Volume XIV, Number 5, May 1996
The Western Separatist Papers are published
monthly by W.S.P. Ltd.
Address all correspondent to WSP, P.O. Box 40143, Victoria, B.C.
Western Canada V8W 3N3.
A one-year subscription is $15.00.
Canada continues to progress to the point where heroes will as a matter of course be made from the ordinary people who merely wish to carry on with their lives in a logical, reasonable and unassuming manner. It's getting to the point where living according to the values of a few decades ago is now becoming heroic.
For example, who doesn't subscribe to the rationalization that one should get all one can from the government, since the government has taken so much from us all?
And who doesn't cheer (sometimes secretly, sometimes not) those who participate in the "underground economy" to avoid paying the oppressive G.S.T.?
When the tentacles of government regulation and peeking into our lives reaches the stage that it has in Canada today, the person who attempts to be virtuous is, sadly, exceptional.
The most recent example of this is a farmer from just outside Edmonton, who works the same land homesteaded by his great-grandfather in 1885. Tom Jackson, a direct descendent of his namesake Thomas Jackson would like to — <M>legally — take the product of his own labours across the Canadian/American border and sell it himself. He simply wants the right to do what then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau belligerently admonished the farmers to do when he passed through the West on one of those arrogant whistle stops that told us we weren't important enough to take seriously. Then, Trudeau told the farmers to "sell your own damn wheat."
Well, they'd like to. Especially when the world price is higher than what the Wheat Board will get for them. Especially when they tire of the officious Wheat Board shouldering the responsibility that any self-respecting person wants for himself. Come to think of it, that's what Western Canadians in the desire for independence want, generally: the right to make their own mistakes, reap their own rewards, realize their own profits and swallow their own losses. But this, sadly, has become oldfashioned in our increasingly interdependent world where cynicism reigns.
It's a basic human need, to control of one's own life and truly own the fruits of one's labour, in a word: freedom. It's certainly not something that an ordinary farmer, a dedicated family man should have to embark upon a hunger strike to obtain. Yet that is what Tom Jackson felt pushed into doing, and that is the same push that more Westerners feel everyday that the Canadian tax man takes too much of their earnings, everyday that Big Brother government arrogates to itself more and more decisions to "protect" the citizen, and everyday that boards and tribunals and commissions find it necessary to regulate the citizen's will into oblivion.
Canada makes living according to ordinary human desires a super-human act that ends up being heroic. We shouldn't have to fight this battle just to live.
Tom shouldn't have had to stop eating and endanger his life to make the point that he wants to be able to do legally what many farmers are now attempting to do through trickery or flouting the law. Many frustrated farmers now are running the border, taking their grain across it themselves without the export permit the Wheat Board refuses to issue, only to find their trucks confiscated when they come back from the land of the freer to Canada. Other farmers attempt to find nooks and crannies in the regulations — technicalities — to hide their desire to legally sell their product. Tom was once told that he could take his grain south by calling it "samples" for sale. He's often been told off the record by customs people to just say he's selling seed grain, and they'll leave him alone. Cheat a little, and we'll close our eyes to it, they seem to say.
But then the application of the law becomes ever more strident and to the letter as even a farmer who took a sack of grain south and returned with an empty sack was fined. Farmers have their trucks confiscated at the border and then find themselves charged with the theft of their own property when they take them back. A number of such cases occurred while Tom was at the Alberta/U.S. border and these will come up in court at Lethbridge in May.
Meanwhile other farmers cower in relief that they are still allowed to be farmers, haven't been taxed out of existence (yet), and can still operate albeit with the weight of Canadian totalitarianism on their backs.
And others, from other sectors of the economy have little sympathy for the farmers, saying, for example, "farmers are nothing but complainers, they have new vehicles every year, they take holidays in Hawaii every year," etc. They pay little mind to the old adage that united we stand, divided we fall, or the Western Canadian archetypical pattern that the federal government traditionally attacks us sector by sector; one year it's the oilfields' turn, the next it's the farmers or the small businesses, or the fisheries, etc. Rarely does the devious nature of Canadian federalism take us all on at once. The GST was a notable exception, but we'd been so used to fighting our solitary wars that we couldn't unite in time.
