How we got our country back

[Cariboo]

How we got our country back



Jonathan Kay, National Post Published: Saturday, December 26, 2009




'My country seems to be slipping away in front of my very eyes," former NDP campaign director Gerald Caplan wrote in a Dec. 4 op-ed for a Torontoarea newspaper. "Our proud identity, our cherished core values ... are being turned upside down. Gun control advocates are out, gun apologists are in. Preventing war is out, killing scumbags is in. Demonstrations for peace are out, demonstrations of a martial spirit are in. Thoughtful, restrained Canadianism is out, hand-on-heart Yankee-style patriotism is in."

I'll confess to experiencing a brief spasm of schadenfreude upon reading these words. Eleven years ago, when I joined the National Post editorial board, we also used to spend a lot of time whining about our country "slipping away."

The Liberals had been in power for five years, and seemed set to govern for another 50. Anti-Americanism was a "cherished core value" in the government caucus. The military was rusting out. At the UN, we voted aye to the annual parade of bigoted anti-Israel resolutions. Through the Court Challenges Program, Ottawa bribed litigious activists to lecture the rest of us about how racist and homophobic we were. Duck hunters were treated as public enemies, multiculturalism took precedence over assimilation and any mention of God was taboo.

That's the place Gerald Caplan says is "slipping away." He's right. Good riddance.

It's odd being a Canadian conservative these days. Because the Liberals were in power for so long, and because Stephen Harper still doesn't have a majority, we spend our days in silent fear that all the Tories' reforms comprise a kind of mirage -- that we'll wake up tomorrow with the Liberals back to power, and everything reversed in an instant. Most of us haven't allowed ourselves to sit back and appreciate the very real changes that have taken place since Jean Chretien left the stage.

My big idea as the decade comes to an end ... well, it's more of a commendation: Take a bow, Canadian conservatives. You got your country back.

The roll of honour starts, of course, with Stephen Harper. I wrote a column five years ago arguing that Harper was too cranky to lead Canada's conservative movement. (Scott Brison, I argued in a separate piece, was the man for the job. This explains why I don't write about politics much.) Which is to say, I massively underestimated our current Prime Minister -- just as everyone else did.

We can argue all day about the extent of Harper's fidelity to small-c conservative values. But overall, he provided the conservative movement with something absolutely indispensable: ruthless professionalism. Without that, nothing else matters. As the Reform Party demonstrated, voters can smell amateurism.

The supporting-actor award goes to Jason Kenney. If you told me 10 years ago that a religious, unapologetic, hardcore conservative like our current Citizenship Minister would have a prominent role in government, I wouldn't have believed you. But there he is, doing his thing. And in today's Canada, he gets away with it.

Last month, Kenney released a new citizenship guide for immigrants -- a document that symbolizes, more than anything else, how much Ottawa has changed over the last decade. It contained this line: "Canada's openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, 'honour killings,' female genital mutilation or other gender-based violence. Those guilty of these crimes are severely punished under Canada's criminal laws."

That's something perfectly obvious to all of us. Yet until Kenney came around, no one in government dared say it -- especially to immigrants, whom the Liberals so desperately courted at election time.

For that matter, who before Kenney would have had the guts to take on a Hamas-apologist British MP on the public airwaves? Or to trumpet a cutoff in Canadian funding to an anti-Israel charity -- and to have the balls to do it ... in Israel? Every successful political movement needs a disciplinarian. But it also needs a badass -- a guy with the guts to expand the range of acceptable political speech and gestures, for the benefit of everyone else in the movement, both inside and outside the government.

But it wasn't just Tories who did the heavy lifting in winning our country back. One of the names high up on the honour roll turns out to be -- yes --a Liberal.

Paul Martin will forever be known primarily as the guy who fumbled Jean Chretien's dynasty away to Stephen Harper. But if there were more justice in the world -- or at least among pundits -- he would get his due for making the single most momentous prime ministerial decision of the decade: sending a Canadian combat mission to Kandahar in 2005.

At the time, it hardly seemed epic: Most Canadians didn't know Kandahar from Kunduz. But the military wonks immediately could tell this was a game-changer. Putting our troops in Kandahar, at the ideological and political centre of Taliban territory, meant the Liberals were shedding decades of peacekeeper posturing, and were putting the country on a very real war footing.

"We're not the public service of Canada ... Our job is to be able to kill people," said Rick Hillier, another man who deserves credit for changing this country. The then-chief of the Defence Staff described the Taliban as "detestable murderers and scumbags" -- words that made men like Caplan whimper and run around in little circles. In the old Canada, one didn't say such things. To speak plainly about evil wasn't -- what was Caplan's word? -- sufficiently "restrained."

Martin didn't throw a dart at a map of Afghanistan. He fought for Kandahar in the face of U.S. skepticism -- even though he knew it would mean body bags, and even though he probably could have landed the Canadian Forces a relatively cushy Euro-style sentry-duty assignment in the northern part of the country.

Our deployment set the stage for many of the other, seemingly unrelated, changes in Canadian policy and politics that followed in the latter part of the decade. A nation at war doesn't think about itself in the same way as a nation at peace. We got more respect in foreign capitals. We began to take care of our military. We even started to treat our country's identity and history more seriously.

Having an army in the field has that effect on a nation--even if its citizens don't all support or understand the underlying conflict.

Instinctively, Canadians began to draw a connection between the ideology animating our Taliban enemies, and the extremism and terror-apologism being preached in some communities here at home. We strengthened our alliances with other nations fighting radical Islam. And we stopped talking out of both sides of our mouths when it came to groups that used terrorism in other parts of the world, such as the Tamil Tigers. During the Gaza war that began in 2008 and the Sri Lankan conflict in spring 2009, both Harper and Michael Ignatieff lined up solidly against the terrorists. One heard no Chretienera nonsense from either leader about being an "honest broker." Even the NDP learned to shut up its more radical apologists.

Obviously, Paul Martin didn't accomplish all this himself, having left office in 2006. But he laid the groundwork for it with his Kandahar deployment.

If you're a conservative, or someone who just happens to be proud that we have an army pulling its weight in the war on terrorism, remember this the next time someone emits the usual dinner-party tittering about "Mr. Dithers."

jkay@nationalpost.com


http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/...bf14b58df5&p=1

[montana]

I can't disagree with Caplan. My thoughts on the rest aren't printable.
And I like your new avatar!

[the rifleman]

Good article Boo, thanks for posting it.