Volume XII, Number 1, January 1994
The Truth About Canada, Jean
Boismenu
Down on the Farm, John Schmidt
O, Canada, Stop Censoring, Don
Feder
Tribes, Joel Kotkin
A Suggestion for the Cause
To the Editor:
Remember the Italian Parliament? A legislature made up of five roughly equal political parties was to be the result of the 1993 federal election.
Through the election of a numerous contingent of Reform Party candidates the West would at least parallel the power of the other regions in the national council. Our region could begin to demand its way into Canada.
Today Canada is governed by the Liberal Party which has a massive majority. How so? In Ontario, out of 99 seats the Liberals won 98! Yes, my children that ever-so-responsible-province permanently burdened with the awesome weight of confederation voted tribally. Yes it did, it really did!
Less surprisingly so did Quebec, but this time with a new wrinkle. Quebec gave us the separate from Canada tribe, also known as the Bloc Quebecois (BQ). The BQ will for the official opposition.
Once again the rep-by-pop Ont/Que hegemony prevails. Our new Prime Minister may or may not be yesterday's man but he certainly has yesterday's mandate!
And the West? A large number of Reformers some Liberals, a few NDs and no BQs were elected. We can look forward (if that's the right phrase) to being shunted to the sidelines again. as we always have been and probably always will be.
We never seem to get it straight for our region independence is necessary.
No one is going to help us out on this. If we refuse to recognize when we have suffered enough it will ever be our God-given right to suffer some more.
As for me? Well, I'm a Western separatist. Free the West!
Mike Walsh, Vancouver, B.C.
The Western Separatist Papers welcomes your letters to the editor. They should be brief, bearing in mind our space limitations, and deal with issues of interest to Western Canadians. Send them to The Editor, WSP. P.O. Box 1133, Sooke, B.C. V0S 1N0.
The following appeared in Time magazine of November 29, 1993, and says it pretty succinctly:
To the Editor:
The Canadian federal election was not mainly a protest vote [Nov. 8]. By voting for the opposition party Bloc Quebecois, the people from Quebec proved again that they form a distinct society; newly elected Prime Minister Jean Chretien's Liberals mainly received the support of Anglophone and ethnic concentrations.
The massive vote for the Liberals in Ontario indicates that its population nearly forms a country by itself, with its own visions and purposes. The election shows that Atlantic Canada, the prairie provinces and British Columbia each represent a very different reality. Each region gives a different definition to this country. It seems strange that the Conservatives were wiped out, even if, and because, they honestly tried to settle the problems of constitution and economy.
The failed Meech Lake accords on constitutional reform were suicidal for the Conservatives. The contradictions in the vote showed that Canada is an artificial country. Why not face the facts and live accordingly: Canada represents five different countries!
Jean Boismenu, Terrebonne, Quebec
by John Schmidt
(This column by the "Dean of Alberta's Agricultural Reporters" appeared in the Olds Gazette of October 6, 1993, and tells of some of the principles upon which a Western Canadian economy could be founded.)
WSGA tells MLAs how to run sustainable government I have been hearing a lot about "sustainable agriculture" from a lot of pontificators who have never actually had to milk a cow or feed a sow. Many of these pundits are people who don't even know how to run sustainable governments.
Therefore, it was with a great deal of enjoyment that I finally learned what the term really means when the Western Stock Growers Association rode into Edmonton April 5 and told the Alberta Legislature standing committee on agricultural and rural development: "The WSGA considers property rights and free marketing principles are essential elements in a sustainable agriculture policy."
The delegation was led by WSGA president Welding Kolstad of Granum.
Before it unloaded this definition onto the MLAs the delegation first got their undivided attention by stating where WSGA was coming form and what it had advocated for nearly 100 years and is still around today with this advocacy:
"The WSGA has always been opposed to the use of any government funds to subsidize any aspect of any industry. Such subsidies always cause more problems than they solve. The health of agriculture requires clear signals from the marketplace. Subsidies distort these signals and make producers less able to respond to the market opportunities.
