'Climate' Scam in Oz Goes from Bad to Worse

As a major producer and exporter of thermal coal and natural gas, with lots more to be tapped, Australia is well placed to ride out the forlorn pursuit of renewables. Instead, Australia’s governments fancifully see themselves leading the daring quest to save the planet. Accordingly, policies of uncommon futility and inanity ensue. Two prime examples came to malodourous fruition in the lead up to Christmas. Christmas gifts, if you will, for a population which richly deserves all that it gets having swallowed the climate scam hook, line and sinker.

The Energy Security Board (ESB), just one of a multiplicity of climate-change authorities, had an integral part in the derring-do. Alas, though full of activists, the ESB didn’t stay the course. Bizarrely, common sense won out. The ESB oversaw a scheme, called the “capacity mechanism,” intended to ease Australia through the transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar. The scheme calls for payments to energy providers in order that they might have capacity at the ready when renewables failed to deliver. Natural gas was very much in the mix, as you would expect, as also was coal for the time being. A detailed design of the scheme was to be delivered to federal and state governments in early 2023.

Spot the problem? The envisaged use of fossil fuels in the transition is not nearly pure enough for these clean-climate times. And, last August, the ESB was given a damn good telling off by pedigreed greens and lost its carriage of the capacity mechanism – sullied and shamed by its continued flirtation with coal and gas. Each state decided that it would do its own thing and that thing did not include “dirty” coal or gas.

No coal, please, we're Australian.

At this point, sane people might think that they're being gaslighted. Surely, a shortfall of wind and sun must be met with a flow of baseload power. Logically, that’s where gas-fired peaking plants might fill the breach. Apparently not. Pumped hydro is envisaged, though it is missing in action. Batteries are envisaged, though their effect is trivial in the scheme of things. Green hydrogen is envisaged, though it is pipedream. Finally, interstate power swaps are envisaged; based on massive overbuilding of not-yet-built wind and solar farms and thousands of not-yet-built kilometres of transmission infrastructure. And, still, what will happen during evenings of extensive wind droughts? Cold candlelit suppers ahead.

It’s senseless. But, best to remember, when it comes to climate policies, it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse. And so it is that Australia’s government, headed by Anthony Albanese of the far left of the left-wing Labor Party, recently had a well-worn idea which had proved popular among the apparatchiks in communist Eastern Europe.

Natural gas and coal prices have soared in recent times, as they have throughout the world. Consequently, the Australian Department of Treasury forecast that electricity prices would rise by 56 percent over the period to June 2025 and gas prices by 44 percent. What to do, when you’ve foolishly promised repeatedly that electricity prices would fall? Encourage new supplies of coal and gas? For example, give the go ahead to the Narrabri project which promises to deliver vast quantities of coal-seam gas to the domestic market. Certainly not. To wit, a spokesperson from Santos commenting on the continuing impasse:

Since 2012, Santos [Australia’s largest producer of natural gas] has spent more than $1.5 billion trying to get our Narrabri Gas Project approved and developed; a project that is 100 percent committed to the domestic gas market.

Heck, more dirty gas is needless when socialist economics has the answer. When prices rise too much for comfort impose price caps. Consequently, without meaningful consultation, the federal Government rushed through legislation before Christmas; titled, in true newspeak fashion, the Energy Price Relief Plan. This capped the price of gas at A$12 per gigajoule for one year with a permanent regime to ensure gas prices are set on “reasonable cost-plus basis.” Whatever that means in Newspeak.

Of course, the legislation also gives the government power to compel gas producers to supply gas at the capped price. Socialists have their playbook and know how nasty profiteering capitalists will try to wriggle out of supplying their products at below market value. Separately, the states of Queensland and New South Wales have agreed to cap the price of black coal to $125 per tonne and lose royalties; in exchange for lots of free federal money.

Role model for the future.

To show how far-gone things have gotten rotten down under, the head of Treasury Steven Kennedy supported the idea of price controls. No surprise that he was recognized in 2016 for outstanding public service in the area of climate-change policy. Climate activists have infiltrated every aspect of Australia’s public life.

Kevin Gallagher, CEO of Santos, described the legislation as a form of "Soviet-style nationalization.”

[It] will result in companies needing fiscal stability agreements with the government before new gas supply projects can take investment decisions in order to secure capital, just as would be the case if they were operating in Argentina, Venezuela or Nigeria.

