THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

There is no such thing as Islamofascism. Almost every Arab government is a boring bureaucratic despotism. They hardly have any ideology at all nowadays, other than the people on top staying on top. Most are looser than, say, Burma or Vietnam. Some are reasonably comfortable if you stay out of politics and don't expect an efficient sewer system (true of Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco). Bin Laden is something different—but only a tiny fraction of the Arab world has anything to do with him.
—Gregory Cochran

Kevin Michael Grace, 3.32 p.m., May 15, 2004►

CUTE CONTRACTIONS: THREAT OR MENACE?

The next person who talks of "illoed" when he could have just as easily said "illustrated" is now Amiri Baraka. You have been warned.

Kevin Michael Grace, 9.42 a.m., May 15, 2004►

A MAN WHO NEEDS SOME INTRODUCTION

Thanks to Paul Wells of Maclean's, who has sent about 400 visitors this way by linking to me on his blog. Wells refers to The Ambler as "right-leaning but admirably independent-minded," which is very kind of him. To return the compliment, I don't agree with Wells about much, but I have long admired his own independence.

It would please me greatly if some of this multitude of newcomers decided to make this website a habit. To this end, an introduction of sorts is in order. I am rather more than "right-leaning." But I hold no brief for the Conservative Party or any other party. (As strange as it may seem, there are many Canadian journalists that revel in toadying to the Republican Party.) Factionalism is not what journalism is about. Or rather not what it should be about. What visitors to my site get are my own opinions: about politics, Canadian and foreign, but on other subjects as well. You may find them singular or odd or or even frightening, but they are mine. I strike no Olympian poses.

Being unemployed and pretty much unemployable (in journalism, at least, in this country) has its advantages. Primary among them is that I am no forced to suck up to anyone. I no longer suffer angry letters to the editor demanding my head and anguished advice from editors suggesting I "tone down" my copy; neither do I fear that so-and-so will in future refuse to take my calls. 

For almost a decade I wrote for a magazine that was in the pocket of a political party. I could never see the point of this. Political parties employ thousands and spend millions of taxpayer's dollars in order to get their points across. They don't need and certainly don't deserve pro bono flacks. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?

Political pundits in this country delight in being...I was going to call them whores, but whores are paid directly by their clients. There is a kind of honour in prostitution. What is distinctly dishonourable, false, hypocritical, fraudulent, etc., is pretending to call 'em as you see 'em while slavishly following the party line—Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia (or Eurasia). 

Typical Canadian pundit roundtable: 

Bobby:  I am not surprised that my esteemed colleagues Jerry and Suzie would so mischaracterize the Slaughter of the Innocents Act. I am fully confident, however, that when Canadians learn the truth about this bill, as they will, they will understand that its provisions
(Liberal pundit) reaffirm Canada's commitment to ensuring that no child will be left behind.
(Conservative pundit) restore the pride of place Canada had in the world after World War II.
(NDP pundit) restore Canada's safety net after decades of a Liberal/Tory race to the bottom.
Jerry: Get real! (Snort, snicker.)
Suzie: Hellooo! (Guffaw, giggle.)
Host: Whew! As always, a real fireworks display from our panel. I only hope we've shed more light than heat on this pressing issue. Goodnight, and drive safely.

Why do people put up with this rubbish? By "people," I mean those that are interested in more than simply having their prejudices reconfirmed. It is for these "independent-minded" souls that The Ambler exists. 

Kevin Michael Grace, 6.31 p.m., May 14, 2004►

I WON’T HAVE BABS TO KICK AROUND ANYMORE

Reuters reports this morning that

Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper [has] suspended the weekly column of Barbara Amiel-Black after its parent, Hollinger International, filed a lawsuit accusing her and her husband Conrad Black of looting the company.

Martin Newland, the editor of Britain's top-selling broadsheet, "has decided to suspend the column until legal proceedings are completed," the paper said in a statement on Thursday.

Amiel-Black, famously quoted in a profile in Vogue magazine as admitting to an "extravagance that knows no bounds," is a defendant along with her husband and several of his business partners in a $1.25 billion amended lawsuit filed by Hollinger…last week.

The suit alleges they "used Hollinger as a cash cow to be milked of every possible drop of cash."

Good news, but how much better it would have been if the Telegraph had sacked Amiel for being loopy and unreadable and for finding excuses for torture.

Kevin Michael Grace, 11.39 a.m., May 13, 2004►

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Just because we're already halfway down the slippery slope doesn't mean we should just give up and roll to the very bottom.
—Rob Neyer

Kevin Michael Grace, 7.30 a.m., May 13, 2004►

THE ANTI-SOCIAL REGISTER

I sent the following letter to VDARE a week ago, but it doesn't seem as if they are going to use it, so I reproduce it here:

If you scroll down to the bottom of the [letters] archive, you will find that five years ago I wrote the first letter VDARE published and that I asked this question: "Have you ever noticed that the pro-immigration argument is always ultimately about food?" Well, it still is. On May 2, the New York Times published an interview of Samuel Huntington by Deborah Solomon. An excerpt:

Solomon: How, exactly, would you define the culture that you think immigrants need to embrace?

Huntington: We are talking about the core culture of this country, which derives from the founding settlers and includes the work ethic and individualism. It also includes the English language, English legal institutions, social institutions and customs.

Solomon: What about English food? Wouldn't you rather have pizza or sushi than shepherd's pie?

Huntington: I'm not talking about culture in that sense. I am talking about a whole set of values.

