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Saving Canada Friday, 12 March 2004 Ted Byfield Confined to a bed in a nursing home at London, Ontario, these past two
months is one Robert Ivan Martin, age 64, victim of a stroke four years
ago and a hipbreaking fall last December. He is in pain, often in despair
for his country, and most of the time alone. Not too many would recognize
him as the man who has written the book that I think will help set off
a conservative revolution in Canada. Martin is professor of law at the
University of Western Ontario and a highly respected academic. His background
as a conservative might seem, to put it minimally, unusual. A former agnostic,
socialist, Third World liberationist, and ex-patriot of the old far-left
Mel Watkins "waffle" movement, he ran twice federally for the
NDP and, of course, lost. But to Martin his conservatism is no mystery.
He is, he explains, a George Grant conservative and, like the great McMaster
philosopher Grant himself, abandoned the socialist movement when he discovered
the movement was abandoning most of its founding principles. Martin's
book, The Most Dangerous Branch, published last year by McGill-Queens
University Press, has taken on a life of its own. In Alberta, people scour
the bookstores for a copy of it, can't find one, then scrounge illegal
photocopies of this or that chapter and fax them to one another. It suggests
what used to be called "salacious literature." And, as Martin
himself would concede, in a way it is. For to Martin, the great change
in late 20th Century Canada was not essentially political, or economic,
or social, or constitutional. It was religious. Unbeknownst to nearly
all Canadians and certainly unsought by them, Canada was gratuitously
endowed with a "secular state religion." He does not advance
this as a sarcasm or a joke, but as a literal fact. "It is a set
of ideological beliefs, largely taken on faith, which appears to underlie
and motivate the actions of the Canadian state," he writes. "It
is enforced and imposed by the state. It is secular because it aggressively
denies the existence of a god." He refers, of course, to what is
vaguely called the Politically Correct. But it is no longer vague, nor
merely correct. It is now The Law of the Land, and woe betide the offender.
It has been branded upon marital law, criminal law, family law, laws controlling
public expression, medical law, tax law, and legal procedure. It has been
imposed upon Parliament and the legislatures. And it is pre-eminently
a religion, presided over by the nine high cardinals of the Sacred College,
a.k.a. the Supreme Court of Canada, who are appointed through a mystical
process that we, the peasantry, could never understand. It runs feminist
seminaries called law schools to train the hierarchy for tomorrow and
indoctrination centres for the judges of today to make sure that the dogma
is strictly observed in everything they decide. It issues daily encyclicals
with names such as The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star who harshly
punish the deviant, should any be so blasphemous as to question the infallibility
of the Sacred College. Now I've said all this before, and so have numerous
other purveyors of the salacious, but not like Martin says it. In 11 horrifying
chapters, he shows us how all our worst fears have been realized. He describes,
he details, he identifies and he documents beyond all doubt how our Supreme
Court has destroyed our national heritage, our constitution and our democracy.
Never has any Canadian conservative produced such an incisive catalogue
of calamity. But the game is not over yet. Governments can change, and
courts can change and, as we saw not long ago in eastern Europe, "state
religions" can also change. But we can't change them until we know
what we're up against and, thanks to Martin, now we know. I might add
that he became late in life a practising Christian, a believer. So perhaps
other believers might pray for his recovery. We need him back on the job.
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