Meg O'Neill, CEO of global oil and gas producer Woodside and chairman of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, made the point that price controls will lessen investment and drive supply out of the marketplace. I wonder where she got that strange idea. Probably from economics 101. In any event, it doesn’t seem to have yet penetrated the minds of the geniuses who form the Labor government’s brain trust. Woodside claimed that contractual talks to supply gas to twenty customers had been suspended. Shell made a similar point. Not surprising. How can supply contracts be finalized when no one knows what the regulated price will be in twelve months’ time?

Socialists wear mind-limiting blinkers. How else to arrive at simplistic solutions and think them sublime? Unseen effects of their superficial solutions, as the 19th-century French Economist Frédéric Bastiat put it, are studiously ignored. The rest of us are condemned to live them out. "Where did you put the heavy sweaters and candles Ma?"

THE COLUMN: What's the Constitution Among Friends?

Thus spake the great George Washington Plunkitt, of Tammany Hall fame, and it makes a fitting epitaph for the noble experiment in self-government that is, or was, the United States of America. Last week, we discussed the now-explicit anti-constitutionalism and anti-Americanism of the modern Left, and their desire to see it on the ash heap of history, now that it's served its purpose (like John Hurt in Alien) as their incubator and victim. From at least the time of Woodrow Wilson, the Democrats have despised the Constitution—which they think let them down in the battle over slavery—and have sought to kill it by the death of a thousand cuts, some of which have been delivered by the Supreme Court, some by legislation, and some by sheer inanition.

It's time now to begin going into detail about what can be done and what can't. The good news is, there are solutions, or rather, one simple one. The bad news is, it will never be implemented, because the century-long browbeating of the American public via the political establishment and their handmaidens in the news media makes that effectively impossible.

The hell with it.

Free speech, the cornerstone of our Republic, dies in several ways, most obviously by suppression and prohibition. We might term this the punch-in-the-face, "shut up, he explained" approach much beloved by national-socialist fascists and totalitarians everywhere. Aping the unfortunate literary example of most of the Ten Commandments, leftist rules for radicals are filled with thou-shalt-nots, which delight those who instinctively believe that humans are intrinsically guilty and must be punished, even for sins they haven't committed yet. It's not a big leap from "thou shalt not covet they neighbor's ass"—don't blame me, blame the King James Bible—to the clank of prison bars and the eternal solitude of the oubliette. In a proscriptive community, just one look is all it takes.

But it also dies from self-strangulation, which is currently the preferred murder weapon. Having just emerged from Facebook prison for the second time in less than three months (a month in stir for each "offense against community standards," i.e. thou shalt not speak ill of the Chinese or the Ukrainians), and having been permanently anathematized by Twitter for (I believe but cannot prove, since they won't tell me) publicly correcting the mistakes of a certain "presidential historian," which act of lèse-majesté the reigning robots of Tweetville deemed "targeted harassment," I am bloodied but unbowed.

Social media has proven itself a very great evil, and in the coming kingdom needs to be atomized and resurrected as a genuine free-speech platform, not an implement of government and "community" censorship hiding behind the increasingly slipping mask of private enterprise.

This is in contradistinction to the U.S. Constitution, and in particular the Bill of Rights, derided by leftists such as Barack Obama as "a charter of negative liberties" in that it tells the authorities what they may not do, not what you the citizen may not do, but which in reality is the sole guarantor of personal freedom left in these crumbling United States, which almost certainly will not last out this century and is unlikely to make it to its 300th birthday intact. But then, the Left has never really been interested in freedom—intellectual, spiritual, or personal—when it can enforce conformity via the trigger fingers of all of the non-constitutional agencies with which it has supplanted the Declaration of Independence. License, especially the sexually exotic, is what they mean when they say "freedom," and if you don't like it you're a bigot who deserves to be cancelled or charged.

The joke's on them, Barry.

That said, it's becoming increasingly likely that the Left won't be crushed at the polls this November. That the Burden of Brandon may not, in fact, bring the houses of Congress tumbling down around Nancy Pelosi's and Chuck Schumer's ears. At the highest levels, nobody cares who's "President." One guy named Joe signing the bills is as good as another, especially given the fact that the nomenklatura runs the national-security state today, just as it did in the old Soviet Union. A nebbishy nonentity, such as Mr. Thompson in Atlas Shrugged, is just what the moment calls for, to occlude the ugly face of fascism beneath.