One wonders how much "ethnic" food Solomon eats. My experience has been that most (non-chain) pizzerias are owned by Greeks and most sushi places by Chinese or Koreans. And never mind that a country can maintain many "ethnic" restaurants with few immigrants.

Having softened up Huntington on the food front, Solomon moves in for the kill. Her next question: "Are you an immigrant? I hope you're not one of those Mayflower snobs."

I understand how wicked it is for one's family to have been in America for four centuries, but hasn't Solomon revealed herself as one of those "Ellis Island snobs"?

Kevin Michael Grace, 9.38 a.m., May 12, 2004►

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Even not particularly happy memories are made heartbreaking by the fact that they can never be recaptured. The idealized past populated by the happiest memories is thus the most heartbreaking of all.
—Harry Thompson, Richard Ingrams: Lord of the Gnomes

Kevin Michael Grace, 9.11 a.m., May 12, 2004►

FELIX CULPA

So I find myself in a Jamaican patty shop this afternoon, and as I wait for my samosa to heat up, who should I hear on the stereo but St. Bob of Kingston himself, singing....guess what? Now the chances of hearing "No Woman, No Cry" in a Jamaican patty shop are pretty good at any time, but, even so, it's the little things like this that keep me going, let me tell you.

Kevin Michael Grace, 2.24 p.m., May 11, 2004►

NO WOMAN, NO CRY

One characteristic of the multicultural society is a morbid reticence regarding race, especially race and crime. Many Canadian newspapers have stopped reporting the ethnicity of both perpetrators and their victims, even when reporting incidents of tribal warfare. The Globe and Mail is one of the least reticent Canadian papers in this respect, but it has its limitations.

A Globe story datedlined Toronto and headlined "Party host slain over $10, court told" explains how a well-respected Guyanese man called Colin Moore was shot to death, allegedly by two Jamaicans after the latter refused to pay a cover charge at a disco.

According to testimony at the trial of Gary Eunick and Leighton Hay, charged with first-degree murder,

The armed gunmen went directly to the kitchen, where the Moore brothers stood, unable to take cover or protect themselves.

Besides Mrs. Moore, a 39-year-old mother of two was also in the kitchen. The mother said she begged the gunmen not to shoot the Moores. "Shut your bloodclot or I'll shoot you," one of the men told her, the court heard. (The reference is a Jamaican pejorative.)

So we have learned that "bloodclot" is a "Jamaican pejorative," but we have not been told what it means. Perhaps because "bloodclot" is a nasty pejorative indeed, but this explanation is unavailing, as the Globe prints all sorts of nasty words. No, the reason "bloodclot" goes unexplained is that to do so would suggest a nasty truth: that Jamaicans, particularly those that subscribe to the messianic drug cult "Rastafarianism," do not hold a particularly high opinion of women.

Of course we know already, if we take an interest in such things, that Jamaica is one of the nastiest places on earth. But we do not know why successive Canadian governments have inflicted so many Jamaicans on this country.

Kevin Michael Grace, 8.13 a.m., May 11, 2004►

JUMP THE QUEUE? WE’D SOONER DIE

My old colleague Shafer Parker, Jr., a native of America, used to marvel that Canada’s healthcare system was comparable only to Cuba’s and North Korea’s. It is a "single-payer" plan, and competition is forbidden. Time was when Americans such as Ted Kennedy commended Canadian healthcare as a model for the United States. We don’t hear much of that kind of talk anyone. Canadian healthcare is an unfolding disaster, but…all together now…there is no alternative!

What about Canada’s "right-wing," nay "extremist," opposition, you might ask. Surely it would not countenance totalitarian controls on the provision of medicine? If you ask these questions, you don’t know much about Canada. Our "right-wing," nay "extremist," opposition is actually prepared to countenance further federal government interference in the provision of medicine.

One day healthcare competition will be legalized. It will happen quickly, and shortly thereafter Canadians will wonder what all the fuss was about. If we’re lucky, it will happen before every provincial government is bankrupted. Oh, you didn’t know that the federal government calls the medicare tune, but the provinces pay the fiddler? You really don’t know much about Canada.

After that day, the following essay will be scrutinized by historians eager to understand the intellectual and political paralysis that gripped millennial Canada. It is long and quotation-heavy but rich in analytical goodness.

Nobody here but us socialists
Tax increases, not private choice, are the only item on everyone’s medicare menu
The Report, November 18, 2002

Guess which right-wing Canadian politician said the following about medicare:

[It] was launched on a fallacy. First we were going to finance everything, cure the nation and then spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed. Then there was the period when everybody thought the public could have whatever they needed on the health system—it was just a question of government will. Now we recognize that no country, even if they are [sic] prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything.

The cleverer among you will have guessed that this is a trick question. No Canadian politician would dare say that. The man who said it was a British physician and socialist; in fact, he was the minister in charge of the National Health Service (NHS), David Owen. And he said it 27 years ago. Can anyone guess which Canadian wrote this?

The myth persists—the myth that [medicare] not only can but does offer a high and unvarying level of medical care to all members of the community. For most of us, it is only when we join a yearlong hospital waiting list, or have to take an injured child to a hospital [emergency ward] on Sunday afternoon, that we realize just how threadbare and starved financially the service really is.

Another trick question. The writer was Bernard Dixon, editor of Britain's left-wing New Scientist. He wrote it 27 years ago.

