— City of Dartmouth

“Ideal for work and play“. Much of Dartmouth Township, including Dartmouth Town, as it was in 1886.

Welcome to the City of Dartmouth. That which is time out of mind, ab immemorabili, is easily lost forever, who profits when this becomes the case? “History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes” as the famous old saying goes, and it’s apparent when one digs into Nova Scotia’s history that so much of what’s happening today hearkens back plainly to the convulsions of the past.

The impetus for this site was “amalgamation“, a city county merger accomplished by fiat (a “municipal coup“) that seems to have been designed to sever any connection to our legal heritage in the form of the Township of Dartmouth, in a jurisdiction much older than the country it now finds itself in. What occurred to Dartmouth and other incorporated Cities in Nova Scotia in the 1990s was achieved without any plebiscite or legal process to which they were previously accustomed. What are the conditions under which a body corporate and a body politic can be unilaterally dissolved? If “the people” are not the source of the legitimacy of government, who or what is?

“Amalgamation” was part of a pattern of actions: The imposition of the BNA in 1867, the dissolution of Nova Scotia’s Senate (the Legislative Council) in 1928 and the imposition of the paradoxically named “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” in 1982 — a trifecta that since 1982 alone has enabled the theft of our Cities, our local Courts and our Grand Jury – any substantial local control of our monopolistic “public health” infrastructure, and even our separate school sections with elected School Boards. These changes have completely upended Nova Scotia’s constitutional order, and for what reason beyond further entrenching the hegemony of the old “Province of Canada“, served so well by its initial usurpation in 1867, a process since redefined into a “confederation of consent”?

The fact that Nova Scotia’s constitution remains unwritten has only helped facilitate these endless confiscations — authoritarian, totalitarian actions conducted by those who use their involvement in an alleged “democratic” process as a pretense for their Machiavellian maneuvers. Welcome to “Canadian democracy“, population you. Intersectionality and critical theory are the tools by which this regime of forever divide and conquer is achieved, so much so they’re constitutionally enshrined as “equity seeking groups” without mention of “the people” as a whole. Eradication of the individual appears to be the paramount goal of the Canadian state.

These regular infringements on our institutional arrangements, our identity and certainly our dignity, that which is claimed to be consensual, involve a never ending mendacity on behalf of crown adjacents and those who I must assume profit handsomely from the monopolies and fiefdoms afforded to them by this regime. There’s much more to this story than just your garden variety corruption. Friendship grows, but it retreats, it withers and it dies under a Canadian ruling caste intent on instituting a regression — back to what, perhaps we are finding out currently.

It’s been eye-opening for me to see how much of Nova Scotia’s history and constitutional framework have been reinterpreted and reorganized through a postmodern, neo-marxist lens — hence my reliance on so many older sources and analysis, to help escape modern academic ideological capture, with which to come to an understanding. By no means is this meant to be a complete picture, but hopefully some of this cancelled history serves to reframe the pieces since disappeared. How can one pretend to have perspective based on the facts, if at so many levels, a contrived political narrative has blunted the intricacies and the nuance, later presenting that which is taken for granted as pristine, the shoulder over which is encoded the next building block of knowledge?

Don’t get me wrong, different viewpoints are vital, I enjoy studying the experiences of different groups which is why you’ll find several articles here with such an aim — even if intersectionality groups are in many cases a fiction to begin with, a totalitarian affect, no group can ever be a monolith of thought or experience. It shouldn’t be fashionable to analyze the past through a modern moral framework in order to cancel and erase out of political expediency or to use the past as a cudgel to destroy the potential of the individual in the present in favor of these totalizing group identities.

Yes, our institutions were certainly imperfect, much like the people who participated in them, though not usually as a result of the wishes of a people that required royal assent — which perhaps still do, regardless of the assertions of “stability” by a class of crown adherents in a self serving supranational gentleman’s handshake club — yes, what we take as a moral given now hasn’t been static throughout history. The people nonetheless exercised some iota of control at the lowest levels, for better or worse. The ability to create something better from the bottom up in Nova Scotia was largely thanks to the efforts of Joseph Howe and his reforming compatriots during our “paper revolution“, advances largely clawed back a few decades later with the BNA.

There are aspects of the past that reconfirm a potential, hints here and there of a kind of unanimity between friends, regardless of creed, class or color. Nascent beginnings of something better through the levelling principles of republicanism, that which has been demonized since the lead up to the American revolution by the most conniving and impositional class of all, crown adherents.

If the history of Dartmouth and Nova Scotia writ large have proven anything to me, it is the very real danger of backsliding — democratic, economic, institutional, constitutional or otherwise — which would be the standard for all without the American revolution. Various states of unfreedom under an omnipotent crown — whose heirs and successors insist is the representative of God on Earth — was the best that could be hoped for before it, a totalitarian state of affairs which seems to have continued on in the collection of subsumed colonies to America’s north.

Nova Scotia’s ancient form and its constitutional roots point to a past that’s been buried and a potential that’s been stymied, at every turn — for what reason I’m not sure, though occasionally you will see me hazard an opinion. I hope you’ll enjoy what’s shared here, primarily an effort to keep the memory of my hometown alive. Amicitia Crescimus, indeed — but perhaps most importantly, to which I’m sure Joseph Howe would agree now, looking back: Sic Semper Tyrannis.