Tom Jackson was one farmer, on a hunger strike for over four weeks, who had the courage to see how his particular situation could be extrapolated to the principle of the issue for all Western Canadian farmers, for indeed all Western Canadians. He made the long trek to Winnipeg, right to the heart of the Canadian Wheat Board's corporate territory, hauling his truckload of grain, accompanied by one brave adolescent boy, his son Daniel, who saw with eyes unhooded by adult cynicism the uncompromising corruption of the Canadian system. That Canadian system doesn't care whether his dad lives or dies, and would be prepared to sacrifice him, just to maintain its stranglehold over all farmers, over all Western Canadians.
Totalitarian regimes have ever been the same. The big shock for many people is that they didn't realize we were living in a totalitarian state. That understanding is beginning to dawn on more people. Tom knows it, and his sons know it and his wife Lucy knows it, and so do his daughters know it. And many other people now know it, because of Tom's brave stand. He may eventually have taken to heart what the resigning commissioner of the Wheat Board, Ken Beswick, told him, that he shouldn't jeopardize his son, but there are many ways to fight the same battle, and I'm sure Tom will find another way.
He has continued on in the tradition of his forebears, his great grandfather who homesteaded the land, his great-grandmother who left Ireland when she was only sixteen, never to see her home or family again, and came with her brothers across the ocean, across the country, and who as a child not much older than Daniel, walked from Calgary to Edmonton before marrying Thomas Jackson and settling down to create a new life a new home, a family in Western Canada. She raised chickens to sell eggs to buy a bookcase, piece by piece, that Tom inherited. He's also inherited the idealism and the courage of those forebears, so that there can be a future for a country of Western Canada. And a country where it isn't a disgrace to be an honest person.
To the Editor:
The following statistics released by the National Citizens' Coalition reveal how the French in Canada are gaining control of the federal civil service in Ottawa. The figures show the percentages of French-Canadians in various key government departments:
This situation has been secretly accomplished by designating more and more positions as bilingual. In the Ottawa area there are many more bilingual French applicants than bilingual English applicants. I am told that a French applicant is accepted if he speaks poor English but an English applicant is rejected unless he possesses fluent French skills. Of course, all the more important and higher paid positions have been designated bilingual.
I don't know how the National Citizens' Coalition obtained their statistics. Previous attempts to obtain this information by other groups have failed because "no record of this information is maintained by the government."
Name witheld by request.
The Western Separatist Papers welcomes your letters to the editor. They should pertain to Western Canadian issues, and be short, due to our space limitations. Please send them to the Editor, WSP, P.O. Box 40153, Victoria, B.C. V8W 3N3, or by e-mail to wcc@ftcnet.com .
An honest election, under democracy, is an act of innocence which does not take place more than once in the history of a given nation.
Jose Marie Gil Robles: Speech in Madrid, 1933
Learn from the earliest days to insure your principles against the perils of ridicule. If you think it right to differ from the times, and to make a stand for any valuable point of morals, do it, however, rustic, however antiquated, however pedantic it may appear; do it, not for insolence, but seriously, and grandly, as a man who wears a soul of his own in his bosom, and does not wait till it shall be breathed into him by the breath of fashion.
Sydney Smith
Never "for the sake of peace and quiet" deny your convictions.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Since it is not granted us to live long, let us transmit to posterity some memorial that we have at least lived.
Pliny the Younger
A life without a purpose is a languid, drifting thing; every day we ought to review our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let me make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is naught.
Thomas à Kempis
There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one, and you're living. You do the other, and you may be walking around but you're dead as a beaver hat.
John Wayne
Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all life's greatest tests alone.
Agnes Macphail
Have respect for your species ... You are a man; do not dishonour mankind.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
Walt Whitman
Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do ingloriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple: who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
John Milton
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of a unanimity.
Christopher Morley
I beg you to keep alive the integrity of the individual, and his ability to judge and compare and create. May your writers write secretly and hold their writing for the time when this gray anaesthetic has passed as pass it must. The free world outside your prison still lives. You will join it again and it will welcome you. Everything around you is cynically designed to destroy you as individuals. You must remember and teach your children that they are precious, not as dull cogs in the wheel of party existence, but as units, complete and shining in themselves.
John Steinbeck, Broadcast to Eastern Europe
Live your own life, for you will die your own death.
