Liberal platitudes

I’ve heard quite a lot of excuses for Liberal behaviour recently, as many of my fellow Ontarians are evidently screwing their courage to the Liberal-voting place once again. As I believe Richmal Crompton said, it is a great gift to be able to lie so as to deceive others, and a greater gift to be able to lie as to deceive oneself. Evidently a lot of Liberals possess the latter gift, or are trying to acquire it.

“Not all of the money was stolen.”

I think I’ve even heard this from Paul Martin himself. If a burglar broke into your home and stole your television, but not your VCR, would that excuse him? More to the point, should it convince you to allow him into your home again, unattended? That is, after all, what the re-election of a Liberal government would entail.

“It was done with the best of intentions.”

The good in suppressing Quebecois separatism and promoting national unity is highly subjective at best. Even if it were considered universally good, would that be an excuse? Let’s say you gave $500 to the Red Cross for Tsunami relief, the Red Cross worker you gave it to pocketed $250 and bought himself an iPod, and only the balance actually went to Tsunami relief. Because $250 did eventually go to a good cause, does that excuse the theft of the other $250?

Now consider that Canadian national unity is not nearly so accepted as a worthy cause as Tsunami relief. Many in the West and in Quebec think it is actually an evil. So to construct a proper analogy, let’s say that the government took $500 of your money without your consent (bearing in mind that about three-quarters of the electorate never consented to be governed by the Liberal Party) and gave it to the Red Cross worker, who pocketed half and bought himself an iPod, and then gave the remainder to, say, stem-cell research, abortion clinics, propping up the House of Saud for Middle Eastern stability, or to Cuba so that poor people could be fed (and by “poor people” we mean “Castro’s Gestapo” and by “fed” we mean “supplied with torture instruments”).

“They’ve done a good job as government so far. This is just a small glitch – it’s insufficient reason to throw out a government that overall has been good for Canada.”

Quite how good the Liberal government has been is highly debatable. The economy is not doing so well. Their provincial counterparts in Ontario have succeeded in pulling off the stunning feat of raising taxes to produce declining revenues (and if either Ronald Reagan or Ibn Khaldun were alive, they could tell you how obvious that result was), while still managing to cut services. Medicare is a complete mess, and neither Romanow, nor Kirby, nor anyone else for that matter believes that it can survive without drastic changes. The Canadian armed forces are a joke, and Canada relies for defence upon our neighbour to the south, whom the Liberal government has continually found new ways to annoy and insult. And so forth.

But that is really irrelevant. When a government begins to steal from the people and believe it can and should get away with it, that government is corrupt and wrong, and should be removed at once. The people who stole the money evidently believed they could have and should have gotten away with it, and if Paul Martin’s address to the nation and continued white-knuckle grasp on power is any indication, that conviction goes all the way to the Prime Minister’s office. It is similar to the Clinton scandal. It does not particularly matter how good a steward of the American nation that Bill Clinton was, because when the time came that he felt he should perjure himself, lie to the electorate, sidestep due process and the law, and spend the hours he was supposed to be running the country in sexual dalliances, his entire Presidency was cast into disrepute.

So it is with the Liberal Party. All of their past achievements are now cast under the stinking cloud of corruption, of theft, and of lies. Since they are still in power, who knows what other scandals remain undiscovered? They have already proven they are completely unworthy of any kind of trust for full disclosure.

“They are still the best party to run the country. It can’t be run by Alberta or Quebec.”

For one thing, it’s pretty arguable that the country is already run by Quebec. Liberal leaders all seem to be Quebecois, or have close ties to Quebec, and government offices are dominated by Francophones. But apart from that almost specious point, this objection really highlights the faults in Canada as a nation. The West and Quebec clearly reject government by Ontario in principle, and Ontario similarly rejects Western and Quebecois politics. The fact that Quebec and Alberta have so firmly rejected the Liberals is proof that the “unifying party” argument is fallacious, that the Liberals are not in any kind of unifying position, and that when Ontarians play the “national unity” card, what they really mean is that the country should be united by Ontario, with a relationship less like confederacy and more like empire. Once again, that old Liberal adage comes forward: Alberta and Quebec should just lie down and take it, because Ontario knows what’s best for them better than they do.