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Law schmaw

19 Feb 2020 | News Roundup

The PM has plenty to say about “National Flag of Canada Day” and this “symbol of our rich history, and a promise of the bright future we are building together.” But when rule-breaking intimidation becomes accepted practice the future isn’t bright and we are not building it together. And Canada has a growing problem with the rule of law, particularly it seems where climate is concerned, including blockades over the Coastal GasLink to carry LNG. So why can’t he get his tongue disentangled from his molars on the unacceptability of unlawful actions, and of intolerant attitudes even in the service of “social justice”?

The situation is not really surprising. Government and business leaders can’t keep telling people we’re going to destroy the planet if we keep using fossil fuels, then ask everyone to sit back and watch them build pipelines and approve oil sands development. Or praise the rule of law but say it’s not the government’s job to enforce it. Time for our leaders to ditch the carbon-intensive self-congratulatory “productive visit to Senegal” and “Building a more secure and prosperous future” in Germany and stand up to the mob at home … instead of egging it on.

Now to be fair, our Prime Minister who has been spewing vast amounts of CO2 going from Africa to the Middle East back to Africa to Germany to Ottawa this month alone decided not to get on yet another plane to the Caribbean as well and instead meet with the “Incident Response Group” to concoct PR banalities like “I understand how worrisome this is for so many Canadians and difficult for many people and families across the country. We're going to continue to focus on resolving this situation quickly and peacefully and that's what we're going to do.”

Maybe instead he should be going to going to continue to focus on upholding the rule of law by having people arrested who break it. And issue a sharp rebuke to those who presume to speak for aboriginal communities whose elected councils have taken a very different stand than the one they are taking. Because it really matters if following the rules is only for chumps.

Canadians long prided themselves on being peaceful, law-abiding and so polite it was almost funny. But it’s not so funny any more. The growing intolerance of the “woke” has been on display across the board, including attempts to deplatform Jordan Peterson and worse. (As you may recall, one of the “protestors” at a Queen’s University lecture by Peterson was found to be carrying a garrotte, whose only practical use would be to dehead him.) And it’s becoming more and more mainstream, including Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore being shut down by the same City of Regina officials who invited him.

Amazingly, Moore writes, “In its announcement regarding my banishment, the city said it did not want ‘to spark a debate on climate change.’” Which makes you wonder what idiot invited him given his fairly well-known views on that subject. And also wonder when the idea of having a debate on an important issue had become distasteful. But of course they are lying.

What they don’t want to do is stand up to the mob, intellectual or physical. And as Kipling warned, “if once you have paid him the Dane-geld/ You never get rid of the Dane” so the problem is only going to get worse.

We see increasing efforts to create “blacklists” of climate skeptics and drive them from academia and, worse, praise from the mainstream media and reputable academics for such efforts. We see more and more “smash and grab” mobs who believe that any time they don’t agree with a public policy decision they are entitled to break windows, and heads, to get it reversed. We see more and more examples of the police apparently siding with those who wish to silence debate not engage in it. And we see politicians and commentators who apparently believe that the police are a law unto themselves rather than a part of the executive branch subject to direction by those at the top of the executive branch… including our Prime Minister who said “We are not a country where politicians can order the police to do something”. Then who can?

At bottom the rot is intellectual, as it always is. We really appear to have abandoned the idea of rational discourse and are then astonished to find that others are abandoning the practice. As C.S. Lewis said, “We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

So just possibly the City of Regina, and other spineless elected officials, will accidentally spark a debate on mob rule. We need one.

3 comments on “Law schmaw”

  1. Click on the link 'to create "blacklists" of climate skeptics' if you want to know how this mob rule is being orchestrated behind the scenes. From the Forbes article by Roger Pielke, you'll see this statement regarding wikipedia's involvement.
    "How can it be that a website, founded by an Australian cartoonist named John Cook and run mainly by volunteer non-academics and amateur scientists, can rise to the position of not just claiming to arbitrate who is and who is not an appropriate hire for universities, but actually fulfilling that role?"
    We must get to the bottom of both wikipedia's and google's role in preventing people from learning the truth. Names need to be named. Exactly who is directing their 'order followers' to manipulate information ? These people need to be held accountable for the massive harm they have caused/are causing.

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