"We note that the government of Alberta often promotes the free market approach yet has succumbed to pressure from some farm groups for subsidies. We encourage the government to eliminate all such subsidy programs."
After WSGA had transferred its collective wisdom amassed since 1896, before there was a legislature in Alberta there was an audible gasp of surprise from the usually somnolent MLAs.
"Who were these progressive conservatives? Why had we not paid enough attention to them previously?" the legislators asked.
There were glazed eyes and disbelieving glances. Mouths dropped open. Two more NDP members made as if to bolt to the Tory party.
This was the biggest story of the year aimed at restoring fiscal sanity to Alberta. Roust the press gallery members out of the bar to write it up.
The press gallery, however, had little sympathy for a bunch of cowboys emerging form the antediluvian short-grass country talking like Ross Perot of Texas. Good God, if every taxpayer came into the standing committee with this kind of philosophy, Alberta would have $10 billion in the bank rather than being $29 billion in the hole — and they'd have nothing to write about. Premier Ralph would be able to go back and relax once again at the St. Louis with a couple of Drummond ales made by the Alberta Wheat Pool.
He would actually be in charge of a sustainable government. Glory be!
Only one dissident seemed to have discovered anything wrong with the WSGA solution. The MLA from Hnough (pronounced Huh) would never again get his photo in the paper handing out a subsidy cheque to the Chancellor Vasectomy Club.
Back to discussing what sustainable agriculture means to it, WSGA pointed out when producers hold "rights" t the "agricultural property" they become motivated by two balancing concerns:
1. Creation of marketable production to sustain their operations.
2. To protect the value of their investment by maintaining its fertility.
"We feel the balance of these two concerns results in land-use decisions that foster both immediate and long-term goals," the committee was told.
Subsidization of food production on a large scale has resulted in high supplies, low prices and the capitalization of subsidies into the land — all of which increase the need for subsidies to maintain production.
Among the devastating results of subsidized production are price wars such as that between the United States and the European Common market trying to achieve market share. In poor countries, which cannot afford subsidization, there is hardship and diminished ability to feed the people. Governments, rather than markets, assume responsibility to stimulate production. This places an increased burden on the taxpayers.
"We thus believe government controls, regulations and subsidies, being poor substitutes for natural market responses, create more problems than they solve," WSGA concluded. "Leave the producers free to achieve long-term sustainability and this will give them adaptability to change."
The following column appeared in the San Antonio Express-News of December 27, 1993.
by Don Feder
For a glimpse of fascism in action, you could see the Speilberg epic "Schindler's List" or cast a glance at our neighbor to the north. Someone should tell Canadian customs that the Wehrmacht lost the war.
A book I wrote was "detained" by the authorities up there. Michel Cleroux, a spokesman for Revenue Canada, insists my book wasn't "banned," "confiscated" or "seized" verbs far too active and emotion-charged to describe a delicate situation.
The collection of my columns and speeches was merely "detained." Detained for questioning, as crime reports used to say? I picture my book, sitting in a windowless room with a bare light bulb dangling overhead, being interrogated by two burly Mounties: "All right, let's have it: What did you really mean by that comment on Page 174?"
Actually, this is less a tale of brutal repression than of bumbling bureaucracy. My book was among a shipment of nine from Huntington House Publishers of Lafayette, La., ordered by a gentleman in Winnipeg.
A customs agent in the Winnipeg post office examined the shipment and decided that one or more of the titles might possibly fall into a prohibited category, as set forth in Memorandum D9-1-1 of Revenue Canada. Under Canadian law, this includes material deemed obscene, "hate propaganda" or "of a seditious character."
As to the last, who in his right mind would waste his time trying to overthrow the Canadian government? What would a conqueror do with a nation populated mostly by moose and lumberjacks — use it as a staging area for an invasion of the Arctic Circle?
I am not a First Amendment absolutist. I don't think intellectual inquiry is in any way compromised by an effort to limit circulation of "Heidi Has a Whip." But the way in which Canadian customs mauls literary freedom in an absolute disgrace.
