Barrel Strength

Robert Fowler’s address to the Liberal Party suggests that something has profoundly changed for the better in Canadian politics. The Conservatives are in charge of foreign policy, and we aren’t playing even-handedly between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East. To Robert Fowler, this is a disaster. To the rest of us, it is another example of how Canada is shifting fundamentally for the better, away from moral equivalence between good and evil.

Fowler said both major parties have been enticed by the allure of political gains within the Jewish community. He said it is a strategy that leads to an unproductive support for Israel and undermines Canada’s reputation as a trusted mediator in the Middle East.

 ”The scramble to lock up the Jewish vote in Canada meant selling out our widely admired and long-established reputation for fairness and justice,” Fowler said.

 ”As the globe has become smaller and meaner, Canadian governments have turned inward and adopted me-first stances across the international agenda,” he said.

 ”Canada’s reputation and proud international traditions have been diminished as a result.”

“A proud international tradition” of standing impartial as between Israel and Muslim aggression. That reminds me of George Jonas’ comment about how the cops now stand impartial between mobs trying to shut down conservatives and the conservative speakers, like they would stand impartial between a robbery in progress and the victim.

“The only group exhibiting Canadian-style restraint was the police. They cast a calm eye on the pandemonium, took a balanced view and chose no sides between people trying to exercise their rights and bullies trying to prevent them. Resisting any temptation to enforce the law, Ottawa’s finest exemplified Canada’s definition of moral leadership by observing neutrality between lawful and lawless.”

The news this past week has been replete with evidence of every form of spiritual rot in academe: Coulter at the University of Ottawa, and the 16 profs at the University of Saskabush who protested the scholarships for the children of those servicemen killed in the course of duty. But the rot in the Liberal party goes unnoticed, because it has been with us for so long. Robert Fowler is one of those Liberal top civil servants whose services we are now living without, and may it continue.