Canada's Secular Government Becoming A Totalitarian Regime  Family Autonomy Seriously Threatened

By Joe Woodard

Although the ancient pagans understood authoritarian regimes, they had no experience of totalitarianism. Nero's word was unchallenged in running the army or setting tax rates, but unlike the Canadian government, the Emperor would never have presumed to tell Roman parents how to raise their own children or how to provide for their old age. Until modern times, no government had the relentless bureaucracy and administrative technology needed for totalitarian rule.
In any free society, the government administers the civil justice, the defence of the realm and any public works. Yet, for all its sovereign power, a free government respects the natural prerogatives of families, and it encourages a broad range of productive "secondary associations" within civil society: schools, charities, corporations, clubs, co-operatives, and municipalities. Totalitarianism denies this freedom of association. Totalitarianism is the attempt to bring all these relationships-even the family itself-under the regulation and direction of the government-the universal and exclusive regulation and direction of the government.

Eric Lowther: The Indictment of Ottawa

The Ottawa regime today can justly be accused of totalitarian intentions, especially in its ambition to supplant the natural and traditional family. Consider the indictment drawn up by Calgary MP Eric Lowther, the Official Opposition Critic for Children and Families and published in the Calgary Herald, June 11, 1999. The Federal Government of Canada:

1.  ...speaks of its concern about child abuse; yet it protects the authority of a provincial trial and appeals court, and their decision to legalize child pornography;

2.  ...wrings its hands over family breakdown, yet it defends the plague of no-fault divorce, equates marital relations with common-law relations, and equates common-law relations with same-sex liaisons;

3.  ...voices its fear of the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases among our young people, yet it lowers the age of consent for boys and girls to 14--two years before they can legally drive;

4.  ...proclaims its desire to repair the Young Offenders Act and stifle burgeoning youth violence; yet it pushes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, granting immature children completely unbridled "rights" of association and privacy, and undermining parental authority;

5.  ...announces its commitment to parental responsibility, yet it funds a court challenge to the Criminal Code's Section 43, to criminalize parents who use "reasonable force" (spanking) in disciplining their own children;

6.  ...laments the fate of children in poverty, yet it takes $6 billion in income and payroll taxes from people earning less than $20,000 per year;

7.  ...cries about the care of infants and young children, yet it penalizes single-income families with a stay-at-home parent with tax rates as much as 66% higher than two-income families, who place their children in commercial day care;

8.  ...worries about declining Canadian productivity, yet the public sector (mostly federal) absorbs 49.3% of the wealth generated yearly by Canadian families. For every dollar families send to Ottawa, they get back just 71 cents in public services, many or most neither wanted nor needed.

Canadians are unaccustomed to thinking of their government as totalitarian, because it employs relatively little physical violence. Yet, a truly efficient, revolutionary totalitarianism doesn't need violence. In the last decades of the Soviet Union, for example, even Moscow's secret police, the KGB, discovered that the psychiatric ward is a far more effective way of handling dissent, than the late-night firing squad. The firing squad only silences the dissident; the psychiatric ward publicly reinforces the notion that there really is only one legitimate interpretation of reality-the dictates of the sovereign state.

In fact, as Mr. Lowther's indictment of the regime reveals, the Ottawa agenda is, FIRST, revolutionary, SECOND, ideological, THIRD, coercive, and FOURTH, occasionally violent. It has a goal which is antithetical to the lives of most common Canadians. It is built on a faith alien to the country's traditions-a faith in the public administration. And it employs methods destructive of everything Canadians hold dear-punitive taxation and child seizure, religious discrimination and family dissolution.

Canadian Government Forces a Social Revolution

FIRST, the Canadian government is forcing a social revolution upon the grass-roots population. Most Canadians find their happiness within their families, raising their children and enjoying their grandchildren. However, as the state's toleration of child pornography, promotion of easy divorce and protection of adolescent promiscuity demonstrate, the Canadian regime really wants to preserve and extend the Sexual Revolution of the "Swinging Sixties." The integrity of the family requires marital fidelity and parental discipline, both of which are abominations to the regime of "free love." So the regime-now run by the "college kids" of the 'Sixties-looks on the family as an oppressive remnant from more primitive times.

The elite commitment to the Sexual Revolution is revealed in the government's attachment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the 10-year-old document the government describes as the cornerstone of its family policy. Yet, the document's Article 13 guarantees children access to "any literature or information, written or oral" (like pornography). Article 15 grants "freedom of association" (like a 14-year-old girl's 23-year-old boyfriend). And Article 16 grants minors an absolute "right to privacy" (like sexual activity). Last year alone, Ottawa received petitions with 12,000 signatures, from parents who fear the Conventions erosion of their parental prerogatives; but the Canadian ruling class believes that kids benefit from sexual freedom.

Public Policy Based on Secular Ideology

SECOND, Canadian public policy is now based on an ideology that is foreign to most citizens. Historically, Canada has been a Christian-based country, committed to the principles both of the rule of law and of limited government, because of an underlying belief in the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Government was to be limited, because no sinful human could be trusted with unchecked political power; yet the law had to be supreme, because every sinful citizen had to consider themselves a potential threat to the public safety and peace. (Atheists, agnostics and other religionists could be at home in a Christian society, because its limited government would essentially leave them alone.)

Today, however, the government's support for adolescent sexuality, its campaign against parental spanking and its promotion of children's rights all reveal a very different faith, a belief in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's doctrine of Original Innocence. "Only if children are left free to explore all of their natural desires, only then will they grow up healthy, non-violent and happy," runs the doctrine of Original Innocence. Canada's Young Offenders Act testifies to the belief that children will turn out naturally gentle, if only adults do not treat them sternly.