Huntington House publishes conservative titles, the farthest thing imaginable from pornography or genocidal pleading. Although, given the mind-set of Maple Leaf bureaucrats, they probably think " Death of a Nation" is treasonable and "The Little Prince" is the type of reading matter found of Michael Jackson's night stand.
I spoke to Cleroux and David Whitehouse, superintendent of the Winnipeg postal branch. Both initially refused to discuss the basis for the agent's decision.
Such a disclosure would be a "breach of confidentiality," said Whitehouse. Whose, I asked? The buyer wants to know why he can't have his books. The author and publisher are equally curious. That leaves the Canadian government, which is determined to protect its own privacy.
I suspected that the reason the books were embargoed was so trivial and ludicrous that to reveal the same would embarrass Ottawa by demonstrating the inanity of its minions.
I was right. After considerable prompting, Cleroux confessed it was the title, "Hitler and the New Age" (an examination of Nazism and the occult) that raised a red flag.
Would "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" or "Hitler, A Profile in Tyranny" also be detained? Are Canadian customs officials so uncritical that any book with the word "Hitler" in its title is automatically tagged when a perusal of the back cover or the introduction would demonstrate its innocuousness?
Canada's censorship system provides ample opportunities for abuse. Say one of its customs agents is a raving feminist who thinks family values is a misogynistic concept. She spies a book by Rush Limbaugh (who coined the word "feminazi") and decides to call it pornographic, degrading to women, whatever. Off it goes to Ottawa in customs tape for months.
And this is a nation whose policies we are urged to emulate. O, Canada U.S. liberals love you. They adore your nationalized health care. They salute your gun control. In their eyes, you have taken multiculturalism to new heights.
You are also a stagnant, sterile land whose economy and culture is as inert as the frosted tundra of your frozen North. Unemployment is 11 percent; taxes and deficits have exploded.
Things are so swell in the land of hockey players and slow-running say that what used to be the ruling party went from 155 parliamentary seats to two in the last election.
With Canada's manifold problems, its bureaucrats have nothing better to do than flog literature.
The story has a happy ending. After five weeks in custody, my book and the other eight were sprung from the Ottawa poky upon a determination of the Canadian thought police that they were not pornographic, prejudiced or seditious.
And that's how I was almost banned in Canada. Could Canadian customs conceivably combat neofascism without acting like men with monocles and swagger sticks?
Our selections this month are taken from the book "Dreams Come Due -- Government and Economics As If Freedom Mattered, A Libertarian Agenda" by John Galt, published by Simon and Schuster
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Milton Friedman
Permit me to control the money [he meant currency] of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.
Baron de Rothschild
If you want to remain the slaves of the bankers and pay the costs of your own slavery, let them continue to create money [he meant currency] and control the nation's Federal Reserve credit.
Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England
Whoever controls the volume of money [he meant currency] in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.
James A. Garfield
All through man's history, there has been a competition between the safe and the adventurous; the fully informed and the to-be-informed; between the "pattern set for all men" and the glimmer of a gleam for men to follow.
Harry A. Overstreet
Government means politics, and interference by government carries with it always the implication of coercion. We may accept the expanding power of bureaucrats so long as we bask in their friendly smile. But it is a dangerous temptation. Today politics may be our friends and tomorrow we may be its victims.
Owen D. Young
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.
Thomas Paine
The worthless and offensive members of society [bureaucrats], whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is not a man in the country that can't make a living for himself and family. But he can't make a living for them and his government, too, the way his government is living. What the government has got to do is live as cheap as the people.
Will Rogers
by Douglas Christie
There is a phony war being created and promoted in Western Canada. It is the phony war between B.C. and Alberta. I say "phoney" because it serves only the interests of the federalists and the media are promoting it like mad. This war is supposed to pit the "Ralphster" from Alberta against the socialist Mike of B.C. They ship welfare recipients back and forth and generally posture and bluster. Some might see this as innocent fun but behind it lies a plan.
