By Jim Mosher
The left-wing bias that frequently tarnishes this page (www.interlakenews.ca) with its inflammatory rhetoric is an irritant in my right-tending craw.
The cackles of the Lefties and their minions grate on my free-thinking spirit. The Left’s façade of analysis is only exceeded by its facile arguments against modern thinkers like our sublime prime minister, Mr. Stephen Harper.
Many may accuse me of being a sycophant, a myrmidon, laying down at the feet of a man who should be exalted the world over — or, at the very least, in his own country.
I curry favour with no one nor can I anymore abide the puerile criticisms trotted out as thoughtful analysis by the never-weened Left. Rather — as a staunch Conservative and therefore, ipso facto, a deep thinker on all matters political — I must rail against the assaults from the Left.
Our justly beloved prime minister is not the Prince of Darkness. He has, instead, chosen to bring riches, right and light to a nation set on a course of endless navel gazing, a nation stalled in its quest for corporatist glory at the expense of those who dare to disagree.
When, after all, do Mr. Harper’s critics ever have a nice thing to say about him and his policies. Few seem to recall, for instance, the PM’s soul-wrenching rendition of “Imagine”, a Beatles song slavishly embraced by the Left as its clarion call to peace and justice.
Consider, also, the PM’s decision to offer no debate in the House of Commons about the Canada-China Foreign Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement (FIPPA). Think about it. What if the FIPPA had been open to debate by our elected parliamentarians?
Such a debate would have been dominated by the automatic-pilot naysayers whose cacophony in the House would have drowned out the sensible global economic policies of a man who cut his teeth as a policy wonk and expert in all things that involve other people’s well-developed numbers and theories.
Such a Commons debate would stall one of the best FIPPAs ever assembled in the bowels of unknown buildings in Ottawa by bureaucrats keenly aware of the PM’s vision.
Were we to leave economic policy to the NDP, we would be a nation of under-producers and cry-babies, mewling and puking at its mother’s bosom. We would be a union shop, unable to compete in a global marketplace.
The Left always assails our Darwinian approach to policy. But Charles Darwin, the great British botanist, proved that the survival of the fittest is key to growing a strong population and, by implication, a strong economy.
(We allow that there is compelling proof that evolution does not always proceed in a linear fashion, as witnessed by the well-proved theory of jumping genes and rapid, unanticipated change in the gene pool — change that is not entirely connected to Darwin’s seminal theory of survival of the fittest. That may suggest that Darwin has been misinterpreted, but let’s leave that aside ... because it’s really not my point anyway.)
And those milquetoast Lefties who revile our country’s greatest prime minister since Mackenzie King will also do a dog pile on the rabbit if the Government of Canada endorses a buyout of Calgary-based Nexen, one of the country’s largest energy companies and a prominent player in the development of our coveted tar sands.
They will conjoin the Canada-China FIPPA and the bid by China’s state-owned CNOOC to pay $15.1-billion for its buyout play on our natural resources.
There is no connection between the sale deal and the FIPPA. They, those indefatigable critics of our PM and his visionary policies, will crow about how you can’t have one without the other.
They will falsely claim that the FIPPA is a pretext to proceed with the Chinese state’s bid for Nexen. They will claim that Communist China will balk at their hard-won FIPPA if it does not get what it wants in the tar sands.
It’s ludicrous, of course. The Nexen deal is a separate process. It is entirely coincidental that the PM waited more than two weeks before tabling the Canada-China FIPPA in the House. That the investment agreement will be ratified in advance of a decision on the Nexen deal is one of those quirky things we all talked about when we were children.
We have to grow up, frankly.
Critics will also assert that we have no right to sign huge deals with a country that has an abysmal human rights record; a country that kills its citizens if they disagree with the Politburo of the Republic of China. A red herring if ever there was one.
Selkirk-Interlake MP James Bezan has said clearly that he strongly opposes the Nexen deal; that we should not be dealing with a state that executes its citizens and has among the worst human rights records in the world.
That noted, Mr. Bezan is a proponent of the Canada-China FIPPA, an agreement that he says will protect Canadian investors in that country.
The left will hang its hat on this apparent contradiction. But is it really a contradiction to say I hate China on the one hand but I’m okay with dealing with it at another, perhaps concealed, level of common interest? Of course not.
One can have different ideas simultaneously. (Recall British PM Neville Chamberlain who had no time for Adolf Hitler but famously placated the Nazi dictator with his policy of appeasement. It was a necessary move, one that would save the British from Hitler’s wrath for, oh, a month or two.)
Thankfully, the loud Left cannot destroy the most forward-charging federal government this country has seen for more than a century.
It is high time the Left allowed that the ship of state is better in the steady hand of a man who knows the tiller.
Sadly — at least for the minority of Canadians who handed Mr. Harper his majority government in May 2011 — the Left would sooner linger at the public teat, rather than develop the visionary policies we have seen under the leadership of our prescient PM.
(This satirical piece appears in the Nov. 7 edition of the Interlake Enterprise.)
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