Latin proverb
by Douglas Christie
I had the honour of accompanying Tom Jackson to the Coutts border crossing (between Alberta and the U.S.) from his home in Ardrossan on April 18, 1996. He had been on his hunger strike for 22 days at that time.
His demand is to be able to sell his own wheat in the United States. This seems reasonable but for our wheat commissars (Communist overseers) in the Canadian Wheat Board. This body of government-appointed hacks controls all wheat and barley sold in Canada. They charge the farmers the costs of delivery and usually sell for below world market price. They are the Canadian monopoly.
Some farmers seem to like being slaves because they like a guaranteed meal, even if small. Other farmers would like to be free to sell their own wheat. Tom Jackson is one of those latter group.
We got to the border at Coutts, Alberta, at 4:00 p.m. on April 19, 1996. The order guards with pony tails and guns couldn't quite relate to a farmer with a wife and 3 children in tow, a van, a motorhome, and a huge grain truck full of grain. He parked in the parking lot and carried on with his hunger strike. This he did for four days.
In that time, farmers returning from the U.S. with empty grain trucks were confronted with Mounties, road blocks, charges and fines. Their crime was that they had left Canada to sell their grain without the government's approval. This was not the Soviet Union. It was Canada and it caused Tom at one point, to lie down and cry for his country.
I know how he feels; I felt that way many times in this unfree land of fools. The government of Canada is a smiling dictator which robs people of freedom and prosperity but the people stay slaves.
I had to leave on Saturday, April 20th, to return home. Tom, meanwhile, drove his grain truck to Regina to continue his strike outside Goodale, Minister of Agriculture's office, and then onward to Winnipeg to the Canadian Wheat Board offices, where he parked his truck, waited and continued his hunger strike. Nothing happened.
Eventually Tom realized that they didn't care if he lived or died. His son Daniel was being mistreated and insulted by them and he decided for the sake of his family to go back to the plantation and back to the fields.
Ken Beswick, Chairman of the Wheat Board resigned with a show of sympathy for tom, but otherwise it was business as usual at the Wheat Board. The farmers who run the border pay huge fines to get their trucks back. The public is kept in the dark by the media on the take from the crooks in Ottawa who rob us all. They know their slaves will never escape. There is no underground railway in reverse for them. We are the new slaves of North America. We don't even need chains. We pay our taxes voluntarily. The story of Beswick resigning was only a small column on the back page of the newspaper. The farmer goes back to his field. The Wheat Board can live off his labour for another year.
But Tom Jackson's experiences have made him more favorable to the idea of the West being free. He never thought his country could be so cruel and so corrupt. Not a single farmer other than his wife joined his hunger strike. They are too busy getting ready to plant the Wheat Board's next crop. This game has gone on for over one hundred years. The west needs to be free of the Ottawa politics that created and appointed the Wheat Board. Tom and his family are waking up.
Once again the media and politicians set out to dine at public expense on people's ignorance. The class war model of an election is being trotted out once more. Glen Clark, the people's friend is painting Gordon Campbell as the big business candidate. There is no hope for any of us as Clark appears set to win a majority. The media has sided overwhelmingly with Clark since the first day. He has some control over them. This election is already a phony war.
However the Western Canada Concept is still here. Still struggling. We will have three candidates at least: Douglas Christie, Dode French, and Robert Ward will run and see what happens. If none of us gets elected, we will need to re-apply to keep our party status after the election.
Our platform will remain as it was: Independence is necessary. There are nine points indicating a new direction. This are reproduced in this edition of the WSP.
We will offer the people in our ridings at least the most important choice they could make: the major parties are really just a fraud and a sham. Canada will take all B.C.'s wealth and burn it up in Ottawa unless we escape. They seek to create divisions in English Canada with cultural ghettoes of new immigrants who will never speak English. Race is being used as a weapon to divide us. This is the Ottawa multicult plan. Then we can never unite to question the destruction of our freedom and plundering of our resources as long as we are divided into separate racial and linguistic groups who can be played off, one against the other. This is the Canadian method of divide and conquer. This is the way the election in B.C. is shaping up.