At the very time when B.C. and Alberta, who are now the only two "have" provinces upon whose backs the whole country rests, should be realizing their common enemy and getting serious about escaping the clutches of the bankrupt Ottawa government, they are playing these silly games. One might assume it was merely light-hearted ignorance except for the perfect timing to serve as a diversion from a profound economic reality. If every western Canadian realized what Canada is costing them in real terms, they would form separatist movements overnight.
Best to keep them ignorant. The media sees to that. But even then they need a diversion so pull the strings on the two clown premiers. Make them dance and shadow box and hope that the people watch them while we rob them blind.
Sometimes I think these abstract and invisible realities are just too much for the average person to understand. They must be or they would have seen it by now.
So last night, being Saturday, I saw what should be a concrete example of what suffering this causes in the world and by this I mean Canada. I was passing by the Commonwealth Games Pool in Victoria, a very popular spot. I saw a lineup two blocks long, of cars waiting to get into the parking lot.
I looked at the cars full of anxious loving parents, full of expectation of paying $4.25 per adult and perhaps $20 for a family to take them for a mini Hawaiian holiday in the wave pool or teach their kids to swim.
They will wait in long lines. They will wait to pay, wait to get in, wait to get a locker, wait for a change room, wait to go on the water slide, stand in a crowded pool and stand like so many sardines in the water as the waves bob them up and down. Then they will stand in line to get a change room for their family, they will stand packed in a hallway, shivering, trying to explain to their children that they have to wait.
All this because it is cheap to go to the pool and it's our pool, right? Well, it cost $27 million for that pool. The cost of construction being reflective of the tax costs of doing business in Canada. Furthermore, although there is federal money in there, and lots of it, that and a great deal more comes from B.C. All the federal money into B.C. is exceeded by federal revenues out. So what has this got to do with the pathetic performance at the pool, and the suffering of those families and kids?
Simple. If B.C. was independent, and not financing all of Ottawa's bankruptcy we could build many more pools like that and make room for everybody and all the children could have swimming lessons and no greater tax increases would result. So it's really a phony war to fight B.C. against Alberta to keep our minds occupied while we are all having our pockets picked by those bandits in Ottawa.
The real losers are the real people, the real families and children whose expectations for the future are being rapidly decreased. Their culture is being degraded and diluted by massive immigration from the Third World so that the gradual decline will not be noticed but still it is real. We are becoming like Soviets for standing in line. We are becoming like the Third World for being deprived of our freedoms our individuality and our capacity to enjoy a standard of living which our forefathers took for granted. all because we cling to the sinking ship of Canada rather than boldly set out in our own country to make a future for ourselves.
But fear not! In spit of our timidity, Canada will not last. Quebec and its aspirations will deal the final blow to this insidious monster. They have a tribal identity. They have no further need for the Ottawa handout. They have the power to chose and chose they will in this year of 1994, to move away from the corruption of Ottawa and all it stands for.
Chretien promised them more bribes. Their experience with him would demonstrate that he meant it. He would deliver. Still they voted for a party who could not give them favours, only self-respect, the Bloc. They could not form a government. They could only stand for sovereignty which they did. If Quebec was going to be bribed again, why wouldn't they vote for their native son, Chretien? They will be a lot braver this time than they were under Levesque. It is only a matter of a short time and Quebec will leave.
Let us not be so foolish as to try and stop or discourage them. But that is for another day. And not far off.
Joel Kotkin's book "Tribes" is really at the forefront of the intellectual awareness of our age. This book describes the growth of ethnic nationalism. This phenomenon is traced in various parts of the world. However, only multinational or global tribes are sanctified as the only ethnic nations given credit or merit.
Still, the realization is repeatedly described of the emergence of ethnic and tribal loyalties. These Kotkin approaches from a Jewish perspective and asserts that ideology has never put a dint in these realities.
The fact is this book has emphasized the need for ethnic nationalism as an antidote to rootlessness or undisciplined individualism. The wave of the future is becoming known by books such as Kotkin's and they agree with our assessment of history in some startling ways.