Neither side wants to upset the worm-ridden applecart. Resuscitate a dead nuclear deal with Iran without Senate approval? "Forgive" student loans for gender-studies unemployables at taxpayer expense, without bothering to get the House to originate the spending bill? No problem! What part of "our democracy" don't you understand?

It's like the relationship between the CIA and the KGB during the Cold War. Both teams loved the status quo and neither wanted things to change, ever. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, at which I had a ringside seat, caught them both completely by surprise. But in the cozy modus vivendi of the current Washington racket, an accommodation has long since been reached between "progressivism" (always good) and "conservatism" (always bad) by which things will gradually but inexorably shift leftward until the Last Trump, when the charade collapses under its own weight and we have finally reached the New Jerusalem: one zillion consecutive life terms in Hell.

Freedom ain't what it used to be, and coveting your neighbor's ass has a vastly different meaning nowadays. Much of the population of the territorial United States now hails directly or indirectly from countries and regions that have neither a connection to nor an affinity for 18th-century British or American political institutions and philosophy. Perhaps the worst moment of the wretched George W. Bush presidency came with these spectacularly ill-chosen words in his second inaugural address:

Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery... In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak.

Revelation 21: it's down there somewhere.

At that, any self-respecting Roman would have laughed out loud and ordered the Tenth Legion into action. (You want to see a country that has never, ever, once fought for freedom? Try China.) Even with "their democracy" crashing around Roman heads during the civil wars between 83 and 44 B.C., it had already lasted half a millennium, and in form if not in substance would last another half-millennium in the west. "A heart for the weak" was the surest way to find your head sitting atop a pike in Parthia or nailed to a tree in the Teutoburg Forest by German barbarians. Nobody ever said gratias vobis ago to the Roman legions bringing civilization to Gaul or Germania at the point of a gladius.

Which brings us back to the Constitution, now as shredded and torn and lying on the floor of the Senate like Caesar on the Ides of March. The easiest and most direct way to restore our American Republic (not "our democracy") is to restore the Constitution in all of its salient particulars, including the restoration of the Ninth and Tenth amendments, a return to the notion of limited central government, the reduction of the Supreme Court to its (very constrained) core powers and duties, and the rollback of the National Security State that began with the American surrender after 9/11. We'll be looking at the details of our Restoration in the coming weeks, what political price we might have to pay to effect it, and whether at this point it's even worth trying.

What's in our future? Civil War? Partition? Amicable divorce? In the meantime, let me leave you with this, from my debut novel, the controversial Exchange Alley, written after my return from Moscow in 1991 and published in 1997 but set in the period just before the end of the Soviet Union.

There is an unmistakable odor about socialist countries that pervades every public place. It is a strong animal smell, composed in equal parts of sweat and unwashed clothes, Russian cigarettes, cheap perfume, piss, disinfectant, and leaded gasoline; in the heyday of Communism, every socialist country smelled the same. But in the mother church of Marxism-Leninism, the reek was stronger, sharper, more pervasive. It was the ur-stench of the Soviet system, the stink of a dying animal and with each passing year it got stronger and more difficult for foreigners, even fellow travelers in the west, to ignore.

Smell that here at home now? I thought you might.

Enemies of the People: Merrick Garland

Biden's Commie Nominee Falls on Her Hammer and Sickle

Joe Biden has pulled the nomination of totalitarian leftist law professor Saule Tarikhovna Omarova to be his Comptroller of the Currency after her radical, un-American beliefs about banking, energy, markets, and economic freedom received the public airing the democratic process requires.

As reported here, the Kazakh-born immigrant whom Biden chose to oversee the banking system wanted to nationalize Americans’ bank accounts, nuke the energy sector, and deindustrialize the world’s largest economy by building a gargantuan new bureaucracy to implement aspects of both the Green New Deal and the Great Reset.

When Senate Republicans grabbed the low-hanging fruit and threw the would-be banking commissar’s own chilling words back at her during the confirmation process, the Left was predictably outraged at the dirty right-wing tactic of reciting facts. Omarova reportedly claimed she was shocked at the “depravity” of the truthful attacks on her nomination.

Too close for comfort, tovarish.

