The Toxic Right In Canada: Definitions, Locations, Characteristics. (Part Two: D

The Toxic Right political party of Stephen Harper/Stockwell Day/ Peter MacKay tries hard to call itself the Conservative Party, but the name doesn’t fit. All of its spokespeople are uncomfortable with it. Consider. You start a U.S. Republican Party in Canada. You steal the name of the traditional Canadian Conservative Party to try to gain legitimacy. Then what would you do? You’d try to make that theft look legitimate by referring to and quoting from the great Conservatives of Canada. And, if possible, you’d try to neutralize or embrace symbolic “traditional Progressive Conservatives” to prove your legitimacy. Joe Clark, as symbol, has “faded.” Handmaiden to Brian Mulroney for ten years in Cabinet, Clark didn’t look like a strong hope, but he could have been a focal point for resistance to the Toxic Right. Clark was neutralized. Easily. Early. The fly in the Toxic Right ointment is, of course, David Orchard. Signing a deal with him to prevent merger of the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance Party, Peter MacKay had hardly let his signature dry on the written agreement when he turned his pen into a dagger and sank it in David Orchard’s back. David Orchard hasn’t been neutralized. He hasn’t been embraced, either, unless the boa constrictor-stranglehold of the Stephen Harper/Stockwell Day/Peter Mackay Party can be called an embrace. Holding up money due to him, trying to ignore his existence, the Toxic Right Party even refused him (a member) observer status at the recent Montreal convention of the Party. Because the Party is so far from anything related to the traditional Canadian Progressive Conservative Party, it had to keep David Orchard away from the convention. He is living proof of the betrayal of traditional Canadian Conservative values. Orchard’s mere presence would not only have pointed to the blood on Peter MacKay’s hands. It would also have revealed the full-scale violence the new Right Party is doing to Canadian language, to meaning in Canada, and to Canadians who join the Party in good faith believing it is not “the U.S. Republican Party in Canada.” David Orchard is the flash-point of the Toxic Right Party in Canada. He is the constant reminder that its birth was made possible only by political murder – not something any of the core group wants advertised. In a way – unnoticed by many – Carolyn Parrish is a kind of David Orchard in the Liberal Party, except that the Liberal Party is much more complex than the Toxic Right Party of Harper/Day/MacKay. When John Manley decided to take on the David Frum role – toady and servant of U.S. interests – after his leadership chances failed, that was a very good sign. He had fawned on the U.S. from a multi-power Cabinet position, a position which, in other hands, could have made its holder a real leadership contender. The leadership race was sewn up, we know (by fair means and foul) to crown Paul Martin. (Except that no leadership is really ever “sewn up.”) Anyway, John Manley obviously couldn’t convince Liberal caucus members to defect his way. Partly that was because of the “Carolyn Parrish factor” – the number of Liberals who didn’t want a David Frum for federal Liberal leader. Those caucus members see something different in Paul Martin than many commentators see. They believe he can snake his way between Carolyn Parrish and John Manley – for those are the two extremes of the Liberal Party. The Toxic Right political party, by comparison, only has David Orchard – and then all the rest. Political homicide, for that party, is easy. Carolyn Parrish is not an exact parallel with Orchard because she is an MP and may well be re-elected. She has constituency and much wider support. In addition, she has silent allies in the Liberal caucus. They don’t support her, as a person, maybe, but they make clear to Paul Martin that agreeing to U.S. Missile Defense (for instance) is not on. If he is a jelly – as many commentators say he is – they help form a jelly-mould to give him a somewhat decent shape. Those of us who despise the vacillation of Liberaldom need to remember that Jean Chretien sold out at the Vancouver APEC meetings, aiding the violence done Canadians to please the murderous Indonesian dictator (and close friend of the U.S.A.). Jean Chretien, remember, praised the thug police who turned the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City into a Grade B Hollywood horror movie. Chretien had the chance, there, to give leadership and direction to the anti-globalization movement. Instead he betrayed it. He promised, before being elected, moreover, to gain key changes on “dumping” and “subsidy” definitions in the Free Trade Agreement – very important matters. But he collapsed from U.S. pressure. He was always, as well, a vengeful, pork-barrel politician (The Sponsorship Scandal). But not being a member of the Toxic Right, Chretien finally surfaced as a Canadian to refuse the Iraq War, to set in motion legislation actively disapproved by the U.S. on same-sex marriage, marijuana, and election spending. Swerving from under the umbrella of John Manley, he finished his term under the umbrella of Carolyn Parrish. Paul Martin believed he couldn’t remain under the Carolyn Parrish umbrella, and that she had to be disposed of to prove his friendship to the Bush administration. The National Post’s Toxic Right Diane Francis wanted Parrish driven (somehow) out of Parliament. (The Toxic Right never lets little things like democracy or parliamentary rights stand in the way of its goals. Paul Martin does.) Besides, he could only push Parrish so far without facing a backlash. Then there’s John Manley. He was not appointed by the Canadian government to the crack-pot, U.S.