Justin Trudeau was sworn in as Canada's 23rd Prime Minister on November 4, 2015. When I saw the footage of his swearing in, it was stark to me as an American. It was weird. It was alien.
This is the Oath of Office for the Presidency of the United States:
”I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
The US Constitution is a contract that serves individual Americans.
The process of being sworn in as a Prime Minister of Canada requires three oaths. Not to their founding document, not to Canadian principles, and not to the people of Canada.
His allegiance is to the Queen:
Oath of Allegiance:
I, __________, do swear (declare) that I will be faithful and bear true
allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada,
Her Heirs and Successors.
So help me God.
Oath of the Members of the Privy Council:
I, __________, do solemnly and sincerely swear (declare) that I shall
be a true and faithful servant to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the
Second, as a member of Her Majesty's Privy Council for Canada. I will in
all things to be treated, debated and resolved in Privy Council, faithfully,
honestly and truly declare my mind and my opinion. I shall keep secret
all matters committed and revealed to me in this capacity, or that shall
be secretly treated of in Council. Generally, in all things I shall do as a
faithful and true servant ought to do for Her Majesty.
So help me God.
Oath of Office:
I, _________, do solemnly and sincerely promise and swear (declare)
that I will truly and faithfully, and to the best of my skill and knowledge,
execute the powers and trusts reposed in me as ...........
So help me God.
This was super weird to my American ears. Where was his oath to the Constitution of Canada, or the rights of Canadians, or Canadians themselves? Then I remembered... Subjects of the Queen do not have rights that were not given to them by the Queen. Subjects of the Queen are... well, just subjects of the Queen.
And Justin Trudeau is a creature of Her Majesty the Queen of England. He ultimately only has to do what she tells him to.
Does that make his behavior in the Trucker Protest make more sense? He has a higher loyalty than his loyalty to every Canadian.
Elizabeth.
We seem to think of the UK, Canada, and Australia as American type democracies. They have democratic processes for putting together a government, but that government serves at the pleasure of the Queen. Long ago The British Crown reacted to a rebellion of Lords and gave them some power, but it never gave a bill of rights to Britons, and has always kept the ultimate power. If Elizabeth is unhappy with the performance of elected government, she can make Prime Ministers resign, dissolve parliaments, and make them start over.
It is all seemingly polite, and the Crown knows that it can only push the people so far, but for us Americans to think that they are like us is a mistake. We know in our bones that we have rights. Rights to speech, rights to guns for self-defense, right to a fair trial, right not to allow police in our homes, right to life, liberty, and property. We are somewhat jerks overseas because we know our power as Americans.
Not so for subjects of the Queen. Brits, Aussies, and Canucks are subjects of the Queen. They don’t have the power there that we do here. In fact they have more rights here than in their own countries.
There is no freedom of speech in England. Saying something considered merely obnoxious in New York could get you arrested in ye olde York.
Canada only got a bill of rights in 1981.
And even those rights were given to them by the Queen. So she can take them back whenever she wants.
In America, power flows up, but in the British Empire, power flows down.
The Monarchy and her colonies see it this way: God chooses and empowers the queen or king, the monarch then creates the government, and the people are at the bottom of the power structure and only have the rights that their monarch, her Lords and ministers, grant to them. And as those rights come from Her Majesty and her ministers, they can be taken away by them as well.
Rights are alienable. This is completely alien to Americans.
We Americans hold these truths to be self-evident, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The top of the power structure is God; He gives rights to individuals, His children, whom He created and loves. Those individual Americans give their power to the state they live in. Those individual states (really small countries) in turn then give their power to the Federal Government.
American power flows from God to man to state government to the federal government, and the President is the servant of that power structure. He is not a King, but a man who cannot acout outside his job description listed in the Constiution. He only has the power to enforce the laws made by Congress, the members of which are elected by the people.
Kings can do what they want.
And the US Federal government is very limited in the powers that they have in the first place. They only the powers that the US Constitution allows the Federal government to exercise. Health care policy, for example, is not a power that the Federal Government is allowed to regulate. HHS really should not even exist, and it has no actual power over your life at all.
You will notice that HHS and CDC can only make recommendations and pronouncements. They can’t impose anything on any individual. They can only wield power by bribing a state to implement Policy X via federal funding, or blackmail a state into implementing Policy Y by removing federal funding.
In turn, State Constitutions limit the power that individual states have over their residents. For example, the state of Maine Constitution holds that:
“Section 2. Power inherent in people. All power is inherent in the people; all free governments are founded in their authority and instituted for their benefit; they have therefore an unalienable and indefeasible right to institute government, and to alter, reform, or totally change the same, when their safety and happiness require it.”
Thus I also have the First Amendment protections enshrined in my state as well:
”Section 3. Religious freedom; sects equal; religious tests prohibited; religious teachers. All individuals have a natural and unalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences, and no person shall be hurt, molested or restrained in that person's liberty or estate for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of that person's own conscience, nor for that person's religious professions or sentiments, provided that that person does not disturb the public peace, nor obstruct others in their religious worship; -- and all persons demeaning themselves peaceably, as good members of the State, shall be equally under the protection of the laws, and no subordination nor preference of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law, nor shall any religious test be required as a qualification for any office or trust, under this State; and all religious societies in this State, whether incorporate or unincorporate, shall at all times have the exclusive right of electing their public teachers, and contracting with them for their support and maintenance.