As justifiably frightened, less-radical Democrat lawmakers ran away, U.S. senator and former bankruptcy law professor and former American Indian Elizabeth Warren tried to save the nomination of her Soviet-raised doppelgänger from an unrelenting onslaught of relevant evidence, accusing Omarova’s critics of red-baiting.

“Saule Omarova will stand up to the giant banks that repeatedly break the law and hurt consumers, which is why Republicans have launched a shameful smear campaign against her nomination,” Warren tweeted the day of the confirmation hearing.

Biden, or whoever actually does his job while he bumbles, off-gasses, and gropes, lamented Omarova’s Pearl Harbor Day withdrawal from consideration for the top banking oversight post:

As a strong advocate for consumers and a staunch defender of the safety and soundness of our financial system, Saule would have brought invaluable insight and perspective to our important work on behalf of the American people. But unfortunately, from the very beginning of her nomination, Saule was subjected to inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.

This is obvious nonsense. Nothing “inappropriate” was said about Omarova –her background and personal history were fair game— and she was a perfect fit for today’s Democrats. Omarova failed as a nominee not because she was a small-c communist –the Biden-Harris regime is bursting with such people— but because she was so brazen about it. Her voluminous paper trail of Marxist drivel was easy to find and could not be dismissed as the mere thought experiments the nominee belatedly claimed they were.

In the old Soviet Union of her birth, whose ideas remained so dear to Comrade Omarova, someone like her who became an embarrassment to the regime might be disposed of by mysteriously suffering a heart attack or a traffic accident. Because she's in America, she got off easy.

Partiya Lenina, Sila Narodnaya!

The Biden-Harris regime’s embattled nominee to oversee the banking system is a dishonest small-c communist who aspires to nationalize Americans’ bank accounts, crush the energy sector, and deindustrialize the world’s largest economy by creating a mammoth new bureaucracy to implement aspects of both the Green New Deal and the Great Reset. What could possibly go wrong?

She's not alone. Plenty of Democrats share Comptroller of the Currency nominee Saule Tarikhovna Omarova’s view that the economy is a plaything to be manipulated for political ends.

Fortunately for your wallet, five of the more survival-savvy Democrats –including Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Mark Warner of Virginia— are reportedly defecting from Comrade Omarova’s camp, so it seems unlikely she will survive the confirmation process. Republicans have also vigorously criticized her nomination and the regime is fighting back.

Of course, anonymous comments fed to friendly reporters are often the best way to disseminate smears. In that vein, Bloomberg News reported that an unidentified “White House official said the attacks on Omarova, a Cornell law professor who has been sharply critical of big banks and cryptocurrencies, were so unfair that they smacked of the red-baiting smears leveled by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.” Except McCarthy was right, though that is a discussion for another day.

Even if the nomination craters, these retrograde Soviet-era policies will live on because they enjoy significant support in Democrat circles, academia, and in the halls of government.

Omarova shares the Leftist regime’s antipathy to American energy independence and said she wants the coal, oil, and natural gas industries to die. “A lot of the smaller players in that industry are going to probably go bankrupt in short order – at least we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change,” she said.

The White House formally sent the nomination to the Senate on Nov. 2 but unveiled the pick two months ago, hyping the demographic boxes she checked – as if her sex and skin color might make her a better commissar. “If confirmed, Omarova will be the first woman and person of color to serve as Comptroller,” the Sept. 23 announcement stated. Omarova was born in Kazakhstan and is a graduate of Moscow State University. A Cornell law professor, she holds a J.D. from Northwestern University in Chicago and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She was also arrested for shoplifting from a T.J. Maxx store in Madison in 1995.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent branch of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, supervises some 1,125 national banks, federal savings associations and federal branches and associations of foreign banks, representing $14.9 trillion in assets, or 65 percent of all U.S. commercial banking assets.

Omarova, 55, claims to be a capitalist –even an anti-communist in her youth— but her recent writings tell a different story. At a Senate confirmation hearing Nov. 18, Omarova portrayed herself in prepared testimony as someone who learned firsthand about the dangers of all-powerful government, saying she grew up “under a totalitarian regime presiding over a failing economy.”

Druzhby Narodnov, Nadyozhny Oplot!

In her charm offensive, Omarova said she was raised by her grandmother “who was orphaned and barely escaped death when, in the 1920s, Stalin sent her entire family to Siberia.” Their crime was “that they were educated Kazakhs who did not join the Party.”

