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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 29, 2005
Oh Canada
The perspicacious reader will have noticed me treading water the last week -- with Land Rovers, yachts, and catfish for my topics -- as I puzzled over the stance I should take towards political developments in my benighted home and native land. A week ago Saturday I concluded, after a fortnight's disgrace in our House of Commons, that, "The dignity and decency of Canadian life had been leeching away, for so long, that we are now past writing any 'lament for a nation'. The Canada of which I was once so proud now sleeps with the worms."As I said, it is pointless to continue bemoaning something that is simply lost. Even a mother chimp will abandon the threadbare remains of her deceased babe, after dragging it around for a bit. A friend referred usefully to the "Montypythonization" of Canadian politics, perhaps a happier expression than my own, "Zimbabwefication". It was somehow suitable that everything finally turned on the defection of the bird-brained Belinda Stronach, without whose feckless ambition, some of the farce might have remained concealed. It was as if God wanted everyone with eyes to see, just what our ruling order is made of. Yet at my back I always hear that wonderful line from the Pythons' plague sketch: "I'm not dead yet!" Look around, after the disgusting things that have been done by Paul Martin to preserve himself in power -- and which Canadians have (in the main) told pollsters they will complacently tolerate. We notice that Canada is still here. The sun still rises on Cape Race, Nfld., and still sets somewhere beyond Victoria. Canada remains, as nearly 10 million square kilometres of partially inhabited wilderness, and there is no question that it still has a government. What I meant, was it no longer has a legitimate government. Things are hardly yet as bad here as they have become in Zimbabwe -- but only because we started from a better position, and Robert Mugabe has had more time than Messrs Chretién and Martin. I don't think this is rhetorical excess. I do not think, after so much more than a century of unfailing constitutional government, that people fully appreciate how little of our safety and prosperity depends on the writing and enforcement of laws, and how much on unspoken habits of mind and behaviour, without which the laws can have no effect. This is a problem across Europe, and in the U.S. as well -- the gradual extinction of those principles of honour that made our high civilization possible, and allowed civic freedom to so many. And in particular, no free legal and political order can long survive this loss. It decays, crumbles, and must be rebuilt. Everything must be rebuilt, eventually. As I've argued before, the Canadian corruption goes not only wider, but far deeper than what is being exposed through the Gomery Inquiry. We find the entire country is being held together by the bubblegum and string of Liberal Party impostures. And the rogues' final argument is: "You must vote for us, or else it will fall apart!" And that may be close to the true situation. It helps to explain why so many Canadians, outwardly in their right minds, would consider voting for the Grits again. (Alternatively, they are themselves indifferent to honour.) It is because they feel in their guts that only the Liberals could hold up the sham. Take away everything that has rotted, and the whole pathetic system will collapse. They may be right, that the Conservatives are unprepared for the huge task of renovation; that they can only do what the Liberals have done (and as Mulroney did), but with even less skill. They can only run wildly about, trying to buy off all the losers and whiners and frauds, at a constantly escalating price. They do not understand that the Liberals can no longer hold things together, either. They can hold power, but only in Ontario, and by direct purchase of the poorest regions elsewhere. Quebec, and the West, will openly rebel. And Ontario, as our premier now affirms, has tired of paying for all this nonsense. A kind of default separatism is growing, even here. Let me not prescribe, but predict. The rending will continue. The separatists of Quebec and Alberta will now pull harder, and with more reason, to escape the Canadian squalor. The shakedown that is coming is inevitable. But the question, whether a new Canada may emerge from the ruin of the old -- a kind of re-Confederation -- is too far ahead for anyone to answer. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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