A commentary on the Sandy Hill election debate, May 2018

In response to "Do we call that a debate?" in the June-July print edition of Image, and as the Ottawa-Vanier riding candidate for the Freedom Party of Ontario I have several comments.

The article starts off by applauding the technical organization of the debate but incorrectly says that only three candidates showed up. In fact, only four candidates were invited - the Freedom Party was not. I registered as a candidate about a week after the election campaign started and then immediately contacted the debate organizers. They had already determined who would be invited and did not wish to have other participants. While I expressed my reasons why I thought my participation would provide positions very different from all the others, they politely declined and since I totally respect their rights to hold a peaceful event, invite whoever they wish and their freedom to exclude any people or opinions from their event, I attended the event as a spectator only. I found the discussion uniform and a sad comment on the state of our culture.

I was invited and did participate in a debate in Beacon Hill and at Samuel Genest High School (in French and for students only). In these I consciously avoided attacking the individual representatives of the other parties (who I believe to be mostly good but misguided) and the often awful platforms they held and instead made statements demonstrating the correct principles of a civil society, pointed out the moral and economic flaws of several existing widely adopted and even popular policies and explained why all my answers to questions were unified and consistent with those correct principles. 

The PC, Liberal, NDP and Green parties do not share my respect for individual rights, as demonstrated clearly by their long standing actions in government and their election platforms that restrict many freedoms and infringe many rights of Ontario citizens. Ontario has been sliding into greater government power, more central command of our economic activity and a progressive violation of our human rights for many decades, accelerating in recent years. This is a predictable pattern as the errors and damages caused by central planning and the elimination of millions of minds from decisions compounds on itself. When a government makes a rule, one relating to wage controls for example, it deliberately prevents people from rational consideration of all options, blocks freedom to negotiate and find agreement and replaces it by the opinions, wishes and whims of whatever group holds the reins of political power. It says "obey me or face the wrath of the people with guns I have in my control."  It is precisely this type of power that inevitably must corrupt those who hold it, even relatively benignly.

The article refers to the three speakers as inhabiting the same part of the political spectrum. In fact, even the absent PC party (which sometimes makes statements sounding like it values true freedom) has more ideas in common with the other three than it does with the Freedom Party. Whereas all four of them agree on fundamental socialist principles and differ only in degree or style of implementation, the Freedom Party holds completely to the principles required for a sustainable, peaceful and stable society of rational and free people - one where the purpose of government is to clearly define and strongly protect your rights to life, liberty and property and takes no action except for these purposes. We believe government is essential for a civil society but in contrast to the four parties mentioned we believe it violates its most sacred trust when it uses force to override the will of a citizen acting in the peaceful pursuit of his or her goals in life. In start contrast to the others, we believe that all economic and other exchange of values is properly done only by the consent of both parties.

I see the big three as the parties of Kathleen Horvath, Doug Wynne and Andrea Ford. I dare you to find an area where they differ on a matter of fundamental principle. I particularly note that the explicit policy of the other parties is to use physical force and the threat of it to sacrifice the rights, reasoning, choice and thus important parts of the lives of some citizens in order to supposedly benefit others. Of the three speakers present, the NDP candidate was the most strident and explicit about this - speaking eloquently with the passion of a consistent follower of Marx and Kant. The world is already full of examples of the human and  societal terminus of these ideas and it has always been destruction. Unfortunately, these are the dominant ideas in our culture today and unless radical changes are made, we will see a continuation of cultural decline.

David McGruer

Sandy Hill

Ottawa-Vanier Freedom Party of Ontario Candidate

Ontario Liberals are in love with the ideas of Karl Marx

Below is my quick response to the current Ontario Liberal campaign. They sent me an email asking me to support them in their efforts.  I declined and opted instead to send them a brief response.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Unfortunately you have chosen to launch initiatives that are straight out of the ideology of Karl Marx. Each of the initiatives listed below requires a massive violation of the rights of Canadian citizens the government is elected to protect. I believe Sir Wilfred Laurier would recoil in horror at what the meaning of being a Liberal has become. In his lifetime he lived just long enough to see the ideas of Karl Marx start bloody revolutions that in the end resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people across the world. More die daily as a result of these same ideas in countries like Venezuela, while countries that are throwing away these ideas like China and India are advancing more rapidly that any country in history.  The Liberal party ideology needs to return to its roots and re-discover the ideas that made Canada a great country – individual rights and a government that protects them, not one that violates them.

While volumes have been written about all that is morally and economically wrong with these ideas, I will simply state here how they violate the rights of citizens, with government forcibly sacrificing a part of innocent lives to the whims, wishes and wants of other people. These actions are the exact opposite of fair.

The five initiatives are:

1. A $15 minimum wage - violates the right of employees and employers to negotiate terms of employment contract free of interference from parties who are not involved in the contract.

2. A basic income pilot - violates the rights of those who are working to create value and exchange it for wages by seizing some of their money and giving to others who are not or who have chosen not to work in support of their own lives.

3. Free pharmacare for youth and children - violates the rights of all those who work to support their own lives and those of their family, forcibly taking part of their hard work and giving it to those who did not earn it.

4. Free post-secondary education - violates the rights of all those people who work to pay for the education of themselves or their loved ones and all the rest of society's producers too, forcing them to pay for the education of strangers at the expense of their priorities in life. Such an action raises the expenses of education, stifles innovation and competition, and punishes those who work the hardest and whose work is the most productive.

5. Rent control - violates the rights of the people who have saved and invested their capital to provide rental accommodations for willing tenants. Such an action can only cause less rental properties to exist and to reduce the quality of such properties.

A guaranteed income sacrifices producers

In an Ottawa Citizen column August 16, 2014, writer Toni Pickard proposes a guaranteed minimum income. She taught law at Queens University but apparently absorbed only marxist ideology instead of the correct principles of freedom, rights, prosperity, economics and capitalism.

Pickard claims that welfare demeans recipients and runs them ragged. Welfare is an immoral and counterproductive program that victimizes both its recipients and those whose rights are violated to pay for it. She claims a guaranteed income frees energy for work, when work naturally requires energy since it is a basic requirement of human survival. She claims technology eliminates jobs when in fact it creates new and better ones, raising the standard of living for all.  She claims there is no longer enough work for everyone, ignoring that the work to be done is infinite and only government interference through laws such as the minimum wage prevents full employment. She asks how we can enable people to live decently without sufficient work income, ignoring that reality requires individuals to earn their own living or perish and that her goal requires the sacrifice of the productive and rational to those who are not.

A state-enforced minimum income would be a horrific legacy, as has been discovered by the tens of millions of victims of marxism in Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc. It is a monstrous idea that should be denounced at every opportunity.