Environmentalism has replaced Socialism

While it has been a while since I have posted anything it is not because I have been inactive! During the run up to the national election held in late October I was busy submitting items to the Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal newspaper and the local Nipigon Gazette. Here is the first of the several I submitted to the CJ.

Environmentalism has replaced Socialism

Politics, for me, is a fascinating subject in that there are so many shades of meaning such that at times it is hard to differentiate those who favour one political philosophy from another. In Canada we have three main parties and several also ran's that lie more on the fringes. In a "perfect" world they would be labelled as being right wing, centrist or left wing.

Those who support "capitalism" typically would be considered to be right wing, or "conservatives" and those who support "socialism" are left wing or "socialists". "Liberals" traditionally have tried to find a happy medium between the two extremes; except in Canada whereby all three major parties were centralists in that our "conservatives" support socialistic policies and our "socialists" support capitalistic policies.

No matter which party one was previously aligned with the common thread was what was best for the people of Canada as attested by our two mottos: “From sea to sea” and “Peace, Order and Good Government”. Both are currently being challenged by a new political order.

To illustrate the “old” order let us consider as an example the farmers of the prairies, the birthplace of the New Democratic Party and where Provincially they have been well represented for a long time. Farmers are independent businessmen, capitalists, but with no control over critical aspects of whether or not they make a profit; the weather and grain prices. When times are tough (the grain markets are doing poorly, or the weather prevents a good harvest) they band together to help one another survive until next season; they are socialists. But when times are good (the prices received for their grains more than meet costs or the weather has resulted in a bumper harvest) they stand apart and are capitalists again.

We are now in strange times in that environmentalism has overtly (the Green Party) or covertly infiltrated most of our political parties such that we have much disunity across our country and our collective well being is seriously threatened by environmental-centric policies such as no pipelines and so called “carbon” taxes (we all should know that all living creatures, including us, are primarily carbon so we are now declaring ourselves ”pollution”?). Currently the only exception appears to be the Peoples Party of Canada.

What has happened to be doing what is best for society? Instead society has become the scapegoat for everything that is imagined to be wrong with the environment such as the supposedly imperiled woodland caribou or climate change. The Liberals embraced environmentalism the earliest. The NDP and Conservatives are falling over themselves to various degrees trying to do so as well.

An example of a former politician who sees clearly the problem with adopting the draconian actions promoted by the environmentalists is Brad Wall of Saskatchewan. While he believes in climate change, he does not agree at all with the policies being put in place by the Liberals, both Federally and Provincially across this country. Government is financed by taxes. Taxes are paid by working people. If people lose their jobs due to untested and unproven environmental policies, then we are due for economic collapse.

What is most puzzling though is how did this come about? How did almost all our political parties lose sight of who they are supposed to be representing, the people of Canada? Not too long ago Barbara Kay, a columnist with the National Post wrote a piece titled "The deplorables' get their moment. Break out the pointed hoods". She tells about how radicals now pretend to be others as a means of attaining their own agenda; a methodology created and promoted by Saul Alinksky who wrote a book called "Rules for Radicals". In it he encouraged radicals to work within the system while accruing power to destroy it. If you think of it, Gerald Butts, former CEO of the World Wildlife Fund of Canada, up until recently Justin Trudeau's principal secretary and previously the principal secretary for former Premier Dalton McGuinty fits that description to a tee.

In summary Canada's political system has devolved whereby most of our political parties have become corrupted from within to the point that they care not for you and me, the people of this country. The Bloc want to tear the country apart for different reasons but with the same result. This coming fall election think twice about who you wish to support for our local representative in the Canadian Parliament. How about someone with well reasoned principals who wants to ensure our economic well being going forward? Watch, listen and if given the opportunity, ask them hard questions. Assure yourself they have your best interests in mind, or would they rather be modern day Don Quixote’s and tilt at windmills, the imaginary giants they are afraid of. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt so eloquently said: "the only thing we have to fear, but fear itself"!

The Political Spectrum Revisited.

For some time I have been reviewing and mulling over the “Political Spectrum”. An early reference was Wikipedia but I found it wanting in that most of the diagrams summarising the various ideas are two dimensional except for the Vosem Chart. The latter I have to agree with in that we are dealing, from a society perspective, three primary measures: society, economic and government. These can be summarised as describing degrees of Freedom.

It has taken me some time to try and get this in an easy to understand form, but I think I have something that works. What I have done is modified the Vosem Chart idea by setting my 3 axes as being a measure of Personal Freedom, Economic Freedom and Democratic Freedom (the reciprocal being increasing Government control). Then I gathered what appear to be the dominant Political Groupings, created a table and then gave each a subjective score:

	Freedom
Category	Economic	Personal	Democratic
Anarchist	10	10	10
Libertarian	9	9	8
Conservative	6	7	6
Liberal	5	5	5
Social Liberal	3	3	5
Socialist	2	2	4
Fascist	2	1	1
Communist	0	0	1

An Anarchist believes in total personal and economic freedom with no government control. As “Democracy” is all about freedom of personal choice then the situation where there is no government, I give a Democratic score of 10 with Personal and Economic freedom scores also being 10. Libertarians typically are those who understand the need for common services and thus limited government yet still value maximum personal and economic freedom. Classic “Liberal” is typically middle of the road so that is how I scored it. Because “Conservatives” usually want a bit more economic and personal freedom as well as smaller government than classic liberals I scored them accordingly.

One class that has bothered me, and something I have previously written about, is where does Fascism lie? For the last few decades it has been a catchall term for the “alt-right” and the “extreme right” but the “right” is a term firmly connected to those who value maximum personal and economic freedom with limited government. That does not fit with the Fascism of the early 20^th century where personal freedom was greatly limited under severe government control yet with some economic freedom in that individuals outside of government still ran businesses (some economic freedom). Now I understand that why I was so troubled by this problem is that the extreme left (Communists and Marxists especially), in an effort to redirect attention from their cruelty have used successfully “Projection” to apply their flaws on the innocent.

Here is the result in graphical form:

I must point out that I did not intentionally have the “left” side of the graph being populated by those ideologies that favour reduced personal and economic freedom along with maximum government control! But that is how it works out.

Now I admit this isn’t perfect, but it does a better job, I think, that other schemes I have seen. A wild card is that there is a force that corrupts the right leaning ideologies and that is extreme environmentalism. The sad thing is that these people do not look at the Human Race as being a part of the global ecosystem but instead as a blight that needs to be eradicated. Think of Jim Jones and the mass suicide he encouraged his followers to commit at Jonestown in 1978. 

In conclusion I need to make some admissions. The first is that the “Liberal Party of Canada” (LPC) is not “liberal”. It was at one time but has been degrading itself over the years into a group of socialist’s thanks primarily to the infiltration of the Greenies (Environmental Activists). When you get right down to it they have also infiltrated the NDP to the point there is little difference ideologically from the LPC. Ironically the “Conservative Party of Canada” (CPC) now fits the more classic liberal description. That leaves the “Peoples Party of Canada” (PPC) as the only right of centre party in Canada and one that so far has not been corrupted by the Greenies. As I see it the PPC is the best choice for Canada but since when does logic decide the outcomes of “democratic” elections.