IN order to be my most admired politician, Ujjal Dosanjh had to overcome two formidable obstacles.
One, he was a New Democrat. Two, he became a Liberal.
Aw, mostly just kiddin'. He was around in the Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark eras, and after serving as premier was an MP under Jean Chrétien. I liked all three personally, their policies not so much. But Dosanjh gets the palm for guts and straight-up candour like few other politicians.
Guts: A Sikh, he openly opposed the Sikh terrorists fighting the battle on Canadian soil for a Khalistan homeland in India. He paid a price, almost with his life. He was viciously attacked in a parking lot.
Candour: He has no truck or trade with the wet-eyed, grovelling politicians, bureaucrats and wind-testing media, in short the entire elite classes, apologizing for Canada's real or trumped-up abuses of non-white people decades ago.
Especially for the supposed abuse du jour: the Chinese head tax that ended 90 years ago, for which Premier Christy Clark is being goaded to apologize, fast - Ottawa having bowed its contrite head years ago.
Was the tax discriminatory? Definitely. Were immigration laws racist? Unquestionably. A much-quoted novel puts the core of such matters brilliantly: "The past is another country. They do things differently there." Right. The smugness of exporting today's attitudes (and attitudinizing) to the past is ridiculous.
Racial tolerance is a very recent invention. What shameless hypocrites we are to throw past Canadians, unsummoned witnesses whose mouths are stuffed with the dust of the grave, before the kangaroo court of fickle public opinion - and how blind not to perceive that the future similarly will harshly judge our current "truths."
Dosanjh scorns the apologists. Not so difficult after retirement from politics? Second thoughts, even a road-to-Damascus total conversion, aren't unusual after escaping the lions in the political arena. Martyn Brown, top and mostly inaccessible aide to Gordon Campbell, is now retooling himself as a detached commentator - slamming Christy Clark.
Dosanjh bluntly calls "phony" these apologies for claimed historical injustices. But he's different. He doesn't spare himself.
He acknowledges personal responsibility. Regarding the genuflecting toward any ethnic group claiming past grievances, Dosanjh declares: "No emperor has any clothes in this business." More: He regrets his own demand in the B.C. legislature that Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government apologize for the head tax.
Let me wind this up. No matter what professional Chinese like Victor Wong say, the Chinese immigrants who came to Canada, especially to do the heavy lifting of the 1885 transcontinental railroad, knew the score. They weren't forced. They came to improve their lot because they were better paid and treated than in cruel, utterly (and still) undemocratic China.
Here's a home truth: Not one immigrant ever came here to "build Canada." That's speechifying, Canada Day BS. Each came out of flat self-interest. My forefathers, yours. Cut the baloney.
And by and large we have, every colour, every nationality, prospered like hell. Stop head-bowing, knee-bending, trashing your ancestors from heights of moral superiority - the arrogance of the present.
. . .
Tom Flanagan permanently became a pariah for his stupid and naïve words about child pornography and was instantly dropped from all his employment and positions.
What then about the long-established North American Man/Boy Love Association, whose creepy name clearly states its reprehensible mission - identified with the disgusting phrase "sex before eight or else it's too late," its goal "to end the oppression of men and boys who have mutually consensual relationships."
Shouldn't NAMBLA have been prosecuted and closed down decades ago for advocacy of actual criminal acts, seduction of under-age boys, not just a damn fool observation like Flanagan's?
. . .
Karen Selick may be Canada's smartest lawyer. I've never met a wiser. Her March 6 Vancouver Sun take on the Supreme Court of Canada's upholding of a Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal in the case of homosexuality-hating William Whatcott is a must-read.
Selick called the ruling "hopelessly subjective . . . no one knows ahead of time whether their words are legal or not." Then she scored a shrewd point.
The Supremes ordered Whatcott to pay all costs - ignoring that he was partly triumphant, because the judges struck down the Saskatchewan code's "vague prohibition on speech that 'ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity of' individuals" as below the threshold of exposing them to hatred.
The court's stiffing Whatcott with the full legal bill "under circumstances of divided results (appear) purely spiteful . . . unworthy of our highest court," Selick wrote.
It's obvious why. The court is playing to the powerful New Intolerance. It's open season on Christians who openly declare homosexuality a sin. As Will Rogers drily remarked: "The Supreme Court reads the newspapers." Rogers meant the U.S. one, but of course ours is just as political(ly correct) as theirs ever was.