My third quotation is too famous to require a guess. It comes from a non-socialist but free-spending British health minister, Enoch Powell; it is known as Powell's Law, and it too was formulated 27 years ago: "The demand for 'free' medical care quickly outruns any possible provision for it."

(These quotations come from Harry Schwartz's essay, "The Infirmity of British Medicine," reprinted in The Future That Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failures in Britain, Doubleday, 1977.)

The point of this history lesson is that it was in the 1970s that Britons realized socialized medicine was not working. That was about 30 years after the NHS was founded. (Of course, as Schwartz pointed out, "[British general practitioners] have successfully retained their right [unlike in Canada] to see private patients, who pay directly for consultations, unlike NHS patients.") It was in the 1990s, about 30 years after medicare was established, that Canadians realized socialized medicine was not working.

But who wants to eliminate socialism in Canadian medicine? Don Mazankowski, chairman of the Alberta government's health reform council, said in October at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress in Edmonton, "A single-payer system, properly funded with some modest participation by individuals, is probably the way to go." Mazankowski's willingness to entertain user fees marks him as a radical. Senator Wilbert Keon, speaking on behalf of Senator Michael Kirby's health committee, responded, "The average citizen finds a tax on the sick as socially repugnant." Dr. Robert McMurtry, adviser to healthcare commissioner Roy Romanow, had even stronger words: "The medicare contract was seen as sacrosanct."

Romanow himself, whose royal commission is expected any week now, said at Harvard last month,

A 'universal single-payer' is a feature of our healthcare system well worth preserving. There is a broad consensus about this in Canada. Most polls have told me this, as did my own research and extensive public consultations, People believe not only that this structure is efficient, but also that it is fair. And Canadians value equity…

Dr. Arnold Relman, professor emeritus here at the Harvard Medical School, said, almost 20 years ago, healthcare should be a "social service," not an "economic commodity sold in the marketplace" only to "those who can afford to pay for it."

We have heard this noble rhetoric before. Here is prime minister Winston Churchill in 1942 (as reprinted in Schwartz's essay):

Disease must be attacked whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman, simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked in the same way that the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humble cottage as it will give it to the most important mansion.

Sen. Kirby's committee delivered its report in October. As Jeffrey Simpson reported in the Globe and Mail, 

Canada has proudly and defiantly gone it alone on healthcare. If a Senate committee has its way, that proud defiance will continue at a higher cost than before. As the Kirby report noted, "Canada is the only major industrialized country which does not have some element of a parallel private hospital and doctor system," adding: "Canada is the only industrialized country that prohibits user charges for publicly insured health services." The Kirby committee rendered Canadians a great service by reviewing practices around the world; it found that every country organizes healthcare differently, then rejected the other models.

Sen. Kirby, in his own piece in the Globe (co-written with Sen. Marjory LeBreton), attempted to scare readers by suggesting that socialized medicine must be strengthened or else Canadians will demand freedom and get it:

There is a real chance to reinvigorate medicare in this country. Are Canadians prepared to pay for it? If not, it is likely that the courts will be asked to move in. For if governments cannot ensure that patients get timely access to medically necessary healthcare, then Canadians cannot be denied the right to buy private healthcare insurance. In the face of such a court decision, it won't be long before a parallel private healthcare system emerges.

Romanow does not want to be "apocalyptic about this," but he shares Sen. Kirby's nightmare vision of freedom.

To both Kirby and Romanow, the solution to the failure of socialism is more socialism. They both want medicare to cover new services. Sens. Kirby and LeBreton:

Our report recommends that the public healthcare insurance be expanded to cover the catastrophic cost of prescription medicine and that the federal government pick up 90% of these expenses. Much more must be done for people requiring home care after surgery or help in caring for a dying relative. Ottawa and the provinces should share the cost equally of expanded coverage for acute home care and palliative care in the home.

Romanow:

I think the universal, single-payer system should actually be expanded beyond the basket of services offered in hospitals or by doctors. I can't say now which ones ought to be included…But I can say that if we don't lay the groundwork now, the private costs for these services will continue to grow with little restraint.

Even today, Romanow believes socialism saves money. Schwartz wrote that NHS godfather Aneurin Bevan, 

in his 1952 political autobiography...stated his misconception clearly: "When the Service started and demands for spectacles, dental attention and drugs rocketed upwards the pessimists said: 'We told you so'...Ordinary men and women were aware.. that a considerable proportion of the initial expenditure...was the result of past neglect. When the first rush was over, the demand would even out."

Schwartz commented, 

Now we know that Bevan was wrong: the demand does not "even out." The patient who is cured today lives to get sick tomorrow, and the older he gets the more likely he is to become the victim of a serious, debilitating ailment requiring long and expensive treatment. Nor did Bevan foresee the rapid progress of medical technology, which provided new means of curing the sick and easing or eliminating disability, but often...at very high cost.

We know this already in Canada. British Columbia's Pharmacare (drug) program now costs $700 million a year and is the fastest growing service (now 7% of total costs) of the provincial healthcare budget, costs of which have risen from 34% of total expenditures in 1992-93 to 41% in 2002-03.

Sen. Kirby thinks it will take another $5 billion to $9 billion (in addition to the current $100 billion) to "reinvigorate" medicare. He wants a redistributive healthcare tax. "For lower-income Canadians, the premium would be 50 cents a day-half the price of a lottery ticket. For those with more than $103,000 in taxable income, the premium would be $4 a day." (That is $182 to $1,460 a year.) Romanow has hinted at a healthcare GST (value-added tax). Ralph Klein's Alberta government was suggesting this too, until a backlash changed its mind.

