By Beryl Wajsman
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Stphane Dion is a man of integrity and intellectual rigour. But the Liberal Party is certainly not characterized by these traits. and I am not writing here of adscam. For if it was simply that, then we would also need to focus on the billion dollar gun registry; the human resources boondoggle; Hewlett-Packard's $165 million overcharging of the Department of National Defense; retroactive tax-haven changes costing Canadians hundreds of millions of dollars and the abridgment of due process and abuse of state power to destroy enemies of the Party or its leaders.
What I am writing about here is the hypocrisy of the Liberal mantra. Balanced budgets; lower taxes; growing social programs; Kyoto; defense of the Charter and Canada's pride of place on the world stage. Throughout the Liberal convention we heard all this repeated time and time again. It was disheartening to hear Mr. Dion repeat some of these same old lyrics. If he is to put his own stamp of authenticity on Liberal direction he will have to put away this song sheet. For the sake of his legitimacy and for the sake of the country. Denial won't cut it anymore. It's not just a river in Egypt.
The past thirteen years of Liberal government has not made life easier or better or prouder for Canadians. The "biggest tax cuts" in Canadian history merely moved more of the burden from the top 3% of the population to the bottom 60%. The "balanced" budgets were mostly accomplished by the sleight of hand of moving pension liabilities to other ledgers and keeping unemployment insurance surpluses in government coffers instead of returning them to Canadians as even many Liberal MP's had urged before the last election. Canadians are working longer and for less. The Vanier Institute for the Family reported this year that one-third of Canadian households are below the poverty line. The Centre for Policy alternatives mirrored this tragedy in the general working population in a study that demonstrated that 50% of working Canadians are one paycheque away from the poorhouse.
The major reason for this crisis are our impossibly high tax rates in place because the Liberals hungrily became the subventors both of corporate welfare and cheap pork-barrel vote grabbing schemes to the point where they reached almost one-third of our federal budget over the past 13 years. The multicultural and social programs the Liberals enacted ostensibly for "the common good" were done in reality for no other reason than to have something for flyers in the next election. These programs have become restrictive of our rights as individuals and invade every aspect of our civil liberties and basic privacy. They are reflective of government by coercion and compulsion instead of by education and persuasion. They have resulted in the growth of government power through burgeoning bureaucracy. Power for its own sake. We do not cede our natural liberties to the state for more bureaucrats to exercise more control in order to help politicians hold a tighter electoral leash.
The Liberals love affair with Kyoto is perhaps its biggest sham. Greenhouse emissions have gone up 30% since Canada signed on - higher than in the US which didn't, - and has cost Canadian taxpayers $1.3 billion last year in purchases of Russia's emission credits. Kyoto is nothing more than a scam for emissions trading. The Tories Clean air act is certain to be more effective since the best science has determined that if all signatories to Kyoto met 100% of the targets it would only have a globally positive effect of 1/10 of 1%. and the Liberals know it. But Kyoto provides another opportunity for more bureaucrats which means more government power which means more control.
as for being the party of Charter protection, the recent Liberal record has been one of abuse of due process and state power. From Chrtien's attempt to destroy Franois Beaudoin, former president of the BDC, for not going along with his loan request for the auberge Grand-Mre, to Martin's star-chamber Gomery Commission running roughshod over sec.7 Charter protection rights in an effort to deflect from some of his questionable practices and destroy his political enemies, to the last Liberal justice bill that included oversight on internet telephony and e-mail records. This is not the party of Trudeau which sought to raise individual consequence and the sovereignty of our suffrage over the authority of state or collectivity.
as for our place in the world, Canada under the Liberals did not shoulder its fair share of the burden of engagement in relieving oppression to millions living in third world countries from which we benefit from cheap resources, human and material. Our military was reduced to dangerously low levels. Both Chrtien and Martin declined to celebrate the heroism of Canadian servicemen and women in Operation apollo. Canada refused to call Darfur a genocide. We had a hypocritical record on the Middle East refusing to stand with Israel, that region's only democracy. We even saw Prime Minister Martin call Libya's Muammar Khaddafi a man "with a philosophical; bent of mind" when he went to negotiate oil leases. The Liberals remain wedded to the false and bankrupt notions of peacekeeping rather than peacemaking all layered with the veneer of knee-jerk anti-americanism. Unlike Prime Minister Harper's foreign policies of courage and conscience, the Liberals defined Canada's role in the world more by what we were against than what we stood for. Canada ran between the raindrops.
Though the Liberal Party of Canada may have lost its relevance , the promise of industrial liberalism is still the last, best hope for the broad masses of Canadians struggling for better lives under the crushing burdens of rising taxes, contracting opportunity, invasive statism, failed bureaucracies and continued pandering to privilege and preference. But whether historic liberalism will be best exemplified by the large-L Liberal Party or the small-c Conservatives is yet to be determined.
Labels no longer matter. Centre-left, centre-right, sustainable development, are all meaningless to the vast majority of citizens searching for a voice and a vision that will address their problems other than in vague terms of techno-babble meant to offend no one. They are tired of leaders running between the raindrops. Tired of a society that dares not care. Tired of governments that can no longer tell right from wrong.
They are looking for someone to champion the cause of the promise that liberalism once held as the movement that would gentle our condition; temper exception with inclusion; turn the inequality of narrow circumstance into the equity of just consideration; and reward each citizen's labour with a full and fair share in the bounty of this land.
In the past two decades the Liberal Party has not kept the promise. It has succumbed to a fear of addressing these hard political and distributive issues that still plague us lest it step on the toes of a variety of vested interests. This submission has allowed political elites within the Party to cynically exploit inherent prejudices for partisan advantage paying no regard to the lasting damage inflicted on the commonweal. Before Stephen Harper's election the Liberal elites had left this nation bereft and abandoned drifting amidst what the prophet Isaiah called "…a legacy of withered grass…" Stphane Dion's surprising victory - apparently owing little to those elites and the machines they run - affords him the opportunity to end years of Liberal hypocrisy and go beyond the duplicity and deceipt of an agenda of statism and sustainability.
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