-formed, “secret” task force. As the Liberal Party’s David Frum he is a free agent. Though a few press commentators have said things about John Manley being the possible next leader of the Liberal Party, the chances are very slim. John Manley has nailed his colours to the mast, and his colours turn out to be the U.S. Stars and Stripes. Just, however, as Jean Charest turned himself, suddenly, from being a go-boy in the Mulroney cabinet to a Liberal who could win the premiership of Quebec, John Manley may be a very serious and strong contender as next leader of the political party presently headed by Stephen Harper. Manley would get Canadian corporate money, U.S. money from all directions, and he’d get the fawning devotion of present Toxic Right champions in Canada. The CanWest National Post would, doubtless, publish special editions to further his success. John Manley has gone far enough away from the centre of Canadian Liberalism to sign on formally with the Toxic Right in Canada. That group, now, has a party misnamed “Conservative.” And it has the dilemma of trying to use the great Canadian Conservatives of the past, by reference and quotation, to legitimize its existence. Whom do they quote? They can’t quote Brian Mulroney, of course, because a large portion of Canadians believe he is an embarrassing sell-out to the U.S.A. There are, however, real, great Conservatives in our history to be quoted. John A. Macdonald, Arthur Meighen, Robert Borden, John Diefenbaker, Donald Creighton, W. L. Morton, George Grant, Charles Taylor, and many others. They are there. But they are not quoted by the leading Toxic Right spokespeople – for two reasons. The first reason is the most embarrassing one and must be disposed of quickly. Toxic Right spokespeople don’t refer to and quote great Canadian Conservatives because the Toxic Right doesn’t know anything about them. The Toxic Right is profoundly ignorant about Canada’s history and traditions – even about Conservatism in Canada. The Toxic Right leadership people in Canada are like members of a wolf pack on an ice floe. They appear to have come from nowhere. They circle uneasily. They have no real connection with the surface they stand on. But there seems to be nowhere on shore where they belong either. So they howl and scan the shoreline for prey they can descend upon. To say, secondly, that if the Toxic Right people suddenly knew Canadian Conservative history they would refer to and quote great Conservative Canadians would be a mistake. For a simple reason. The toxic Right in Canada is a new thing. It is ignorant of Canadian history and traditions because it has contempt for them. When Stockwell Day was running a little school in Alberta, it is said he used pre-packaged education kits from the U.S. suitable for ignorant, chauvinistic, fundamentalist U.S. people. No one has said Day went to work to fashion course materials so his Canadian students could learn Canadian history and ideas. Why would he bother doing that? Toxic Canadians couldn’t, in fact, find anything in great Canadian Conservatives to quote. The two groups are so different that a Toxic Right Canadian quoting a great Canadian Conservative would be a total act of fraudulence. Besides, the great Canadian Conservatives don’t say any of the things the Toxic Right wants said. The market-economist, hyper-individualist, neo-liberal, annexationist beliefs of Canada’s Toxic Right push it light years away from the Canadian Conservatism from which it has stolen its name. In fact, the theft is only one of the major attacks by the Toxic Right upon the meaning of language in Canada. Real Conservatism in Canada is founded on a political philosophy which upholds the ideas of a democratic constitutional monarchy in a Parliament with two houses – Commons and Senate. Real Conservatism in Canada is nationalist, too, because the U.S. (not Britain) is a serious threat to Canadian independence – political, cultural, and economic. Real Canadian Conservatism is nationalist, also, because it believes history and tradition define the person and the community and help to create a whole entity that gives identity to the population and the society. The Toxic Right in Canada – the CanWest Media monopoly, and the Stephen Harper/Stockwell Day/Peter MacKay Right Party – reject the structure of Canada’s democratic Parliament, think Canadian history and traditions are nonsense, believe a collective identity in Canada doesn’t exist (believe that only hyper-individualism exists). And, finally, the Toxic Right in Canada sees no threat from the U.S.; on the contrary, it sees the U.S. as an ideal to be followed, to be integrated with, to merge with - and into - politically, culturally, economically. If Canadian Conservatism is what it has been for 150 years, then the party which presently calls itself the Conservative Party can only do so by a perversion of language, a purposeful distortion of history, and a calculated destruction of meaning. The relation of the Toxic Right in Canada to Canadian history and traditions is totally destructive. Destroying everything about Canadian Conservatism that had social responsibility and public leadership about it, members of the Canadian Toxic Right shrill like illiterate Yankees against any sense of public responsibility or social democratic policies. They shrill, in fact, as well, against Canadian values they believe (wrongly) are not Conservative, especially values that require community ownership, public openness, full accountability for corporate actions, progressive taxation to alleviate financial pressure on low earners, and the responsibility of private corporations to pay their share of national costs. Members of the Canadian Toxic Right, moreover, move more and more to fundamentalist belief – and fundamentalist belief in Canada is almost always belief U.S.–style, belief put through a screen that demands fealty to the U.S. as part of Christian (or other) fundamental faith. That is why Preston Manning, using a Canadian poet of the First World War, John MacCrae, and his poem “In Flanders Fields,” interpreted the poet’s soul to be wracked and unresting because Canada is not supporting the insane and militarily provocative U.S. Missile Shield plan. (Globe and Mail Mar 19 05 A17) Preston Manning’s fundamentalist religion sees U.S. policy – however demented and frantic – as the product of God’s Will, and so able to provide rest for the dead of Canadian wars if only the Canadian government will follow U.S. policy. If the idea seems ghoulish and mad, that is because it IS ghoulish and mad. The Toxic Right of Canada is, in fact, the U.S. Republican Party in Canada. The more it gains power in Canada, the more Canada will disappear into the United States. David Orchard is the SOS signal sent tirelessly to the Canadian people from the temple of traditional Progressive Conservatism in Canada. Carolyn Parrish expresses the outer, independentist limits of the Liberal Party and deserves the ongoing and unstinting public support of Canadians everywhere. John Manley is that strange, quixotic, bizarre political mutation that sprouts in all colonized countries when one of its people aches to be accepted by the imperialists and will do anything to gain acceptance. The type is dangerous. Manley’s inevitable path will lead him into the party of the Toxic Right. Stephen Harper, make room. And Paul Martin? What is to be said about Paul Martin? You, dear reader, write the final paragraph, here, on Paul Martin…. [You are permitted to write that the whole problem can be solved by voting for Jack Layton’s NDP in the next federal election.] [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on April 2, 2005]