The Clark regime will be sleek, dictatorial, brutal in the end in its repression of dissent. It is a system of high finance actually as the friends of the government will be rewarded with rich ferry manufacturing contracts. the Clark system will soon create a reaction in people once in power. Then we may be able to grow. But it is sad we went from Trudeau to Mulroney in Ottawa. We go from Harcourt to Clark in B.C. When will the people awake?
Canada has a peculiar illness. Political correctness has taken over from common sense. The desire to compromise has become a search for peace at any price. People have abandoned principle altogether.
Two instances demonstrate this phenomenon.
The first is Preston Manning's running scared from Ringma's and Chatters' comments about the right to discriminate. He fails to distinguish between moral discrimination (i.e. the choice between right and wrong) and immoral discrimination (i.e. the categorizaiton of people on a basis not connected to right and wrong). The function of morality is to discriminate and chose between right conduct and wrong conduct. It may be difficult to discern in a given case what is demonstrably right or wrong, depending on your view of the facts, but that does not justify abandoning the endeavour to morally discern between the two. Sexual orientation may involve the faculties of moral discernment. If sexual orientation involves pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality or pederasty, physical abuse, even voluntarily assumed, or sodomy or other sexual acts or preferences, it may be morally wrong and properly subject to moral discrimination. No one has defined sexual orientation in the law.
These are not qualities acquired through birth, like race or through moral choice, like religion (which may also be established by birth), so Ringma made an ethical and logical error when he attributed moral discrimination to the cateogory of race, unless he believes as some do that race itself is a moral issue.
It is unlikely that Robert Ringma thought this subject through fully.
The really important event however, was not Ringma's lack of logic but Manning's hysterical obsequious reaction. Rather than give Ringma the right to clarify and accept with tolerance his error or even clarify it himself, he chose to condemn Ringma and Chatters. The latter's sin was merely to say discrimination of homosexuality was in some circumstances appropriate. Manning's concern is not with ethics which he may consider too deep for a 10 second news clip, but rather with public perception which is created by the 10 second news clip. So we have a horrified reaction. The media who manipulated this whole thing so well just haughtily snicker at the scrambling bumpkins who will soon be gone.
The second instance is the 100 eminent persons conference including Lougheed, Bob Rae and Claude Ryan trying to create a formula which will accomodate Quebec and unite Canada. These older politicians concluded that Quebec should get a constitutional veto, special status of course, but that we should also have senate reform. This "feel-good" agenda can be attained for Quebec but how will we get a real senate with regionally balance power? This is the same promise that has been made to get the West to go along with Quebec favoritism before. We are promised senate reform which never comes true while Quebec gets everything it wants.
This brings me to the peculiar illness of Canada and how these two examples demonstrate that illness.
Lougheed and Manning have a lot in common. They both are opportunistic, simplistic and superficial. Winning, to them is forging a peace at any price which they can sell to the lowest common denominator of voters. Manning deals with an ethical issue as if it was a media event. Lougheed deals with a countries problems as if it was the negotiation of a hostage-taking — promise them anything while they have our hostages, but reneg until the next time. Compromise itself has become the principle. These are men who although they tout their high ethical conservative values, really have no principles governing them. They really are wolves in sheep's clothing. Sadly, they have both deluded a lot of people for a long time.
The tragedy is that nobody treats the voters as if they had a brain. This way they can never be disappointed. Such is the fate of a political institution (not a nation) lacking vision, purpose, common values or even a common language. How much longer must we struggle with this mess before we separate and start anew learning from this bad experience?
On April 24, 1996, I turned 50 years of age. Half my life, 25 years, I have been a lawyer. I founded the Western Canada Concept in 1980 and the Committee for Western Independence in 1976. The movement has slumbered while I have spent 12 years since 1984 fighting for free speech for people like Ernst Zundel and James Keegstra, and ultimately for all Canadians. I have seen the truth of the fears they had about the powerful forces who control our world and their oppressive deceitful ways. I have not in the past 12 years been able to do much politically. With the final nails in the coffin of free speech in Canada being driven by the Supreme court in Keegstra and Malcolm Ross's cases, I feel a certain freedom. It is clear now separation is essential for freedom as well as prosperity.
I see emotionally as well as intellectually it was a true learning experience in Ottawa. Corruption upon corruption in that city has rendered even fundamental principles of free speech irrelevant. They only want us for our taxes, not for our ideas or our words. They certainly don't need our insight into the evils of the New World Order. They<M> are the New World Order!