These issues are deeply personal to me. Having grown up in an oppressive state-run system, with no free enterprise and no economic opportunity for people like me, I have a unique appreciation for our dynamic and diverse markets. It is what made my life and success possible, and for that I am forever grateful. Every American family should have the same opportunities that my family has had.

Despite giving lip service to freedom, Omarova supports the abolition of deposit-based banking and imposing a totalitarian banking architecture that would put private deposits in the hands of the government. Put another way, she supports communism, except perhaps for all the messy murders of people deemed obstacles to progress like her grandmother’s relatives.

In “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy,” published in Vanderbilt Law Review in October 2020, Omarova argued for the abolition of the current banking system. “After decades of rising inequality, systemic instability, and relentless concentration of economic power, ordinary Americans are demanding a greater say in the distribution and use of financial resources,” she wrote.

She urged that all bank deposits be transferred into “FedAccounts” at the Federal Reserve, a move that would kill off banks funded by deposits. “The Fed’s entire balance sheet should be redesigned to operate as … the ‘People’s Ledger’: the ultimate public platform for both modulating and allocating the flow of sovereign credit and money in the national economy.”

In a draft paper published in July, “The ‘Franchise’ View of the Corporation: Purpose, Personality, Public Policy,” Omarova proposed that corporate charters be issued subject to pledges from the companies that they serve government-approved purposes. This is needed to curb “serious societal harms caused by contemporary corporations’ pursuit of their perfectly lawful business activities—rising inequality, exploitative labor practices, environmental degradation, erosion of democratic process, to name a few…”

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Not willing to allow a crisis to go to waste, Omarova also urged in an August 2020 white paper titled “The Climate Case for a National Investment Authority,” that the “economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic” be used for “a speedy and deliberate move to a massive infrastructure-led rebuilding and ‘greening’ of the U.S. economy.” Such an authority would pursue “the long-term goals of sustainability and decarbonization.” This is the essence of the so-called Great Reset being proposed by the Davos elite led by Klaus Schwab and others.

The Green New Deal movement “has successfully propelled this programmatic vision of an environmentally clean, just, and equitable future to the top of the national policy agenda. The Democratic Party is responding to this enthusiasm accordingly.” Omarova has also proposed the creation of a multi-trillion-dollar National Investment Authority (NIA), “a public entity that would design, execute, and finance a comprehensive nationwide program of environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive growth and revival.”

Drawing on the experience of the New Deal era’s logrolling, hopelessly corrupt Reconstruction Finance Corporation that the Eisenhower administration wisely dismantled, the NIA, she wrote, “offers a novel institutional solution to multiple organizational, financial, and operational challenges associated with an ambitious national project to combat climate change." The United States, she wrote, needs “to shoulder its share of the decarbonization load”:

Estimates of the amount of global investment in clean energy required to meet climate targets between now and 2050 range from about $1 trillion to over $3 trillion annually. The NIA will step into this gap and use innovative financing tools to mobilize and boost the flow of public and private capital into socially beneficial ‘green’ infrastructures.

So much for Omarova’s claimed “deeply personal” commitment to free enterprise and economic opportunity. Actions speak louder than words, so cue the marching bands:

In Canada, Liberty at the Covid Crossroads

I live in a country that has become, for people like me, a vast internment camp. Knowing that vaccine fail is a fact and unwilling to allow an experimental infusion into my body, I have become a social leper. I cannot attend a broad range of public events, visit various facilities and businesses, or dine in restaurants. Now I find I cannot even leave the country, which is my fondest wish. Airlines, ships, and trains are all off-limits for inter-provincial and international travel. Combat-decorated pilot and CEO of Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms (C3RF) Russ Cooper writes, “the country has become “a police state with mandated ‘jabs’ and passports…We find our civil liberties giving way to martial law.”

I believe my rights as a citizen of a democratic state have been violated by an increasingly autocratic government. I have studied our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and consulted lawyers and constitutional experts on its provisions. I have wondered whether the Nuremberg Code applies to the government’s presumably arbitrary cancellation of our rights and privileges as citizens, and have been told by legal professionals that the relation of the Code to the Charter is a “grey area,” in part because Canada has not formally signed on to Nuremberg, and in part because the relevant sections of the Charter are subject to interpretation.

