Chris Selley's Full Pundit: Nothing says Canada Day like "facile baloney"
A distinct lack of fireworks
Canada Day punditry is usually a bit of a bore. We wish we could say 2009 was different.
By far the most depressing Canada Day comment came from the Toronto Star’s Antonia Zerbisias: “Canada's proudest moment this century was when it refused to join George W. Bush in his attack on Iraq.” That is, our proudest 21st-century moment is something we didn’t do after weeks of hemming and hawing and sticking moistened fingers into the political wind. Relieved we didn’t go to Iraq, or happy, we’d understand, but proud? Surely even boring old Canada has done something better since the turn of the millennium.
John Ibbitson begins his Canada Day column with an anecdote proving Americans think little of Canadians except that we’re pathologically law-abiding, and then… whoops, no, that is the column! They print blog posts in The Globe and Mail now, apparently.
Staying at the Globe for a little while, Preston Manning, bless his heart, implores Canadian politicians to get together over the summer and decide to reform Question Period so that it doesn’t distract from what, in his opinion anyway, is actually quite a productive period of Canadian governance. He also urges the media to reform its coverage such that it doesn’t dignify the more hideous aspects of our democracy. We give these two no-hope ideas a weary thumbs-up.
Lawrence Martin tries and fails to cram the following ideas into a single coherent column: that “there is, you might say, a Canadian in the White House”; that said “Canadian,” Barack Obama, is just terrific; that Obama’s and Janet Napolitano’s handling of the Canadian border has been most unfortunate; and that Canada needs to look beyond its relationship with the U.S. and embrace other markets.
And Jeffrey Simpson positively gushes about Michaëlle Jean, which is fair enough, but in defending her against those old, “pathetic” charges of separatist sympathies, he manages to cast Jean-Daniel Lafond as some kind of arch-federalist. That’s not fair enough; that’s just silly.
Briefly, on the matter of Canadian democracy, and well worth reading: the Globe’s editorial on Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, and the deplorable bipartisan consensus that he be muzzled; the Edmonton Journal’s editorial demanding political parties pay to distribute their “facile baloney” to voters, rather than disingenuously sending it out as taxpayer-funded “newsletters”; and the National Post’s editorial taking the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to the woodshed for its “silly, preposterously biased” study alleging Canadian Employment Insurance is an international embarrassment.
Duly noted
The Globe’s Margaret Wente thinks Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives have taken “exactly the wrong message” from John Tory’s demise—namely, that Red Toryism is dead, and that a return to Harris-era ideals will lead them to the promised land. “The 5,600 diehards who elected [Tim Hudak] as leader are the party's past,” she argues, and “the province’s past, too.” When circumstances allow Dalton McGuinty to be beaten, she believes they’ll be better off espousing the ideas of “multiethnic, culturally liberal Toronto” than those of “aging, small white towns like the one [Hudak] grew up in.”
For the record, we think Wente’s description of Hudak’s toothy grin (“alarmingly phony, … as if he’s about to devour Little Red Riding Hood”) beats Jim Coyle’s from a while back in the Star (“wolfish,” and “so alarmingly toothy it has men patting their wallets and women checking the buttons on their blouse”).
The Vancouver Sun’s Daphne Bramham explains just how young some female residents of Bountiful, B.C. were when Winston Blackmore added them to his harem, notes that it’s illegal to have sexual relations with anyone under 18 if you’re in a “position of trust or authority”—and ludicrous to consider God’s self-styled messenger in a backwards little village as anything but—and asks, not for the first time, why Blackmore hasn’t ever been charged with sexual exploitation. It is indeed baffling.
Theodore Dalrymple’s beautifully written and compassionate piece in the Globe on Michael Jackson’s death contains what we think would make a perfect epitaph: “If he had actually been a circus animal, he would have been better protected.” We fundamentally disagree with Dalrymple’s central premise, however, which is that Jackson’s oeuvre was insubstantial. The adult Jacko might have been more a hitmaker than an artist, but it says here people will still be listening to “I Want You Back” in 10,000 years.
And finally, in the Montreal Gazette, L. Ian MacDonald wonders why weird, whore-mongering hypocrites are so attracted to the governors’ offices of various American states.
National Post
chris.selley@gmail.com
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