So as I have now turned 50 years of age, I feel the future lies in writing and in speaking as I once did 16 years ago in 1980. Political action is essential to unite the remnant of our brave people. We must empower ourselves again. The time spent pleading for justice in Ottawa was wasted and they insult us with their pompous rationalizations.
We must mobilize for the survival of our Western Canadian land and culture. We must lift up again the banner of independence. Voices of truth must once again be heard in our land. We are the instruments of our liberation. A slave is a person who waits for someone else to free him.
The Parliament of Canada has now passed (second reading) amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act to add "sexual orientation" as a prohibited ground of discrimination along with race, ethnicity and religion.
This idiocy is beyond belief when you realize this also means you cannot hold persons up to hatred, contempt or ridicule on such grounds by virtue of section 13(1) of the Act. That is why Tony McAleer was sentenced to jail for making a joke about pedophiles. That's right, "pedophiles." His joke was about NAMBLA (the North American Man Boy Love Association), but it didn't matter. He used the word "queer" to describe them and because "queer" could refer to all homosexuals, he was condemned for that. Free speech in Canada is utterly meaningless. You are free to say what pressure groups will allow because judges are scared stiff of pressure groups.
Dode French
The Western Canada Concept.
What do we stand for?
1. Independence for British Columbia from the bankrupt Quebec-dominated government in Ottawa
2. A constitution for British Columbians where freedom and referendum, initiative and recall are readily available and protected.
3. English as our official language.
4. An end to paying equalization to Ottawa to bribe Quebec and the Maritimes.
5. Total control of our own fisheries to stop Ottawa from destroying them for us. Conservation of salmon streams will be a top priority, requiring massive effort from all British Columbians.
6. Equal rights for all. No special rights for persons because of race or ancestry to stop Ottawa from setting up tribal homelands. We will not be a successor government to the Ottawa regime. We are all natives, Ottawa has robbed us all and we will all benefit from Independence.
7. A greater emphasis on reforestation and value-added wood products including research into better use of hydro carbon fuels from wood wastes.
8. Smaller government, closer to the people government, lower taxes, debt-free money and repudiation of Canada's debt.
9. Reduction in immigration to traditional levels and sources.
What British Columbia Can Be!
We can be a prosperous, free nation, without debts or heavy taxes. This land of 3 million people could preserve its beautiful environment and maintain our quality of life without increased population and its resulting environmental pollution and degradation. We need to control our destiny.
As a colony of Ottawa, we have been merely exploited. We represent a revenue source in Ottawa with no political influence. Without a Triple E Senate, we will never have the power we need and we will never get a Triple E Senate in Ottawa.
Independence is necessary to achieve our destiny. Join us and together we can make it happen. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and the Territories have the same problems in Ottawa. They too will soon join us in our new nation and form a strong nation looking to the Pacific Rim for trade. We can lead the way into the future.
About the Party
We are not a party of big business, big unions or foreign donors. We need your support. We publish a monthly "separatist paper" for all our members. We need you to help us set British Columbia free. Please join us to build a new and better nation in our beautiful land. Membership is $15 per year.
During the election a donation to our party is tax deductible and we need these donations to get our message out. We have been a provincial party in British Columbia since 1980. As Canada's failure is becoming obvious, our time has come. To join, or simply for more information, write us, phone us or fax us at:
Western Canada Concept, P.O. Box 40143, Victoria, B.C. V8W 3N3. Phone: 604-385-1022 or Fax: 604-479-3294.
A Note About Finances
The movement for western independence has been financed since 1980 through the generous donations of ordinary citizens. Many are doing more than their fair share, by giving more than they can afford. Some, however, could do more. In any case, we desperately need your help now as we face an election at a low ebb.
The finances are not in good shape at this time, but you could make a difference with your donations. Any British Columbian who donates now can get a tax receipt. Unless we build a base now it will be more difficult later. Can you help us?
Western Canada Concept
810 Courtney Street
Victoria, B.C. V8W 1C4
Yes, I want to donate and enclose $_____ by cheque to help pay for the 1996 B.C. election campaign of the Western Canada Concept.
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