By Klaus Rohrich
Saturday, May 5, 2007
The recent witch-hunt involving Team Canada Captain Shane Doan is evidence that Canada is in serious trouble. Rather than dealing with some of the more pressing issues facing our nation, Parliament is busy attempting to ascertain whether the guy who is leading the Canadian hockey team in the world championship playoffs said bad things about a francophone hockey official in Montreal two years ago. I'd call that political correctness gone stark raving mad.
People like Giles Duceppe, Denis Corderre and Jack Layton are attempting to use the alleged slur to try to outdo each other and everyone else on the inclusivity scale, a device unique to Canada that's used to measure the commitment to political correctness among politicians. Not that anyone else cares if Doan was or wasn't critical of the aforementioned lineman or if it was in fact Doan or Ladislav Nagy, a player of Slovakian descent, who said the no-no. You see, if you're a politician in quest of face time with the national media, then trivialities such as guilt or innocence don't really matter, as what's really important here is the seriousness of the charge, not the evidence (or lack thereof) to support it.
This holds particularly true in cases where the wronged party is one of Canada's numerous aggrieved groups, such as Quebecers, aboriginals, women, gays, blacks, Muslims, etc. And to make the nature of the charge seem more serious, people like Layton even pull out the race card because they know that a person guilty of racism is considered much worse in Canada than one guilty of murder or genocide. (If you doubt this I have two names: Ernst Zundel and Desire Munyaneza. The former is a racist who was kicked out of Canada without a trail, while the latter is accused of genocide in his native Rwanda and currently on trial in Montreal. I'll lay three to one odds Munyaneza will not be deported even if found guilty, but I digress)
While it is a stretch to impute racism to someone critical of francophones, it doesn't really matter if you've whipped yourself into a politically correct frenzy and catch the faintest scent of blood. Being hot on the spoor of someone who offended one of Canada's sacred aggrieved presents a great opportunity to demonstrate righteous indignation, outrage and put on a holier-than-everyone-else demeanour.
This whole episode is an embarrassment for ordinary Canadians and highlights just how out of touch with reality and small minded our political classes really are. Canada is drowning in a sea of taxes as governments at all levels have adopted profligate spending as the guiding monetary policy. We have troops engaged in a conflict in Afghanistan and periodically a few are flown back home in coffins. Homegrown terrorists with plans to blow up parliament and decapitate the prime minister have been nabbed off the streets of one of Canada's major cities. And jobs are being exported to China as the business climate in Canada heads toward the deep freeze.
Yet the clowns in parliament are much more concerned with the conceit that the world cares about what Shane Doan may or may not have said and the Jack Layton/Denis Corderre thought police are out in full force looking for someone to lynch. Even if Shane Doan had said awful things about the French-speaking lineman in Montreal, he wouldn't be nearly the embarrassment to Canada that those who govern us have become.
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