An Open Letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper

“Whenever government surrenders its moral authority by aiding oppression and evil, then I am absolved of all allegiance to it, and I know no ruler save God Almighty, and no law but that of conscience itself.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

(NANAIMO, Vancouver Island) - (Editorial note: I don't always agree with my son Kevin. We differ on some things; mostly it's a matter of degree. For one thing, he is far more patient with every nutcase who comes along pleading the case for anything and everything, be it gay pride, animal husbandry, alien alliances and abolishing lawyers without borders. I prefer light satire; he likes in-your-face confrontation.

Sometimes I wish I was more like Kevin, sharing in the DNA he probably gets from his maternal ancestors who were Scottish Selkirk Settlers. The next best thing I can do is present his guest columns, such as the one below. This one could be sub-titled (with apologies to Keats): “On First Looking Into the Canadian Government's Budget (i.e. Transfer Payments).”

I doubt that if one of your own kids was savagely raped, strangled to death and thrown into a garbage pit somewhere, you’d look too kindly on a government that gave $57 million to the killer’s employer, especially when the latter had been caught red-handed concealing the crime.

But that’s what you’ve just done, according to your own Federal Budget. Your government has given that much money to the Roman Catholic Church and its agencies across Canada. In fact, of the more than $80 million you shelled out to religious groups, nearly three quarters of that money went to the same Catholic church that caused the death of most of the 50,000 little kids who never came back from the Indian residential schools.

Now I understand why the Vancouver cops come down on us so hard whenever we picket the downtown Catholic cathedral on behalf of those missing kids, since the local Archbishop is another recipient of taxpayer’s largesse, to the tune of $231,321. I wonder what that particular payoff is for? Or the cool $200,000 you gave directly to one particular Catholic parish, St. Patrick’s Church in St. John’s, Newfoundland?

And just so we’re clear, your Budget doesn’t stop with the Catholics. You also handed $993,000 to another church with aboriginal blood on its hands, the United Church of Canada, at its national office in Etobicoke. Even little Simcoe Street United Church in Oshawa got $136,785!

Steve, you’re colluding with murderers, and for some reason you’re compelling Canadian taxpayers to help you do so, by bankrolling church organizations whose stated policy regarding child rape in its ranks is to obstruct justice by concealing the crime and silencing the victims.

That’s the case for the Catholics, at least, who have always been more honest in their criminality than the more “liberal” United Church, the principals of which nevertheless shuffle their proprietary rapists around for their own protection: guys such as convicted former national officer “Reverend” Russell Crossley.

So, to leave aside for a moment the gross immorality of all this (something I’m sure you won’t find that hard to do, since you already did so at length in your famous 2008 “Apology”), your use of public funds to subsidize proven criminal bodies is an offense, not only under domestic but international law.

Let me repeat: you are committing a crime, and are forcing taxpayers to be accessories. And I know why: it’s because of something called a Financial Concordat, which you share with the Vatican and its subsidiary churches. Under its terms, you’re obligated to subsidize catholic agencies, and even funnel taxpayer’s money directly to the church, as your own Budget reveals. In other words, you’re in a pact with the Devil.

Somebody whom you’ve probably never read, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was once expected to pay his American government a tax that would help fund a Fugitive Slave Law, compelling all citizens to return runaway black men and women to their slave masters. Well, Ralph wouldn’t do so, and, echoing modern day international law, he wrote to the President in the year 1852,

That’s the natural law, Steve, and it’s my birthright. And like anyone of conscience, I’m invoking that higher law right now, and I’m asking everyone I know to do the same. We ain’t gonna pay your butcher’s bill any longer, Mister Prime Minister.

But that’s just for starters. You are also inviting us to issue a citizen’s arrest warrant against you, Steve, on behalf of all of our fellow citizens, whom you are compelling to break the law. We can do that, under common law. It’s called a Necessity Defense, and it has to happen whenever the courts and police refuse to protect the public from criminals in high office, like you. It happened in a court of law in the Midlands in England last year, the citizen's arrest of a judge by 600 ordinary citizens.

And some of my friends among the Cree Nation on the prairies started the direct action ball rolling back in the fall of 2008, right after your bullshit “apology” to them for the residential school terror. They did their own kind of healing when they entered a Catholic church and stripped the local priest of his vestments and told him to get off their land. He ran out the front door of the church, and he’s never come back since then.

That kind of action has always been our only real safeguard against the likes of you, Steve, and the monsters in robes (a few old men in gold dresses) who prey on our children. My ancestor Philip Annett knew that when he picked up his musket in December of 1837, and marched through the Ontario snow to join with other farmers when they tried to overthrow the clique of bishops and bankers that ran Canada for their own private profit.

We may have lost that battle, but we’re patient. We learn from our mistakes, and we know you now for what you are. And our arm is strong, and reaches far. It must do so, for our children’s lives are at stake, and our future. So I won’t bother asking the bought and paid for “Members of Parliament,” who are the bonded servants of a foreign ruler and another criminal called “the Crown of England,” to do something about your funding of child killers. Instead, we’re turning you off at the source. No more taxes. No more votes. We need a new deal, altogether.

A Canadian clergyman, Kevin Annett has for nearly twenty years led the movement to bring to light and prosecute atrocities in Christian “Indian residential schools”, and win justice for survivors. Expelled in 1995 from his former United Church of Canada for exposing murders in that church’s Indian residential schools, and persecuted and blacklisted for his efforts, Kevin is now an award-winning film maker, author, social activist and public lecturer who works with victims of church violence and genocide all over the world. In 2009, he helped to establish the five-nation International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State, which is seeking to indict church and government leaders for crimes against humanity.

As a result of Kevin’s tireless efforts on behalf of native people, the Canadian government was forced to issue a public “apology” and reparations program concerning Indian residential schools, in July of 2008. In giving him the name Eagle Strong Voice in 2007, Anishinabe elder Louis Daniels declared, “Kevin Annett is doing what few of his people have done, and that is to speak about the crimes they committed against many of our nations and their children. He has earned a place forever in our hearts and history. He is a brave and prophetic man. I ask everyone to welcome him and heed his voice.” And scholar Noam Chomsky wrote in 2006, “Kevin Annett is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many of those who have received it.”