Canadian Alliance health critic Rob Merrifield says his party is "OK with a dedicated tax as long as there's a [income tax] reduction to offset that elsewhere." He admits that this offset is highly unlikely. He has no objection in principle to a national Pharmacare program, but worries about drug abuse. He says of the Kirby report, "This isn't about fairness; this is about socialism," but adds that his party "agrees with the principles of the Canada Health Act [which forbids user fees and patient-purchased essential services], [and] we think it reflects Canadian values." He thinks the act should be "modernized."

Merrifield admits the federal government pays only 14% of medicare costs, that $2 billion is spent in the U.S. by Canadians who would prefer not to die on waiting lists and that these waiting lists make a joke of "universality."

Yet he remains convinced that Canadian socialist medicare can somehow ensure "timely access, a quality system [and can be] sustainable, available to all that want it regardless of financial means."

Socialism may be the god that failed, and medicare has certainly failed in Canada. But it is worshipped still. "It's a mystery," concludes Fraser Institute executive director Michael Walker. "Like how they get the goo in the Caramilk bars."

Kevin Michael Grace, 6.01 a.m., May 11, 2004►

A COLONY OF THE WORLD

As a young man, I was a well-trained little "movement conservative." As such, I supported mass immigration in general and Canadian immigration policy in particular. I believed that immigrants, as a class, possessed a work ethic increasingly alien to natives. To my shame, I rather suspected they were better than my countrymen. As I say, I was young then and given to ideology.

My opinion of immigration changed after I began to notice the changes it had wrought on Vancouver, the city where I lived from 1962 to 1992 (and from 1997 to 2001). My home was becoming increasingly alien to me, but I did not fully understand why. 

Then, in 1986,  I met Charles Campbell. Charlie was not your typical "nativist." He had been an immigration bureaucrat (eight years as vice-chairman of the Immigration Appeal Board) and was a former president of the federal Liberal Party in British Columbia. Charlie explained to me that the transformation of Vancouver (and Toronto and Montreal) was not solely a consequence of numbers, though they were important. More important was "family reunification"—"the cornerstone of Canadian immigration policy."

Charlie asked me (and countless others) this question:

Suppose you have a young man from Vancouver and a young woman from St. John's and they meet at the University of Toronto and decide to get married and settle in Toronto. Would you expect them to bring their mothers and fathers and then their extended families to Toronto to live with them? (Americans may substitute Seattle, Miami and Chicago for the Canadian examples.)

Of course not, I replied. That would be silly. Well, Charlie said, that's how family reunification works in Canada. The scales fell from my eyes.

Martin Peretz writes somewhere that immigration implies a rejection by immigrants of their native countries as insufficient. Otherwise, why would they subject themselves to its profound dislocations? But that was the old model.

The new model, in Canada and elsewhere, is the gradual uprooting of entire villages to the West. In Canada, these uprooted villages were located previously in Guangzhou (formerly Canton), the Punjab, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. These villagers, regardless of their origins, do not speak English or French, and their traditions are alien, even hostile, to established Canadian values. Combined with official policies of multiculturalism and positive discrimination (and large numbers, of course) these factors make assimilation (the "melting pot") almost impossible. (Transformation of the host country is not dependent on "official" multiculturalism, however; unofficial multiculturalism will do just fine, as the example of America demonstrates.)

What we have witnessed in Canada since the 1970s is not "immigration" as traditionally understood. More accurate terms for the process are "settlement" or "colonization." Canada is now host to millions of people who, regardless of citizenship, are not particularly loyal to this country or do not even regard themselves as "Canadian."

Two years ago, a Canadian Alliance MP, whose name I cannot reveal, described to me the attempted takeover of his riding by an ethnic bloc which had swamped the membership roll. He discovered that the paymasters of this takeover bid were located in a foreign country. This MP was later offered a considerable bribe by a foreign chieftain to withdraw his renomination. He refused it and managed to keep hold of the riding by setting his ethnic rivals against each other.

Also two years ago, I spoke with immigration reformer Steve Kaufman, another atypical "nativist." Kaufman, who has a Chinese wife and is fluent in Chinese, monitored Vancouver Chinese-language radio on September 11, 2001, and was disgusted by what he heard. Although the Chinese talkshow hosts universally decried the terrorist attack on America, about half the callers argued that "America had got what it deserved." One caller, a former Reform Party candidate, argued that the attack on the World Trade Center was a suitable punishment for "America bombing our embassy in Yugoslavia." He meant the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, attacked in 1999 as part of the War on Serbia.

One would think that the creation of Fifth Columns in Canada would excite widespread alarm, but this is not the case. If discussed at all, it is normally in whispers.

Charlie Campbell is now quite old, but people stopped listening to him long before he became infirm. He was a "racist," you see. The radio stations stopped interviewing him; the newspapers stopped printing his letters; and, as noted below, his life's work on immigration was rejected by his publisher. The last time I spoke with him, I expected him to be bitter. He had every right to be, but he was not. Instead, he was sad and bemused. He still loved Canada fiercely and could not understand why its elite, including his own Liberal Party, had conspired in its destruction. And he could not understand why so few of his countrymen seemed to care.

