The Dominion Loyalist

31/10/2021

06/09/2021

"Good economic and housing policy is not inherently conservative; it is how a government uses these policies that determines this... A stable economy means nothing to an aborted fetus. An affordable house is pointless unless it is home to a stable family."

Like a brisk September wind heralds the beginning of autumn, Justin Trudeau’s raising of the abortion issue in recent weeks could only mean that his visit to Rideau Hall to request the dissolution of Parliament was imminent. Since late July there have been no doubts; an election season is upon us ...

24/08/2021

"In many ways, the right has been experimenting with a Laclauian project for a while, but it needs to be conscious of the inherent warning in Laclau’s theory... (for) he has shaped the activist world more than we give him credit for."

There are certain darlings of the New Left: Michel Foucault; Gilles Deleuze; Judith Butler; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; Slavoj Zizek. These thinkers have, in ways that are becoming only more apparent, shaped the contemporary political and philosophical dialogue for decades. Foucault’s observa...

22/08/2021

"J.R.R. Tolkien is seldom described as a conservative icon, more commonly occupying the position of a literary genius for his fantasy series The Lord of the Rings. However, at the heart of his acclaimed works lies a strain of what can only be deemed traditionalism; a perspective deeply rooted in his love of the natural world."

Climate change has proven to be an extraordinarily difficult issue for Canadian conservatives to take on. Earlier this spring, federal Conservative delegates rejected a proposal to acknowledge the climate crisis as real in a 54% to 46% upset. Any attempt at enacting environmental protection has prov...

13/08/2021

"The response of the Catholic Church to (industrialization) in Atlantic Canada would ensure that tradition did not erode in the context of an industrial-driven exodus of labour from rural communities."

In his treatise on liberty, John Stuart Mill famously inquired on the goal of government [1]. As a pioneer in the liberal tradition, Mill aimed to assimilate the principles of classical liberalism with his own utilitarian doctrine—one which remains enshrined in the political thought of liberals. M...

12/08/2021

"For (Nietzsche), history is not just another field of study but a way of understanding and improving contemporary society, making it one of the most vital subjects one can learn."

In the modern world, history is most often thought of as an academic discipline of relative unimportance. However, Fredrich Nietzsche understood history differently. For him, history is not just another field of study but a way of understanding and improving contemporary society, making it one of th...

21/07/2021

“The Americans” can be viewed as a devotional of continentalism. A firm anti-monarchist, Sinclair praised the efforts of the United States through the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan to spread liberalism throughout the post-war world.

It was on June 5, 1973, from the offices of CFRB on St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto, that Gordon Sinclair first broadcast his commentary “The Americans” to wide acclaim. A near five-minute-long adulation of the United States, Sinclair had spontaneously prepared his two-page script that very mor...

16/07/2021

Presentists would be remiss in forgetting that a statue of Iroquois warrior and slave owner Thayendanegea currently stands tall in Brantford—especially when considering the tradition of enslavement among Indigenous peoples prior to European contact.

To not grieve for the scores of children who were recently found to have died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School and the countless unidentified bodies subsequently found near Marieval and elsewhere, one would have to possess a heart of stone devoid of all capacity for human sympathy. The resi...

11/07/2021

"By condemning the primacy of materialism and utilitarian economic output, Ruskin places himself between the radical liberal and Marxist thought of his day."

John Ruskin and Political Economy The mechanism of modern life today is indubitably liberalism: an ideology responsible for bringing about tremendous social and economic changes that have dictated the modern world since the Industrial Revolution. Born in early 19th century London, John Ruskin was am...

08/07/2021

We are very pleased to share this piece on Stephen Leacock from the brilliant Ron Dart.

"The historic liberal notion of Canadian economic integration and annexation with the US was a position that Leacock opposed as a historic Canadian High Tory."

Stephen Leacock was part of that curious and perhaps indigenously Canadian species which has been given the name of “Red Tory” -Alan Bowker Many writers have asserted that there is a common ground between conservatism and socialism; perhaps the most frequently cited similarities are an organic v...

05/07/2021

"Turn-of-the-century Papal encyclicals like Rerum novarum reflected the newfound position of the Church leadership, which sought to reassert the faith’s commitment to social justice in the face of the perceived ills wrought by liberalism."

Liberalism and Catholic doctrine formed competing currents of thought amidst the politics of change that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nascent liberal regimes challenged the traditional authority of the Church in arguing that the foundation of state authority was constitution...

04/07/2021

"The only thing which binds Canadians today is a loose commitment to the liberal institutions that afford for our atomization, allowing us to exist as little more than one-man communities free from any commitments that might hinder our liberty."

I should have been a Liberal, for my blood is red in more ways than one. Since the first days of my ancestors having come to Canada from Scotland in the 1820s, my family has been sympathetic to the causes of reform and "progress". Products of the Scottish Enlightenment, that first generation was wel...

01/07/2021

"Much like how the term ‘egregious’ has evolved from referring to something distinguished to something that is conspicuously awful, so too has the term ‘Red Tory’ undergone a similar negative shift in the minds of modern-day Canadian conservatives."

Semantic development really is quite a fascinating quirk of human society. Much like how the term ‘egregious’ has evolved from referring to something distinguished to something that is conspicuously awful, so too has the term ‘Red Tory’ undergone a similar negative shift in the minds of mode...