National Post (National Edition)
A review of David Johnston’s new book, and its author
Having known David Johnston, the former governor general of Canada, intermittently for 30 years, I was prepared to fear the worst on opening his recently published little book, Trust. The sub-title is Twenty Ways To Build A Better Country. The 20 ways are avoidance of manipulation, truthfulness, listening to others, consistency, doing the right thing, originality, faith (in something), practicing the golden rule, modesty, helping neighbours, listening to others, sharing implementation of plans, recognizing danger, honouring teachers, being diplomatic, and getting started now. It alarms me that the former acting chief of state of Canada considers it germane and potentially useful to the upward future of this country to offer this pastiche of notorious platitudes as a useful primer for all Canadians to take to heart. At times I thought I had come across a reprint of a setup for an H. L. Mencken slathering of the “booboisie.”
Johnston illustrates most of these clichés with episodes in his career showing himself as an exemplar of them, and, implicitly, as the role model for the enlightened Canadian and a guide to a national future that the world will emulate. Thus, he takes the credit for causing the wife of the Emir of Qatar to persuade that petro- state to stop trying to pull the International Aviation headquarters out of Montreal. (Never mind its support of Iran and the Shiite aggression in the Middle East, and that women don’t influence much in that country.) His discussions with the Chinese about sports exchanges reminded him, naturally, of president Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s triangulation of Great Power relations with China, which changed the world. He had a catalytic effect on German chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, by using “soft power,” a concept he rightly credits to former U. S. assistant defence secretary Joe Nye, without mentioning that it was proposed as credible only when there was a hard power option, which, to say the least, Johnston didn’t possess. He professes to have accomplished something useful for international relations by inviting the entire diplomatic corps to an annual skate on the Rideau and a square dance.
Canada is already a comparatively virtuous country. It is possibly the most receptive country to immigrants in the world, a tremendous source of pride, and it is relatively peaceable, and has more durable democratic institutions than any other country with even half of its population, except the United Kingdom and the United States. Our only formal wars, the First and Second World Wars, were in a just cause, on the winning side, and our armed forces fought with great combat distinction. ( Our participation in United Nationssupported actions have all been well-intended and moderately successful.) Canada produced this author, who now urges Canada to emulate him in doing what it has always done.
Johnston has had, basically, three adult occupations: first, a securities lawyer, who wants a national securities commission. (Fortunately, our constitutional division of powers prevents that and what we need is for one of the provinces to get rid of its securities regulator, add 20 members to its justice department, and invite the whole world to a jurisdiction that did not persecute the entire financial industry to death, but went hammer and tongs after fraudulent issuers of securities.) Second, he was a university administrator, which I know from my time as a university lecturer and trustee, is the ultimate forum for unprincipled politics. It has nothing to do with policy or principles, and is entirely social and companionable: confected, unguent popularity — be nicer to everyone, high and low, than one’s rivals, and kiss the hands, feet, and other appurtenances of sources of funds, public and private. Someone has to do it, but it has no value added per se, and isn’t administration in the sense of actually running anything. In some respects, this was the perfect formation for a governor general, but it confers no right to preach.
This climax of Johnston’s life is a completely anachronistic colonial office, and the whole concept of a head of state when the real head, a non- resident monarch, is not present in the country, is rubbish, despite the outstanding qualities of this monarch and the merits of some of the governors general. (I have suggested reforms of the office, including its name, elsewhere.) Johnston ceremoniously exercised the powers 19th-century essayist Walter Bagehot identifies as the prerogatives of the monarch. (Bagehot was not the founder of the Economist, as Johnston pedantically writes; he married the daughter of the founder, and we may all be thankful that Johnston had almost none of the powers of Victoria, queen and empress.)
Johnston seeks a stiflingly politically correct Canada, embracing affirmative action, legitimizing the theory that Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries invaded and aggressively occupied the natives’ country (a little like real countries invading each other), seeking “reconciliation” with the Indigenous by endless apologies and concessions; encouraging the mediocre in Canada by patting them on the back (fine as a policy but not as a goal), praising the learned professions, and opposing individualism. In fact, what the country needs is not the priggish unworldly worthiness prescribed by this well-pensioned, pseudo-modest priest of what’s been good for him: the primacy of the lawyerly and academic placemen.
He counsels that we must “cherish our teachers.” In fact, our state education systems are often little better than evermore costly unionized daycare centres, and the universities are a mass of under-employed subversive faculty members churning out discontented and under- educated youth generally unqualified to earn a living. Johnston fondles the press, which he always courted, and which never much bothered or even referred to him. And the legal profession is a 360-degree cartel that bilks society, self-proliferates through its incumbency among legislators and regulators, and has got away with class robbery greater than that of the first two estates in pre-revolutionary France behind a smokescreen of pious claptrap about the rule of law.
The former chief justice of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, wrote a grovellingly deferential foreword to this book, which is fully repaid by his log- rolling praise of her exploitation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and her championship of native people. They are careerists of a feather. In fact, she made a Horlicks of the fusion of codified and common law legal systems. Pierre Trudeau launched the Charter to take the ground out from under Quebec politicians arguing for a redistribution of powers, not to turn every judge in Canada into a social tinkerer, and McLachlin’s long career as a senior judge has done nothing but magnify the problem. The Indigenous have legitimate grievances, and they must be addressed, but McLachlin armed them falsely with judicial invincibility, and severely retarded a just resolution of the problem. A supine bench has given them no incentive to compromise. As a religious man happily married to a wonderful woman, I salute Johnston’s religious and uxorial comments. Apart from that, his book is trite treacle.
Now, I shall review the author. As a Southam newspaper director, he was complicit in the editorial dullness, soft-left biases and marginal profits of that company’s products, and I found that he was never available, even by telephone, when an important matter came up. I published in this newspaper on Feb. 3, 2014, my response to his purported expulsion of me from the Order of Canada, to which he attaches self-servingly sacrosanct importance in this book, and from the Privy Council of Canada, which I still believe he and his loyal Iago, Stephen Wallace (whom he praises for writing a “strategic plan” for being governor general, surely one of Canadian history’s more redundant exercises), had no right to do. But after legal bills of over $ 30 million and having won 99 per cent of it, I couldn’t face more litigation over an insubstantial matter.
Johnston and McLachlin and Stephen Harper simply accepted the tattered remains of a completely discredited American prosecution, where spurious verdicts had to be retrieved from vacation by the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court by a seemingly self- interested megalomaniac lower court judge. They all had the evidence that the prosecution was unfounded, the verdict nonsense, and that none of it would even have been charged in this country, let alone made the subject of conviction. Many serious U.S. legal commentators have railed against my disgraceful persecution, most recently Alan Dershowitz, to a large audience in Toronto a few months ago, but our ruling trio, to whom the sovereignty of this country was entrusted, rolled over like poodles in replication of Canada’s branch-plant heritage of subservience to the worst aspects of American overlordship. Rinky- dink American courts and their fascistic prosecutors have unappealable authority over who can have the Order of Canada. Why not North Korea too? I wrote Johnston a letter of resignation on Dec. 18, as it was obvious Wallace would accomplish his little coup; they did not even have the elemental decency to accept it, and instead published a false press release about my departure. It was thoroughly nasty and contemptible, and profoundly trivial.
Trust is one of the last qualities I would credit to David Johnston. His book brought back to mind the leftist writer Hannah Arendt, a fraud and a hypocrite also, but who could at least turn a phrase. She wrote of the “banality of evil.” Johnston has demonstrated the evil of banality.
JOHNSTON SEEKS A STIFLINGLY POLITICALLY CORRECT CANADA.