Kevin Michael Grace, 8.27 a.m., May 10, 2004►

BLACK IN NAME, BLACK IN NATURE

If nothing else, the horrors of Abu Ghraib have certainly sorted the sheep from the goats. As in, I’m not in favour of torture, but…

The "nuanced" approach to the scandal is expressed in these excuses: Iraq is a dangerous place; Abu Ghraib is full of bad men; these bad men possess information we need to save lives; but we don’t need any lectures on morality from Arabs; and hey, don’t you know there’s a war on?

Trust Barbara Amiel not to stick to the script. In Monday’s Telegraph, she introduces a new excuse, which goes something like this. Oh hell, I can’t possibly paraphrase it, so I’ll simply quote it:

Three weeks ago in Highland Park, Texas, Mrs. Dolly Kelton was arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay a traffic ticket after her car was stopped for having an expired registration. I doubt that Mrs. Kelton was a threat to the safety of the arresting officer. She is 97 years old.

We handcuff her—or a white-collar criminal such as Michael Milken—because some Western societies, and America in particular, use these procedures as a way of softening up the accused by humiliation and to underline the power of the authorities. We routinely use measures in normal police matters that, very strictly speaking, violate the Geneva Conventions. Interrogations may use some form of psychological menace. Noise or lighting may deliberately create some sort of sleep deprivation for a short period.

This is not to say we should withdraw from the Geneva Conventions in order to fight drug dealers and child molesters, but only to note that in some circumstances, our police may use such tactics. In Iraq, we are fighting men and women who routinely blow up civilians in a guerrilla war of the most merciless kind. If a 97-year-old woman is handcuffed for a traffic offence, what is the appropriate procedure for murderous guerrillas?

Let’s try again. If I read Lady Black correctly, the torture in Iraq is unexceptional because American police "routinely" abuse nonagenarians and masters of the universe. Is this really the argument she wants to make? After the collapse of the "weapons of mass destruction" canard, the neoconservatives told us the invasion of Iraq was necessary because its benighted peoples required instruction in the Way of the West. Now here is the Queen of the Neocons herself telling us that the Way of the West, at least in America, is "routine" judicial torture. This doesn’t prevent her, as we have seen, from belabouring the "moral equivalence" argument once more, of course, but I suppose we should salute Amiel for admitting the real excuse for the invasion: might is right.

'Calm down, Abdul; judicial torture is "routine" in America'

I would suggest that Amiel wrote this column in haste, that she uses the phrase "may use," as in "what is permitted legally or morally," when she means "occasionally use," as in "This is not to say we should withdraw from the Geneva Conventions in order to fight drug dealers and child molesters, but only to note that in some circumstances, our police may use such tactics." But I’m really not sure. Let us be grateful the only authority Amiel now exercises is over her shoe collection.

I could point out that Dolly Kelton and Michael Milken were neither drug dealers nor child molesters, nor were they accused of such crimes, nor were they subjected to sexual sadism (so far as I know). And I could also point out that Amiel is supposedly a libertarian and thus supposedly against the "war on drugs"; so one would expect her to oppose, at the very least, the judicial torture of those accused of "victimless crimes." But for me to belabour these points would serve only to remind my readers that Amiel is deficient in logic, and my readers don’t need any help from me to understand this.

What is the appropriate "procedure" for "men and women who routinely blow up civilians"? I will assume Amiel means "punishment" here. A bullet in the back of each head, I’d say, but only after those accused of such atrocities are proved to have committed them. What is never an appropriate procedure, and what is a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance, is for any man accused of any crime to be degraded sexually for the amusement of his jailers.

As it happens, it is quite possible that Lady Black and her consort will soon be arrested themselves. If this occurs, it is a certainty that some will take pleasure in the videos of a handcuffed Barbara and a handcuffed Conrad frogmarched into police cars. If they are convicted, these sadists will derive an even more sinful pleasure from thoughts of the sexual degradation the Blacks might suffer in prison, just as they did after Martha Stewart was convicted. I pray Lord and Lady Black are spared such humiliation. No one deserves such treatment: not in Iraq, not in the West. Not even those who contrive tortured excuses for torture.

Kevin Michael Grace, 8.13 p.m., May 9, 2004►

HIGH HOPES

A couple of days ago, I asked whether the Liberals want the upcoming election to be a referendum on immigration. We all know the answer to that question. I also suggested that Stephen Harper might want such a referendum. That was purely rhetorical. Everything I know about Harper more than suggests he is happy enough with Canada's immigration policy as it is. Oh, he rages against our refugee policy—well, not the policy as such, but rather its implementation, i.e., the notorious "abuses"—but this is mere posturing.

In an interview conducted December 5, 2002, I asked Harper, "What’s your view on immigration." He responded:

I'm pro-immigration in principle. I think the biggest concern in the immigration system right now is the refugee-determination process, which has become such a boondoggle. It not only threatens the integrity of the immigration system; it threatens national security. I've been saying for years that the most important thing is that this country make its own immigration selection and that this policy be consistent with Canadians’s views. A refugee-determination system that has effectively created a back-door immigration stream that bypasses legal channels is unacceptable. But I'm very supportive of a significant level of immigration and always have been.