With regard to the Charter: The import of the principles in question, in particular Sections 1, 6 and 7, remain hotly contested. Section 1 states that rights and freedoms are subject to “reasonable limits.” Section 6 establishes that “Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada,” including inter-provincial travel, and Section 7 treats of “the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” 

Rights are a grey area, citoyens!

Section 1 affords the government some latitude, given that “reasonable limits” remains a matter of interpretation—a “grey area” embedded in the very document. Section 6 is clearly being abrogated—there is nothing “grey” about it—but Section 7 can be manipulated in favor of one segment of the population (the “vaccinated”) while punishing another (the “unvaccinated”) “in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice”—although it is now known there is scarcely any difference between vaxxed and unvaxxed. Again, the concept of “fundamental justice” may be construed in any number of different ways. It’s as grey as grey gets.

What we call the “rule of law” has become distressingly controversial and unsettled. In an article for the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) Macon University Business Law professor Peter Bowal points to the weakness of the Charter as a legal document, a weakness that renders it exceptionally difficult to show that one’s rights have been infringed, especially as all-important judicial decisions relating to the pandemic thus far “have fallen in line with the governmental and public interest”—that is, the government’s interpretation of “public interest.” Section 32 of the Charter makes it clear that only the government can ensure these rights—in effect, enforce, justify and even reconceive them. Bowal’s treatment of the question is ambiguous as he seems to believe that the burden of proof for abrogation of rights legitimately devolves upon the government, trumping the individual rights claimant.

We are naïve, Bowal argues, in “embrac[ing] and fiercely cling[ing] to the rights delusion,” to assume we have “legal rights entitlement,” or, for that matter, I would add, to repose our trust in the broad-based fairness and independence of the judiciary. I would argue that the government’s interpretation of the Charter is, in essence, apodictic, which does not make its reading of “rights” right. The dilemma is profound and citizens who claim their constitutional rights apparently “have no standing” (to use a familiar legal phrase) in the view of an all-powerful government. It’s not a pretty picture.

With regard to the Nuremberg Code: Its application to considerations of domestic violations of its constituent principles with respect to scientific “experiments” performed on the human person—in particular Section I stipulating that “Voluntary consent is essential,” Section 5 stating that “No experiment should be conducted if it is believed to cause death or disability,” and Section 9 requiring that “Subjects should be able to end their participation at any time”—are not codified in national legal instruments. 

That was then, this is now.

But this inadequacy has been rectified. UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights declares that “human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms are to be fully respected” in all public health legislation and that “the interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” And as the prestigious Robert H. Jackson Center in its document on “The Influence of the Nuremberg Trial on International Criminal Law” informs us, the Nuremberg promise and precedent has finally come to pass in the creation of the International Criminal Court. The ICC, based in part on the Nuremberg Charter, with jurisdiction to try genocide, war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, began functioning in in 1994 and was adopted by the Rome Statute in 1998.

What is especially salient in this connection is the ICC principle of complementarity, which “enacted broad-ranging criminal legislation to ensure that all the crimes within the Rome Statute are covered by domestic penal law… to maximize the potential benefits of the principle of complementarity in the event of allegations against a State’s own nationals.” The principle is notoriously complex but allows for “admissibility” protocols in cases of national failure to prosecute when prosecution seems warranted or when the political intention to prosecute unjustly is evident. “The Court holds a promise,” the Center’s document anticipates, “of putting an end to the impunity that reigns today for human rights violators.”

It is my contention that the Canadian government is precisely such a human rights violator. The “grey area” in the Charter does not seem as grey as government-friendly lawyers, go-along judges and skeptical specialists claim. According to The Epoch Times, Toronto-based litigator Ryan O’Connor believes “[t]here are several sections of the Charter that are implicated by mandating vaccines,” specifically Section 7 as well as Section 15, “which protects individuals from discrimination and that requires equal treatment of individuals before and under the law” (italics mine). 

Similarly, The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms issued a statement condemning federal mandates that translate into the certainty that “unvaccinated Canadians will lose their right to move and travel freely within Canada, their right to leave Canada, and their right to earn a living and participate in society without discrimination.” Such mandates amount to “an egregious and unacceptable infringement” of our constitutional rights. As the Centre’s president John Carpay observes, “No government will violate human rights without putting forward a good-sounding justification, such as the war on terrorism, communism, online hate, drugs, or a nasty virus.”

Blame Canada.

