More Media Character Assassination of Stephen Harper
June 27, 2005 · By Tom Cerber
Via Neale News, Canadian Press continues to whore itself for the Liberals and for the urban liberals in its latest story on Stephen Harper’s criticism of the Liberal-Bloc-NDP coalition ramming through same-sex marriage.
According to the story:
The Conservative leader called into question the legitimacy of a law that’s expected to pass this week with help from the Bloc Quebecois. “Because it’s being passed with the support of the Bloc, I think it will lack legitimacy with most Canadians,” Harper said.
“The truth is most federalist MPs oppose this.”
Of course, the Liberals and the media have been painting Conservative-Bloc cooperation in April and May as a matter of the Conservatives in bed with the Bloc. However, we all know the rules of the game. You can’t criticize the Liberals for doing the same thing. That would be a no no. And so CP has quotes from the usual suspects feigning outrage that Harper would say something so preposterous.
As for Harper’s claim that “most federalist” MPs oppose it, he seems to be correct, depending on how many of his own caucus oppose it. 99 Conservatives, plus 30 Liberals who oppose SSM (including now Independent Pat O’Brien) = 129 federalist MPs. That leaves 105 Liberals and 19 NDPs plus Independent Carrolyn Parrish = 125 MPs who support SSM. Check out the numbers at marriagevote.ca.
David Koyzis, a political theorist at Redeemer College in Ancaster, Ontario, goes further than Harper and makes suggests some ways that Quebec’s departure would be a boon for what he calls “politcal pluralism” in Canada, which is currently getting choked by radical secularism:
However, thinking as a Christian who strongly believes in the public witness of the christian faith, I am now beginning to wonder whether the presence within Canada of a radically secularized Québec might not constitute a nearly insuperable obstacle to the progress of such a witness. Once an overwhelmingly Catholic province, this changed after 1960 as a result of the Révolution tranquille, the Quiet Revolution, which transformed the province virtually overnight, quickly emptying the pews, severely depressing its once high birthrate, ending the church’s hold on much of the province’s life and fuelling the flames of nationalism. Since then Canadians as a whole have been governed the vast majority of time by Quebeckers who are heirs of the Quiet Revolution and who have managed to put their stamp on the culture as a whole. Given that Québec has the second-highest population in Canada, this gives the province considerable clout at the federal level.
Up until recently I have thought it best to accommodate Québec to the extent possible within the current framework of confederation. It is with some sadness that I am coming to conclude that this may not be in the longterm best interest either of Québec itself or of the remainder of the country. If Canada is to have some chance of casting off the stranglehold of official secularism and embracing something like a principled pluralism, then it may have to find its way without la belle province.
Koyzis is on record for opposing separation, so his change of mind – and his reasons for his change of mind – are worth pondering closely.
His comments remind me of one a friend of mine made to me once. He observed that one can understand a great amount about Canadian politics in observing that a large number of its leaders are lapsed Catholics.
Here’s a past post at thepolitic.com on the media’s vilification of Stephen Harper.
UPDATE: Adam Daifallah explains the significance of this story appearing in CP.
I’d be interested in hearing you spell out exactly what you understand by that last comment.
Lyon: I think what my friend meant was that a lot of Liberals, whether or not practicing Catholic, have a strong Rouge streak in them. Historically, the Rouges were the Liberal sympathizers with the French Revolution in the eighteenth- and early ninteenth centuries who took on Catholic church power in Quebec. Jean Chretien used to joke that his grandfather had been excommunicated by the Catholic church on account of his Rouge inclinations. I’ve never been able to confirm that he was in fact excommunicated.