Harper is a globalist; he believes labour should be treated as human capital: no barriers. An economist by training, Harper believes above all in efficiency. An open-border immigration policy results (in theory) in greater efficiency. Something less than an open-border policy—say, Canada’s policy from Brian Mulroney onward: continual high levels of Third World immigration regardless of economic conditions—results (in practice) in

Short-term:

• higher unemployment

• lower median wages

• a profound redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich

• the creation of ghettoes with the following concomitant effects a) the displacement of English and French as national languages b) the dissolving of the bonds of trust that bind together citizens leading to a replacement of informal agreements with contracts c) a collapse in law enforcement

• an explosion in racial consciousness with the following concomitant effects a) the rise of racial agitators, acting in symbiosis with governments and elite institutions, determined to demoralize the white majority by proving it "racist" b) the continual suppression of civil liberties (e.g., "hate" legislation) and active discrimination (i.e., quotas) against the white majority for the ostensible purpose of combating this "racism" c) the suppression of Christianity as "divisive"

• the replacement of the traditional nation with the idea of the "proposition nation"

Long-term:

• tribal warfare
• the collapse of the state

(Those inclined to regard my predictions as fear mongering are invited to study the histories of Ulster, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Fiji.)

Globalists either do not recognize these results or do not care about them. Indeed, Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan has warned that immigration must be "uncapped" in order to suppress American wages.

Not that Stephen Harper would dare come out in favour of open borders. This would be politically infeasible. But two years ago, directly after Harper had become its leader, the Canadian Alliance made a significant change to its immigration policy:

A Canadian Alliance government will facilitate the current levels of immigration.

(The text of this policy, in all its ahistorical, fatuous and insulting glory, can be read here.)

The significance of this cannot be overstated. Even before Harper forced the merger of the Alliance with the rump of Mulroney’s Conservatives, his party was committed to a continuation of Mulroney’s immigration policy.

For all Harper’s rage against Canada’s "refugee-determination boondoggle," he is talking through his hat. Harper knows very well, even if Jay Currie does not, that the implementation of Canada’s immigration policy—not merely its refugee policy—rests in the hands of our courts, not our Parliament. Immigration and refugee reform would require—at the very least—the use of the notwithstanding clause to void the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1985 decision in Singh. It would probably require nothing less than the repeal of the Charter of Rights. And the delegates to the same Canadian Alliance convention that revised its immigration policy were advised pretty forcefully to keep shtum about messing with the Charter.

Of course to even imagine immigration reform in this country would require two conditions. First, a media prepared to entertain it. Second, a major political party prepared to champion it. Neither of these conditions obtains, and I am not persuaded they will obtain any time in the near future.

Two years ago, I was more optimistic. Three monographs that demolished the justifications of Canada’s immigration policy were published. At the time, it seemed to me that Canada’s elites would have no choice but to consider the data. I reviewed these monographs for Peter Brimelow’s excellent site, VDARE.

---

Breakthrough In Canada!
November 26, 2002

This is Canada’s immigration moment. Three books by respected authors have suddenly appeared, demolishing Canada’s immigration policy and proving it the worst in the world. (It’s also the biggest in the world, relative to population—roughly twice as many immigrants per year as enter the U.S.) The authors, of course, have been attacked as "racist," "protectionist," "Marxist" etc. etc. Well, not "racist" really, as in "I don’t believe Mr. Immigration Reformer is a racist, you understand." (VDARE.COM readers know the drill.) And those are their critics’ best shots.

The intellectual battle is over. In one blow, the immigration reformers have won. The political battle, however, is not yet begun.

Canada and the U.S. are united by symbiotic idiocy. Ted Kennedy’s Immigration Act of 1965 wrecked American immigration policy, replacing an emphasis on national origin with "family reunification" i.e. uncontrollable chain migration. Canada could hardly wait to imitate this folly. In 1967, Canada too removed national origin as a criterion for immigration selection. In 1971, Pierre Trudeau - best understood as Canada’s Peter the Great, Napoleon or FDR - promulgated an official policy of "multiculturalism." In 1985, Brian Mulroney’s government, of the so-called Progressive Conservative party, adopted "family reunification" as a right and priority.

In 1989, Mulroney announced a five-year immigration target of 250,000, regardless of economic conditions, again aping the United States and ending Canada’s traditional pattern of wave and pause. In 1993, Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced a permanent immigration target of 1% of Canada’s population, i.e. 310,000 a year. [VDARE.COM note: For historical background see Immigration And Canadian Nation-Building In The Transition To A Knowledge Economy by Jeffrey G. Reitz.]

Canada’s population reached 20 million in its Centennial year, 1967. This growth was a cause of great celebration. Thirty-five years later, the population reached 31 million. Not many are celebrating now. Centennial Canada has been pretty much abolished. Canada has been transformed: ethnically, linguistically, culturally and politically. Toronto, its largest city, and Vancouver, its third largest, are no longer majority Canadian. (Seventy-six percent of immigrants settle in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver; 90% of refugees settle there.)

It was almost two decades ago when I first sat at the feet of Charles Campbell, the grand old man of the Canadian immigration reform movement. These more recent authors - indeed, everyone interested in immigration reform in Canada’s public policy community i.e. all 10 of us - owe Charlie Campbell a great debt. His book, Betrayal and Deceit: The Politics of Canadian Immigration, is still available and worth reading. It was published privately, after having been taken up and abandoned, at great financial and personal cost to Campbell, by a Toronto publisher who shall remain unnamed because of Canada’s nasty libel laws.

Diane Francis is the former editor of Canada’s Financial Post. She is reputedly the country’s highest-paid journalist, despite or because of which she is regarded as distinctly erratic. For example, she has described housewives as "traitors to the GDP," and has claimed that Quebec separatism was a Catholic plot. I’m told she has said she was on her "best behavior" in writing Immigration: The Economic Case. And so she is. The same can’t be said of her publisher, however. The proof-reading is a disgrace.

