We are now in the final days of the federal election campaign and as predicted the race started to turn ugly after the Christmas break. The sinking and ever desperate Liberals found that they can't scare Canadians with Stephen Harper's "hidden agenda", the tactic that worked so well in 2004. Well, if you can't scare the squeamish among us, mainly Ontarians, with visions of gays and lesbians in concentration camps and women jailed for seeking abortions, you just have to scare them with something else. Now the Liberals are portraying Harper as being too close to those "damn american bastards". The Conservative Party leader is being portrayed as being everything from George W. Bush's newest best friend to a pawn of the Republicans and right wing american think tanks.
It is ironic then that in a country where anti-americanism plays so well and where so many Canadians love to define their country by what it isn't--the United States of america--we are now looking to an american in the hopes of stemming the increase in gun violence that is now plaguing Toronto and other Canadian cities.
Reverend Eugene Rivers, an american, was invited to spend a few days in Toronto by Reverend Don Meredith and the GTa Faith alliance. Rivers was a key player in the so-called "Boston Miracle" that saw the murder rate in that city drop from 150 murders in 1990 to 31 in 1999. The Boston clergyman advocates a combination of tough law enforcement together with solving social programs. Rivers told a Toronto audience that the black community, including religious leaders and parents need to be involved in order to stop the mostly black-on-black crime that is occurring on the streets of Canada's largest city.
The reality is that Rev. Rivers is not really saying anything that hasn't been said before by some members of Toronto's black community. Yet when the american pastor expounds on his ideas, he is treated as Canada's only hope for solving the runaway problem of violent gun crime.
Eugene Rivers has what Canadians do not have--he has american values, which we all know are different than Canadian values. He has the view that taking action and being responsible is not something that is reserved to various levels of government.
We are constantly being told by Paul Martin what Canadian values are and they are, of course indistinguishable from Liberal Party values. Not the least of the differences between Canada and the United States is the Canadian statist notion that all of society's problems, no matter how big or how small, can only be solved by government. There is no role for either faith based groups or parents who are prevented as much as possible from playing any meaningful role in the upbringing of their offspring. Parents are expected turn their children over to state sponsored daycare programs as soon as possible so that the government can bring them up to become good citizens (ie. good Liberals). This is why the Liberals have no use for that pseudo-american Harper's notion that the concept of child care should contain a choice for parents.
Canadians are encouraged by our culture and all levels of government to passively play the role of a "victim" when problems such as black-on-black violence occur. The Prime Minister said as much after Toronto's Boxing Day shootings when, without knowing who the shooters were, declared that they were the true victims because they had been "excluded" from society. Whenever problems occur in the black community, our politicians sigh, cry, and then throw money at the problem in a desperate attempt to rid themselves of their white middle-class guilt.
Reverend Eugene Rivers does things differently. He thinks that the black community should take action. When a young black complained to him about police racially profiling blacks, Rivers told him to stop whining and start fighting. Instead of sitting around and feeling sorry for himself because he was descended from slaves, Rivers not only does take action but he works to get the black community to take responsibility for what goes on in their community and tries to make them responsible for their own children.
Even if Rev. Rivers is not as successful in Toronto as he was in Boston, we can learn a lot from him about working to solve problems rather than sitting back and waiting for the government to come up with the solution.
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