Section 4. Freedom of speech and publication; libel; truth given in evidence; jury determines law and fact. Every citizen may freely speak, write and publish sentiments on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of this liberty; no laws shall be passed regulating or restraining the freedom of the press; and in prosecutions for any publication respecting the official conduct of people in public capacity, or the qualifications of those who are candidates for the suffrages of the people, or where the matter published is proper for public information, the truth thereof may be given in evidence, and in all indictments for libels, the jury, after having received the direction of the court, shall have a right to determine, at their discretion, the law and the fact.”
There are no limits on the Queen, except for the limits that God Himself puts on her. And I am pretty sure that she is not super obedient to the instruction that God gives to Kings, or even to mere rank and file humans.
Remember Alfie Evans?
“The parents of a terminally ill baby were denied permission to appeal their case to the U.K. Supreme Court in an effort to continue life support for their 22-month-old child.
Kate James and Tom Evans have been fighting in courts to keep their son, Alfie, on a ventilator. But doctors at Liverpool's Alder Hey Hospital said there is nothing they can do for the boy, who is suffering from an undiagnosed degenerative brain disease, and that his life support treatment could stop.
The parents want to continue the treatment for Alfie so that they can eventually take him abroad for treatment.
Last month, High Court Judge Mr. Justice Anthony Hayden ruled that the boy can be moved to palliative care, prompting Evans and James to challenge the decision at the Court of Appeal.
However, the High Court's ruling was upheld and the Supreme Court rejected the parents' claim that the previous courts had discriminated against them.
Court papers revealed that James and Evans wanted to continue treatment so that their son could be taken to a hospital in Rome and perhaps later to a hospital in Munich. The parents vowed to accept withdrawal of life support for the child if there was no prospect of his condition improving after "about six months."
The parents could not simply ask Supreme Court justices to consider the case due to legal rules. They needed to clear an initial hurdle first by convincing the judges that their case was worth arguing.
The three justices expressed "profound sympathy" for the parents, but stated that they had not put forward an arguable case.
"The [supreme court] will give permission for an appeal to be brought only if it would raise an arguable point of law of general public importance," the ruling stated, according to The Guardian.
"The proposed appeal is unarguable so, notwithstanding our profound sympathy for the agonising situation in which they find themselves, we refuse permission for the parents to appeal," it continued.
After the court ruling, Evans revealed that he had asked officials at Alder Hey if he could bring Alfie home to a "suitable setting with the private facilities and team."
He explained that this would allow his son to "die in his own time with no further escalation of treatment," adding that the family would not return to the hospital and would pay for a vent from donations.
The hospital reportedly denied his request, prompting the father to express his frustration on the Alfie's Army Facebook page
"We are being denied this!!!!!" he wrote, referring to his request to take the child home. "Alder Hey want Alfie dead and on their time scale with their plans!!! Whose son is he??? We are absolutely disgusted that our local hospital will not release our son who had every right to live and let live!!!!" he continued.”
I ended up getting into a discussion on Facebook with a British barister about the case, lamenting the fact that the child had no individual right to live, the parents had to right to take the child home, much less for a second opinion or alternate care at any of the many foreign hospitals offering him care. In the end the court gagged the poor parents and all they were legally allowed to do was sit quietly and watch their child die.
How could they stand having no rights? How could she stomach such a cruel and unjust system?
She said, “Well, it works for us.”
I said, “Well, it didn’t work for Alfie.”
So understand that the rights we have here, and the American mindset (The Rebel), are quite different from the rights they have there, and their mindset (the subject).
These mindsets came from two very different understandings of God. While both systems assume that power ultimately starts with God, one of these represents the understanding of a God ruling over His subjects from afar, issuing dictates from His throne room at His whim; and the other represents the understanding of a God who became man, lived among regular individuals, and lovingly valued even members of the lowest caste in society.
The argument that America was founded as a Christian nation may or may not be correct, but it is easy to argue that the men who founded it had an understanding of the incarnation. As Christ as God. The Immanuel, “God with us,” who served us as individuals, and died for us as individuals, and gave us life as individuals, apart from any religious institution, any blessing from any priest, any official recognition from any rabbi, or the permission of any magistrate.
He turned to the thief dying on the cross next to Him who could do no good act before his death, and gave him eternal life simply because of his faith in Jesus.
Luke 23:39-43
39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And He said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Our governmental system is aligned with the idea that even a dying, confessed felon has value.
That God came to earth, and rather than ruling from a throne, and dining with kings, spent His time loving the lowly and healing the sick. That God gives His power to those individuals, and they give it to those whom they deem worthy.
I am super proud of Canadians. They are the last people I would have picked to start the revolution against Tyranny (other than the French, of course). But they are doing it with resolve, and so, so much love!!!
They have inspired a wave of rebellion to tyranny across Europe (other than France, of course)! And that wind is blowing harder and harder!
So my hope is that their loving resolve might not just free them from the tyranny of Fidel Castro’s drama teacher son, but of the crumbling Crown as well.
It was the dirty, uneducated farmers and similarly situated rabble in the American colony that threw off the Crown under a weak and ailing King, once upon a time. I am praying that the time might be for those “unacceptable, racist, misogynist” truckers and similarly situated “unscientific” intolerables to show the Crown the door. Much more politely than we Ugly Americans did, of course.
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