Reading Francis - the most anecdotal of the three - I found myself thinking despite myself that her case stories couldn’t possibly be true. But they are. My favorite:

"An African claimant refused to give his name, but, when pressed to do so at his refugee hearing, he looked at his lap and the gum wrapper that he was fondling and said his name was ‘Bubblicious.’"

Francis is weakest in her consideration of the politics of immigration and strongest in her evisceration of Canada’s family reunification and refugee policies. In 1986, the Canada’s Supreme Court ruled (in the Singh decision) that any foreigner reaching Canada was entitled to the full protection of Trudeau’s U.S.-style Charter of Rights. This means that judges control immigration and refugee claims, making it almost impossible to deport anyone.

Terrorists, murderers, rapists, drug dealers, gangsters and the disease-ridden are all routinely allowed to remain in Canada. Almost none are legitimate refugees by the United Nations definition. Almost all are economic migrants and opportunists. Many are the indentured servants of gangsters; they have paid up to US$50,000 to be brought here. Over 70% of refugee claimants are now coming to Canada directly from the U.S. Between 1986 and 2000, Canada accepted 472,857 refugee claimants.

Ottawa does not even know who these people are—destroying or falsifying your documents is the best and fastest way to become a new Canadian.

Thus Ahmed Ressam was allowed to enter Canada despite admitting ties to Algerian terrorists and allowed to stay even after several criminal convictions. He was ordered deported, but nothing happened. (Canada is ignorant as to the whereabouts of over 27,000 such "deportees.") Ressam got a fake passport, flew to Afghanistan for Al Qaeda training, returned and then plotted to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. Only a vigilant customs officer at Port Angeles, Washington, prevented his entry into the U.S. in 1999.

Francis reports:

"Another case involves Somalian warlord Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad. He was convicted in 1968 of participating in an attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine against an El Al plane in Athens, in which one person died. [He threw a hand grenade into the cabin and machine-gunned the passengers.] After serving only four months in prison, he was released when his fellow terrorists hijacked an airplane and held its 155 passengers hostage until his release. ‘The PLO negotiated his release,’ said an immigration official. ‘He went to Spain, assumed a new identity and came to Canada in 1987. We found out he was here. We instituted deportation hearings against him, and he is still here. He’s living happy in Brantford [Ontario], and his case is still before the courts.’"

As Francis demonstrates, family reunification has resulted in an official Canadian policy of importing the worst and the dimmest: unskilled and illiterate in both French and English. And old: 210,000 elderly parents between 1986 and 2000 alone. "By 1997, immigrants comprised 18% of the country’s population as a whole, but accounted for 28% of people older than 65 years of age." Chain migration has resulted in the importation of whole villages from India, China, Sri Lanka, Somalia and elsewhere.

What are the costs? Nobody knows. The federal government refuses to find out, and for a corrupt reason: welfare, education and legal aid are all the responsibility of the provinces and municipalities.

Martin Collacott is a retired Canadian diplomat with extensive service in Asia. He is one of several former senior civil servants who have publicly excoriated Canadian immigration policy. His sober, elegant and thoroughly-documented Canada’s Immigration Policy: The Need For Major Reform is published by The Fraser Institute (US$5 or free in PDF format).

And this fact is highly significant and encouraging. The Fraser Institute is the closest Canadian equivalent to the Cato Institute. It was for years reflexively pro-immigration a la Wall Street Journal. (I witnessed Peter Brimelow’s hostile reception when he spoke there in 1998.) [Peter Brimelow writes tolerantly: Ah, compared to what?] Collacott’s appointment as a Senior Fellow suggests that long-time Executive Director Michael Walker is one Canadian libertarian amenable to empirical evidence—and also, perhaps, that like many of my Canadian libertarian friends, he has been persuaded by the arguments of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Collacott demonstrates that the alleged rationale of Canadian immigration policy is based on several familiar economic fallacies. He proves -

1) that Canada’s population will continue to grow for some time, so there is no imminent labor shortage;

2) that only fantastic levels of immigration can prevent the population’s average age from increasing;

3) that our current immigration intake is not useful in lowering the population’s average age;

4) that anyway an aging population is not calamitous;

5) that advances in productivity and technology, not increased labor inputs, are critical to economic growth,

6) that the post-1980 immigrant cohort is greatly inferior to previous cohorts by every index;

7) that Canadian immigrants don’t create jobs—not for native Canadians at any rate.

And Collacott, unlike Francis, explores politically perilous territory. One example:

"Sikhs nation-wide number about half a million [overwhelmingly in British Columbia] or roughly 1.6% of our total population. They have, however, been able to exercise an influence far greater than might be expected given their numbers. They have achieved this by delivering large blocks of votes, which often determine the results of an election in a particular riding or in the choice of candidate by a particular party…Predictions are that Sikhs will make up about 15% of the 3,600 delegates expected to attend the Liberal leadership convention in November [2003, to select Jean Chrétien’s successor] and that Sikhs could potentially have significant influence at delegate selection meetings in anywhere from a third to a half of Canada’s 301 ridings."

But the best examination of the politics of Canada’s immigration disaster, and its social and economic consequences is Daniel Stoffman’s Who Gets In: What’s Wrong With Canada’s Immigration Program—And How To Fix It. Quite simply, the purpose of Canadian immigration policy from the 1970s to the present day has been to import Liberal voters from other countries—to elect a new people, as Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein put it in their examination of the same phenomenon in the U.S.