The global tribes of Kotkin's book are presented as "the Chinese and Japanese, to the Indians, Armenians and Palestinians some of whom at times express a desire to model their organizational and communal ethos around a Jewish template." (page 34)
Kotkin sees global tribes as the antidote to ethnic nationalism. But surely such tribes have to have a homeland as Jews have Israel, Indians have India and Chinese have China. The story comes back to memory of a person on a train with a Jew in Europe. The latter said he wished his children to be educated in Israel, so they could officially be surrounded by Jewish language, customs, religion and heritage where all things Jewish were emphasized and cherished. His companion replied, "I'm a white Anglo Saxon Christian. Where can I go?"
The Jewish or global tribal response is to create cultural ghettoes wherever members warrant in cultural centres for every sort of colony and keep the faith and works with them alone. The meaning of Kotkin's book approached from a Jewish perspective is to assert that "only tribes held together by group feeling, can live in a desert." (Page 35)
His chapter on "The Secret of the Jews" celebrates the history of Jewish tribal solidarity which emerges in the early 19th century U.S.A. in the garment industry and the current hegemony in the diamond trade, then in science, the arts and politics. Kotkin refers to the Jews as "the oldest and the most persistent of the global tribes." He then analyzes the Anglo-American tribe and sees money as its driving force. English, after all, is almost a universal language. Calvinism was also a Diaspora of sorts as it moved to the rest of the world to escape persecution in Europe. But Kotkin sees the Anglo-American tribe in decline. The Japanese are the newest driving force. Kotkin fears their "monomaniacal addiction to work." (Page 161) He hopes they will mellow. He analyzes the Chinese Diaspora, the Indian Diaspora, in a chapter called "Greater India" and concludes with the road to cosmopolies. They are all refugees of some sort.
The one major place where Kotkin and I part company is on the issue of land. The global tribal member is a rootless exploiter, loyal to tribe, but not loyal to land. There is nothing to protect in the environment if you do not love the land where you live. Kotkin sees only a rootless wandering tribe. My vision of a tribe has roots which find their land sacred and filled with history, cherishing every inch of its soil, often paid for with blood and sacrifice.
The Holy Land was and is holy for such reasons. I hope for a nation and a tribe which will be as true to my culture, language, traditions and character as Israel is to Judaism. But world domination is for those who love themselves more than the land they live in. True stewardship and patriotism merge in the tribal territory where sacrifices are cheerfully made for the cause of land and nation.
Kotkin's book, good as it is to see the recognition of ethnos which it explains, still hangs its hat in the air, it has no feet on the ground. He is right about one thing, "a world wide revival of interest in religion and ethnicity." (page 233)
The Armenians and the Mormons are examples of new tribes but they like other imperialists dilute themselves and lose their vision as they lose their roots. Europe held roughly 15% of the world's population in 1950, now 9% and by 2150 it will be less than 4%.
If a tribe does not cultivate and occupy its territory it loses it. European culture will be no more as Asia, Africa, India fill the vacuum. Everywhere the European culture is in retreat and cosmopolitanism in the end will be its doom. Kotkin believes the cosmopolitan tribal harmony is possible. This would only be true for groups dispossessed of land. The purpose of tribes is to protect, enjoy, develop and cultivate lands and the tribe without land in the end is a parasite which loses its identity in its host. There is no workable cosmopolis.
The Western Canada Concept can be accused of becoming a waiting game as history unfolds as it should. There is some truth to this accusation. But while we wait and write and think of our future we should also advertise our thoughts and educate other people. How can we do this? We do this even as we publish the separatist papers. They can be recirculated by our readers. Distributed to others. But that is a very slow process.
A quicker method is to advertise in magazines, newspapers and on t.v. and radio. This is a very effective method of reaching new sympathetic people who may become supporters. However to achieve this goal we need to consistently advertise and this costs money.
To achieve this I would like to ask our members who are not now giving a monthly donations if they could do so. The idea of a small monthly donation by equal monthly postdated cheques is still the best way to have an advertising budget. Could you consider sending such cheques to us and help us to place regular ads?