Ironically, reality says otherwise. Iowa State University's Centre for Family Research studied 332 families, and discovered NO correlation between spanking and later adolescent aggressiveness or violence. They DID find a some correlation between adolescent violence and maternal permissiveness. According to Statistics Sweden, in the decade after Sweden outlawed spanking, teenage violence soared nearly 600%.

In times past, people living in more savvy ages understood that "children's natural desires" included greed, lust, envy, anger, and a general impulse to play God. The parents of earlier ages also realized that the attempt to satisfy all of a child's desires would result in an adult enslaved to desire and devoid of any self-mastery. The people of times past would have looked on all the high-school shootings as the inevitable result of teaching children that "whatever feels right is right for them." For the devotees of Original Innocence, however, "if it feels good, do it" remains the creed for a coming New Age of peace and love-some day.

Rock, Copps, McLellan, Axworthy: Champions of the Downtrodden????

THIRD, the spoiled "Sexual Revolutionaries" of the 'Sixties are the politicians and bureaucrats of today, the Canadian political elite; and their chosen means for bringing the New Age of Feeling Good is the unlimited extension of social administration-which is to say, totalitarianism. Ironically, radical politicians like Allan Rock and Sheila Copps still think of themselves as champions of the downtrodden and the dispossessed. Yet they stand in the forefront of an elite controlling distribution of half of the country's yearly generation of wealth. According to the Fraser Institute, (1998), 49.3% of the yearly earnings of the average Canadian family is now consumed by taxes, visible and hidden. In the Bible, kings who levied taxes over 10% were called tyrants. Yet Canada today, the public sector consumes five-times that much wealth, mostly federally.

In a wide series of public-opinion surveys, over the past decade, 80% of Canadians have asserted their faith that parents are the best caregivers for the country's children. And the vast majority of parents would prefer to leave one of themselves at home, to care for the kids. But only 33% of families with children under 11 devote one parent to full-time childcare, largely because the public tax burden seems to make two incomes necessary. What is more, the income tax code is deliberately skewed in favour of two-income households. In 1975, two-earner families earning $30,000 paid $3,492 in income tax, while a one-earner families pay $4,317--24% more. And things are getting worse. In 1998, a family earning $60,000 paid $6,383 in federal income tax, if two-earner, but $10,300, if one-earner-a whopping 61% more.
According to a 1998 Southam poll, 82% of Canadians want the tax code changed, to make it easier for families with young children to have a parent at home. This is a "high" or "very high" priority for 65% of us. Yet the Ottawa regime defends a tax code that levies punitive burdens against families who are trying to raise their own children. The government has ample evidence that high taxes are destroying Canadian economic productivity, but it refuses to accept that evidence, because of its deep-seated faith in public administration, its idolatrous superstition that families can do little good and governments can do no harm.

It is important to stress that Canadian totalitarianism is NOT a "conspiracy" or the result of a conspiracy. It is the inevitable result of the passing of Canada's old faith-Christ's Church-and the rise of the country's new faith-the Secular State. In the public absence of any god above or beyond the state, the state has become the god. Proof of this can be found in the inability of the devotees of this new superstition to accept the possibility that the state can do any harm. Because the state is god, the state can do only good.

Government Assault on Families

FOURTH, the unquestioned public idolatry of the state can be seen in the amount of unacknowledged and unrepentant violence that is done by the state to particular families. Last year, for example, Ontario father Joe Cleary was arrested and jailed for legally spanking his disobedient son, Gavin, who had been repeatedly kicking the family cat. After $10,000 in legal costs, Mr. Cleary is back with his family; but his otherwise contented son is now distraught with the possibility that the police will once again take his father away. In this case, as in dozens of cases of unjustified child seizure, provincial social welfare agencies refuse later even to apologize, because they cannot accept the possibility that government apprehension might harm children.

This spring, the Rath family in Vancouver (Christian missionaries) had their four-year-old daughter taken by B.C. Social Services, solely on the word of a vengeful former drug addict. This individual was angry and made threats to Mr. Rath after being asked to step down as a director on the Board of a non-profit organization (Mr. Rath served on the same board). After RCMP removed the little girl, an invasive medical examination revealed absolutely no evidence whatsoever of sexual abuse. Even so, social services kept the little girl out of her home for over a month before the family was able to get a judge to hear the case. The judge ordered that the child returned to her family, but she was severely traumatized by the experience.

To repeat, it is important to realize that Canadian totalitarianism is not a conspiracy by an organized cabal, so much as a natural trend, arising from the actions of "true believers" in the secular state. In ancient times, totalitarianism was unknown, because no ancient tyrant had the bureaucracy or bureaucratic tools to administer the totality of the social relations within a country. Later, in Medieval Christendom, Reformation Europe and the early Modern West-until, in fact, the French Revolution- totalitarianism was impossible, because the Christian Church wielded an independent moral authority in society. The church had no police force or public bureaucracy. But from the pulpit, it could and did condemn political institutions, policies and trends harmful to families (like American slavery).

In 1988, in the BIG M DRUG MART case, the Supreme Court of Canada illegally declared Canada to be a "secular society" - contrary to the Charter of Rights and our entire legal tradition. By then, however, the court was simply codifying a trend consuming Canadian society since World War Two. As a result of the secularization of Canadian public life, Canada no longer has any public moral authority except the political regime. This makes the regime not only sovereign, but practically-speaking, TOTALITARIAN. The question remains, whether Canadians will use their lingering democratic institutions to reverse this trend.