By Arthur Weinreb
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
There was a lot of talk during that last couple of federal elections about the "hidden agenda" of the Conservative Party. This was most notable during the 2004 election when Paul Martin was always warning Canadians about those evil Conservatives: about how, once elected, they would throw women who sought abortions into jail along with all gays and lesbians. During the 2005-06 campaign, the rhetoric was toned down a bit with the warning that if the Conservatives took power we would see soldiers on the streets; with guns; in cities; in Canada. After a couple of years with Paul at the helm, Canadians realized that even a secret agenda was better than no agenda at all and elected Stephen Harper and the Tories to power.
If in fact the Conservatives do have a hidden agenda (and we have yet to see any of these doom and gloom predictions come true) surely they can't be the only political party to have one. The Bloc has a hidden agenda. The truth is that they really don't want their own country; they just want to get the rest of Canada to keeping the money flowing into La Belle Province while they threaten to separate if they don't get enough. Meanwhile, the Bloc MPs hang around Ottawa collecting their perks. As for the NDP; well, this is where the theory that secret agendas are the norm breaks down. If they do in fact have an agenda, not many Canadians are paying attention to it. Jack Layton, the guy who smugly tells anyone who will listen "what Canadians want" can't get 20 per cent of Canadians to vote for his party. To the extent that only a few Canadians pay any attention to them, their actual agenda might as well be secret.
The Liberals have a secret agenda that was unceremoniously leaked last week in a Toronto Sun column written by former high profile Liberal MP and Deputy Prime Minister, Sheila Copps.
Writing about how the Americans treated and reacted to the recent death of Gerald Ford, Copps bemoaned the fact that Americans are more knowledgeable about their own history than Canadians are. She pointed out that every former president of the United States has his own library while Canada doesn't even have one library for prime ministers.
Copps then goes on to muse about how the lack of knowledge by Canadians of our own history might be a good thing. She writes:
Perhaps our ignorance of history is defensible. It keeps us from exhibiting the kind of triumphant tribalism that too often defines a nation. It also keeps us from being too cocksure about our collective identity.
There can be little doubt that this is the Liberal Party's hidden agenda. They want to destroy all notions of the country as a nation state. Canada should not be thought of as a real country because it was founded by that segment of society that it is perfectly permissible to discriminate against -- white males. We should play down the fact that we are a country because it will inevitably lead to tribalism. The Liberals are on a course to destroy whatever is left of our collective identity and culture by replacing it with multiculturalism where our culture consists of everyone else's culture (except that of Canadians). The immigrant who was landed in Canada yesterday is every bit as Canadian as those who fought for Canada during World War II when we were still a country. This is why Canada's foreign policy under Liberal governments is made not in Ottawa but in New York by the United Nations.
Writer Yann Martel was right when he described Canada as "the greatest hotel on earth" and he is far from alone in viewing the country in this light. Much of the opposition to Canada's commitment in Afghanistan is not because the purpose of the war is unjust or unnecessary or being badly executed as critics of the Iraq war focus on. The criticism results from the feeling that there is nothing about our "country" that is worth fighting for. The Taliban are looked at not as the enemy but simply immigrants to Canada that haven't decided to come here yet. To use Yann Martel's analogy, sending troops to fight in Afghanistan is like putting young men and women in harm's way to defend the Marriott.
The scary thing is that the Liberals, in their years in power, have come a long way in implementing their agenda. But contrary to what Sheila Copps wrote, ignorance should never be considered "defensible".
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