From a combination of ignorance of the accumulating evidence calling the vaccines into serious question and the temptations of political absolutism, the government has breached the civil rights of its citizens—if civil rights are to mean anything at all. It has disregarded the moral implications of the Nuremberg Code, the tenor of the UNESCO indenture and the provisions of the ICC, despite the pious statement from the Minister of Foreign Affairs to the effect that “Canada strongly supports the International Criminal Court… as a key pillar of the rules-based international order.” 

The government has scanted both the spirit of these international instruments and the purport of its own Charter. Like other Western administrations—for example, Australia and the U.S. under Biden—it has eaten away at the foundations of liberal democracy and deliberately eroded the rule of law in everyday life understood as part of the social contract. As Ryan O’Connor asserts, “the crux of the issue is more about politics than it is about public health.” Indeed, it is more about convenient “interpretation” of laws and principles and the levying of coercive measures than about civil liberties, democratic justice and political freedoms.

Government authority, certainly in the case of vaccine mandates, does not rely on reason and debate but on the imposition of power backed by physical force and a largely complicit judiciary. It has no genuine interest in discussion and evidence and no compunction against segregating a substantial cohort of its people whom it denounces as irresponsible. Canada was never intended to be a leprosarium, but much has changed. Canada is now a dictatorial regime, in many ways reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. And the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is cosmetic cover for the enactment of political absolutism. Grey areas don’t mean much to citizens who have been deprived by government decree of their constitutional right, however moot, to participate in common life, travel, work and enjoy the fruits of now-threatened liberty.

'Progressivism' Versus Progress

A cry is going up across the world— in Cambridge England, in Germany, and above all in Canada. It’s the cry heard down the ages from the Common People, the Reasonable Person, the Over-burdened Taxpayer, the Forgotten Man, the Silent Majority, and whoever is feeling his shoes pinching and his belt tightening. That cry today is more puzzled and poignant than usual because it expresses bafflement as well as indignation.

That cry is: “What the hell’s going on?”

The note of inquiry is entirely justified. Last week some hooligans (in Newspeak: protesters) invaded Trinity College, Cambridge and dug up its famous lawn, carting off the soil and dumping it in Barclay’s Bank. They were activists from Extinction Rebellion, or XR, a group of Green extremists, who argue that since there is a “climate emergency” that will destroy humanity, civilization, and the world in about a decade, they will take direct action now to obstruct and punish companies and institutions that “profit from” the emergency.

Their justifications for this ecological vandalism—the Trinity lawn was itself a symbol of environmental stewardship over centuries—both vary and multiply.

In this case the protesters were angry both because Trinity has investments in “fossil fuel” companies and because it had sold land to the Port of Felixstowe which might be used for a car park. Half of Britain (and most of the world) depends on fossil fuels for their energy. Industry and individual car-owners depend on car parks in order to move goods and themselves around the country. All these activities are legal, and the government regulates them to ensure that, as far as possible, they don’t impose unwanted costs on third parties or the general public. XR’s vandalism, on the other hand, imposed quite serious costs on Trinity, Barclay’s, the people living in Cambridge, and not least the environment.

Two days later, while the public outrage was still fresh, the protesters added a new complaint: the university had sold land for developers to build housing. The project in question had been designed to be environmentally sustainable. The claim of sustainability did not save it, however, because it was to be sold at a unit price of £385,000 that could only be bought by wealthy people.

A quick check via Google shows that £385,000 is lower than the average price for a Cambridge house which is a little over £388,000. So, in principle, Extinction Rebellion is opposed to building sufficient housing in Cambridge for a rising population. If XR runs out of specific justifications for its vandalism, however, that won’t really handicap it. Any extended discussion of XR’s aims invariably climaxes with its call to end “capitalism” which in XR’s ideology is the cause of all environmental ills.

Yet even a brief glance at the history of the Soviet bloc would show that it had a far worse environmental record than any Western country. Two examples from its last days suggest the ecological consequences of replacing capitalism with “socialism”: the pollution of Lake Baikal so befouled with chemicals that it actually caught fire—and the breakdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (recorded in a brilliant dramatized HBO miniseries.) Chernobyl’s breakdown scattered nuclear fallout over a large region but it was concealed for a time by a managerial bureaucracy anxious to protect the good name of Soviet nuclear power. Such risks inevitably grow when a Politburo which manages industry consists of the same people who appoint the regulators and dictate coverage in the media.

