Civilization can be fragile—don’t take it for granted
To the Expositor:
Re: ‘It is time for ‘Republican’ Harper to go,’ March 18, 2015, Page 4.
It’s easy to see the federal election scheduled for this coming October is not too far away.
The letters to the editor section in recent editions of the Expositor are rife with political partisanship. Over the next six months Canadians can expect to be fed a steady diet of True Grits, Chicken-Catch-A-Tory, and NDP Soup in our media, as I’ve said in these pages before.
At the end of last summer, it looked like Justin Trudeau and the Liberals already had the coming election in the bag. They were so far ahead in the polls—with still over a year to go—that the other two major parties couldn’t catch them for dust. Trudeau was the new Messiah, or some modern day Moses who would lead Canadians back to the promised land of a European-style social democracy, from whence they came during the glory years of his father’s reign. All we were really waiting for when the election itself rolled around next fall, was some biblical-like parting of the Red Sea.
Regrettably, Justin Trudeau seems to have suffered from that most ill fated of political misfortunes in recent months—he peaked too soon. With the war on terror, and foreign policy in general having taken centre stage, Justin’s polling numbers started doing their Titanic act. Now he has a real horse race on his hands. His groupies forget that Justin is facing the proverbial ‘war on two fronts’ in this election. He still has to face Mulcair and the NDP—especially in Quebec—not just Harper’s Conservatives. When both Mulcair and Harper turn their cannons on him in the election campaign, Mr. Trudeau will face a withering fire.
Gary Champagne writes in his letter published in the March 18, 2015 edition: “Canada was not meant to be just another star on the US flag.” That may well be so. However, neither was Canada intended to be yet another dinkey-dong European social democracy transplanted to this side of the Atlantic. Canadians beware: The Euro-wannabes that make up the higher echelons of both the Liberal and the NDP parties would like nothing better than to see our country transformed into a cookie-cutter replica of those European countries that are themselves not much more than a run down case of the blues. Trust me, there is nothing any North American country can learn from Europe except one thing: How not to do it.
Among a plethora of dispersions that Mr. Champagne casts against the Harper government is a rant against Bill C-51, the proposed new anti-terror legislation. He is of the belief that Harper is just fear-mongering.
Oh, is that right? What a coincidence that his letter was published in the March 20 edition of the Expositor. In only the next two days after that, here are just four major news items that occurred. First, a seventeen-year-old boy from Edmonton was charged under existing anti-terror laws for trying to run off and join ISIS. Secondly, the jury finally came back in on the Via Rail terror trial in Toronto. You know the outcome of that. Thirdly, the Islamist terrorists (or “extremists” as Barack Obama and the CBC prefer to call them, so as not to offend) attacked the world famous Bardo Museum in Tunisia, a small country in North Africa, leaving 21 innocent people dead. Fourthly, the small middle eastern country of Yemen—long a viper’s nest of Islamo-fascist terrorism—began its descent into civil war, with Al Qaeda waiting in the wings to pick over the carcass and set up its own government.
That’s just in two days. Fear mongering? I think not. The world wide terrorist threat is hardly a fabrication. It came home to our own soil last October with the attack right on Parliament Hill, and the death of another soldier over in Quebec. Canadians—like other people in the western world—should be afraid. They should be very afraid.
Mr. Champagne makes reference to the various groups and individuals who have come out against Bill C-5I. He mentions by name Louise Arbour, a well known Canadian jurist. I’ve got one up on him there. When this former judge of the Supreme Court of Canada was much younger—and I was too—she was my criminal law professor at that hallowed institution, the Osgoode Hall Law School. On a faculty not lacking in its fair share of left wing academics, Ms. Arbour was known to be one of the more left leaning among them.
The war on terror at the international level is just that—it’s a war. It’s objective should not be to “find those responsible and bring them to justice,” as British Prime Minister David Cameron angrily asserted a few months back after ‘Jihadi John’ beheaded one of his fellow countrymen on video and then broadcast it on the Internet. This struggle should only be treated as a law enforcement issue for policemen, and our law courts, if the terrorist activity occurs within our own borders. At an international level, it must be framed as a military operation to be carried out in conjunction with Canada’s coalition partners—about 60 of them now, not just Israel and the US—with the clear purpose of defeating and eliminating these terrorist organizations and the regimes who harbour them.
Civilization can be fragile. Don’t take it for granted. Islamist organizations like ISIS and Al Qaeda represent nothing short of a lapse into barbarism. These medievalists will drag the world back a thousand years if they are allowed to be successful. Considering what is at stake, Bill C-5I hardly seems like a radical approach, or something Canadians can’t live with.
Brad Middleton
Evansville
