April 2004
by Barry Stagg
Stephen Harper is 44 years old, born April 20, 1959 in Toronto. Harper is Leader of the Opposition but he was just two years old when Pierre Trudeau became a law professor at the University of Montreal. The nine year old Harper gambolled while Trudeau became the anointed Liberal prime minister in 1968. Yet, in these seemingly callow chronological circumstances, Harper stands poised to create a watershed that will flood the present flotsam and jetsam of the Trudeau era into a much deserved oblivion.
The Martin Liberal regime, like its ostensible alter ego, the Chretien cabal, is a simple political function of the Trudeau template. The convenient vacuity concerning the cost of governing, the fatuous provincialism regarding international relations and a smug sophomoric moral superiority toward the great and powerful nation to the south are all products of the political mix of ruthless dilettantism that Trudeau brought to Ottawa.
In Stephen Harper's lifetime, Canada has gone from being a growing and reasonably robust middle power to a hollowed-out dwarf star of a country. We pretentiously exude the neutralist airs of perennial European bystanders. But where Switzerland and Sweden evolved to their stances over centuries of tough history, Canada has taken this attitude off the retail shelf, not unlike one of Trudeau's lapel roses from the exotic times of 1968.
One Canadian malaise that Harper must cure is represented by the frequent characterization of Canada's already grossly negligent national security measures as being sufficiently oppressive to human rights so as to call for relaxation of the existing sieve of rules and politically correct exemptions, courtesies and omissions.
The Keystone Kops routine for refugee claims made at the Toronto airport virtually gives Osama Bin Laden, armed with a shave and a fake passport, the inalienable right to show up at Pearson Airport, claim refugee status and, in the span of an ordinary working day, be released free into the Ontario night with much less obligation to the state than your average wife-beating suspect. The self-confessed mass murderer of September 11, 2001 would not even see bail court or the inside of a prison. His lot would be to vanish into the polyethnic void of Toronto, catapulted there by the manic delusions of a Liberal government, hell-bent to turn terrorists loose rather than offend the self-servingly delicate sensibilities of any number of agitated special interest groups.
On April 6, 2004 Rex Murphy, the wise conscience of this country, bluntly condemned the attack on the United Talmud Torah school in Montreal as a specific and hateful act of Anti-Semitism. He upbraided the prime minister for generalizing about the attack and obscuring its rank standing as an act of hatred against Jews.The CBC's finest journalist understands the corrosive and debilitating effects of smug avoidance of the raw hatreds so blatant in this fire bombing. Ignorance masks the same gross negligence, selfishness and pandering to racists that caused Canada, in the days of the Holocaust, to turn away Jewish refugees, a sordid activity so ably recorded in Irving Abella's fine book, "None Is To Many"
The country seemingly must submit it and us to immolation, a kind of self-sacrifice and self-destruction by terrorist proxy. This is the horrible price the Liberals would have us pay for fashionable egalitarianism and altruism gone stark raving mad.
It seems that some tired Babyboomers, particularly the early ones, born in the relative comforts of war-free Canada in the early 1940's, are so thoroughly self-absorbed that in 2004 only their obsessions with civil rights and public health care keep them going. If younger Canadians, like Stephen Harper, still raising children and building lives for their families, insist on rational national security and a basic element of public thrift, the Boomers, in their incarnation as the "Martin Team", seek to defer all of this messiness in favour of the delusional comforts of political correctness and blithe ignorance.
The political androgyny of the Liberals is now their greatest weakness, a terminal one perhaps, when once it was a narcotic attraction for the young careerists of post-war Canada. No more will Canadians accept ridiculous Liberal explanations of rampant governmemt graft while the security of the nation descends into the realm of deadly farce.
The hard and nasty reality for Liberal Apparatchiks- servile servants or portentous executives- is that the Canadian public is having none of that drivel about rogue bureaucrats and ostensible unity war emergencies. This revelation of Liberal corruption is end of cycle material with the transformation of Paul Martin into Kim Campbell's older brother nearly complete. All of the Martinite squirming seems eerily comparable to the last days of the doomed Kim Campbell government, where process, routine and bare-faced careerism swamped any vestige of Canadian common sense. Retreads, second stringers and mediocrities are given charge of the foundering ship of state as the voters grimly count the days before the next election.
This year, Stephen Harper, perhaps by happenstance, is poised to do what Jean Chretien was destined to accomplish in 1993: preside over Canadian's annihilation of a major political party, then the PC's, now the stultified Liberals.
Two political dinosaurs dispatched by Canadian voters in the space of little more than a decade are testimony to the collective wisdom of the Canadian crowd and perhaps as significantly, to the renewal capacity of political parties, as the re-engendered Conservatives prepare to dispatch the now crumbling 1993 model of the Liberal colossus, here and now in 2004.
For both Chretien then and Stephen Harper now, the words of William Shakespeare, an ever full well of explanation, serve to define the moment: "Some are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them".
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