If it makes you happier, by all means call them “the People.”

 

Nevertheless, the environmental history of socialism provides a very weak argument for getting rid of capitalism. Yet, it is where most solutions to the climate emergency end up and, not coincidentally, where they begin too.

Why so?

XR’s multiplication of justifications for their hooliganism is explicable when you realize that their predictions of doom keep not happening. And when any particular doom doesn’t happen, the climate seer needs to invent another likely catastrophe to justify his activism. Dr. Madsen Pirie, founder of the Adam Smith Institute in London, gave a fairly comprehensive list of such predictions here.

Of course, Pirie was writing in 2014; the list will be longer now. But however often the predictions are falsified, the soothsayers never admit error. Like the religious lunatics who assemble on a mountain to witness the Apocalypse in this Peter Cook sketch, their conclusion is always: “Okay, next week, same time, same place. We must get a winner some time.”

This combination of hooliganism and hysteria is happening not only in Cambridge. Similar protests erupted recently in Germany where the local XR activists were trying to halt the building of a factory that will manufacture electric cars. (Such are the contradictions of climate emergency ideology.) Parts of London have been repeatedly brought to a halt by XR demonstrators who have glued themselves to streets and police vehicles in recent months to demand a change in government energy policy from its current enthusiasm for carbon reduction to monomaniacal passion on the topic. And as readers of The Pipeline know better than anyone, half of Canada has been effectively immobilized by protesters who block railroads and highways in a campaign of forceful obstruction to prevent a pipeline that has passed every legal, democratic, and indigenous test laid down by governments hostile to it.

All of these cases of activism, though described as “non-violent,” involve the use of force to prevent individuals and companies going about their lawful business or simply going about. This is worth pondering. If protesters leave others only a choice between using force of their own to overcome obstruction or abandoning their lawful business, it is false to describe the obstruction as non-violent. Obstruction is itself a kind of tame violence—which is why laws in every country prohibit it. And why the police are required by law to intervene, prevent the obstruction, and enable the general public to live their lives.

Which brings us to a curious aspect of these protests—namely, the passive (and sometimes active) cooperation of the police and governments with the protesters. In Cambridge the police discussed with XR protesters which roads should be closed; they were on hand to see that their obstructionism observed the agreement; and they stopped members of the general public from removing the obstacles erected (one of which forced an ambulance to turn back.) They took no action to prevent the digging up of the Trinity lawn. Nor does Trinity seem to have requested their intervention. And though they have since brought charges against people suspected of offenses in these cases, that was probably in reaction to the angry and widespread public criticism of their previous inaction.

Earlier that inaction had been defended by a police spokesman on the grounds that legislation gives police a duty to superintend political protests. That seems right. But commonsense suggests that it means they should regulate such protests rather than assist them to gain their objectives. Laws also require the police to enable ordinary citizens to go about their lawful business unhindered. Taking those two duties together, they require police to regulate protests in such a way as to enable citizens to go about their lawful business. If it comes to a choice between those two duties, helping members of the public should come ahead of enforcing the will of activists upon them.

In the case of Canada, an entire government has been wobbling nervously for more than a week in order to avoid enforcing public order on left-wing and environmentalist constituencies whose support it is reluctant to lose. Only when those defending the pipeline failed to surrender in a timely fashion did the Trudeau government move—still nervously—to require that the law and the democratic decision making process it supports be upheld. And as to that, we’ll see.

For the moment, these different but similar events illustrate the degree to which our political life throughout the West has been changed by the cultural conquest of our institutions by progressive ideas. Under progressive governments which sympathize with the protesters, of course, but also under conservative governments which fear to challenge a respectable orthodoxy even when it breaks the rules that are supposed to govern everyone.

That conquest, which had already taken over the HR departments of corporations, the media, and even the armed forces, has now spread to the police who seem to have imbibed the silliest sociological ideas of the last few decades. In these cases they apparently have decided that the police should, where any choice exists, side with the protesters against society—even when, as here, the protest movement is unusually “white”—against the respectable classes who bear the odium of keeping society’s rules, obeying the law, and seeking change only through democratic channels. It looks liberal, but it is really a form of anarchy. And an anarchic police force is not something to treat lightly. It is odd and perhaps sinister.

Which is why people say: “What the hell is going on?”