Thus in May 2000, Canada’s then-Finance Minister Paul Martin attended a fundraising dinner for the Federation of Associations of Canadian Tamils (FACT). (Up to 20,000 Canadian Tamils are said to be Liberal Party members.) Also present were another cabinet minister and a Liberal MP.

Martin had been warned in advance that FACT was a front for that vicious terrorist group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The warning came from the Canadian High Commission in Sri Lanka and was based on information provided by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the U.S. State Department.

Martin simply brazened out the scandal, accusing his accusers of being "un-Canadian." In any normal country, his career would have been over. Instead, he is universally expected to replace Chretien as prime minister in 2004.

Quite a few Americans argue that Canada’s points system, which in theory rewards immigrants who have skills, speak the national languages etc. etc. is something the U.S. should emulate. But the practice is very different. Stoffman relates a conversation with U.S. economist George Borjas:

"He was disappointed when I informed him…that the skilled portion of Canada’s immigration intake was down to 23%. ‘Why did it shrink way down?’ he asked from his Harvard office. ‘Why did the Canadians allow this to occur?’ Because the Canadian program had been taken over by its clientele, I said, who insisted that the family class be expanded."

Stoffman is a left-winger (his Toronto Star 1995 review of Brimelow’s Alien Nation harrumphed unhappily about its frank discussion of race) and he extrapolates from Borjas’s analysis in Heaven’s Door to estimate that Canadian immigration policy lowers native wages and results in an annual transfer of CDN$30.7 billion from the poor to the rich. This has led to Stoffman being accused by Terence Corcoran in the neoconservative National Post of being a "Marxist," and by Corcoran’s colleague Andrew Coyne of being a "protectionist." As I noted above, these--along with the usual "racism" insinuation—are the best arguments the immigration lobby has.

Yet valuable as Stoffman, Francis and Collacott are, there is something missing. Something more important than all their arguments put together.

It is this: Even if it could be proved that Canadian immigration policy worked to the economic benefit of all Canadians (and not just to the immigrants themselves and rich consumers), even if our refugee policy was not a threat to Canadian and American security, this would still not justify the transformation of Canadian society.

Canadians have never been asked if they desire a non-white Canada. If asked, they would say: No.

Kevin Michael Grace, 12.12 p.m., May 7, 2004►

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY (SPECIAL 'STEPHEN HARPER'S CHILDREN ARE UPSET' EDITION)

It was Clive James who first put forward the danger of children crying on the way home from school as a good reason for not abusing the famous and the powerful...The answer is, of course: let them cry. Anybody who has had anything to do with children knows perfectly well that they cry and then they stop crying. It is an incident of no importance. Convicts in prison may be excused such nauseating sentimentality about children as we read every day in the gutter press, but the suggestion that nobody in public life may be criticized or tormented for fear of his children being upset is an absurdity.
—Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?

Kevin Michael Grace, 11.59 p.m., May 6, 2004►

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

It is a mystery why otherwise reliable writers think immigration is an economic boon. No major study, in Canada or elsewhere, has reached that conclusion. If immigration were an economic godsend, it would make everyone richer. It doesn't do that. In 1991, the Economic Council of Canada concluded that immigration had a tiny positive effect on average per capita incomes. A previous Canadian study, for the Macdonald royal commission in 1985, had concluded that immigration actually caused a decline in real per capita incomes and real wages...

Increasing the population through immigration is like doubling the size of a pie and, at the same time, doubling the number who want to eat it.

But there's more to the story than that. To understand the full economic impact of immigration, we must look not just at average incomes but at individual incomes as well. What if one of the original eaters got one and a half pieces after the pie was enlarged, while another received only half a piece? Per capital pie consumption would stay the same, but one eater would be better off at the expense of the other.

Thanks to the work of the brilliant American economist George Borjas, we know that redistribution of the pie among members of the host community is precisely what happens because of immigration...

In his latest book, Heaven's Door, Borjas gives us a new way to look at immigration and understand its economic impact. His complex analysis boils down to the old saying, "No pain, no gain." Immigration creates additional competition in the labour market, reducing the wages of native workers. The result is a huge transfer of wealth to employers and, to a lesser extent, consumers. The winners win slightly more than the losers lose; so there is an "immigration surplus" that can be seen as a gift from immigrants to the country as a whole. But this gift is very small, which is why many analyses dismiss the economic impact as virtually neutral...

Borjas notes the irony that those who stress the benefits of immigration and advocate more open admission policies usually downplay the impact of immigration on native wages. "They are in for a shock," he writes. "There is no immigration surplus if the native wage is not reduced by immigration." Borjas's analysis lets us see the Canadian immigration program for what it is: an income redistribution scheme that benefits the wealthiest members of society. Because the Canadian program is substantial, the resulting income transfer is massive, about $30.7 billion per year.
—Daniel Stoffman, Who Gets In: What's Wrong With Canada's Immigration Program—And How To Fix It

Kevin Michael Grace, 10.11 a.m., May 5, 2004►

YOU TOO, TERRY?

A correspondent has passed on an article from the March 29 Western Standard, "When Green Meets White." This essay, by my old boss and friend Terry O'Neill, longtime former editor of BC Report, is a rambling (and wretchedly edited) attempt to smear as "racist" (guilt by association) the immigration-reduction slate that failed to win election to the (U.S.) Sierra Club.

Terry's essay is rife with the usual pro-immigration myths, and I don't propose to refute them here. (But readers interested in discovering the effects of unbridled immigration on the American worker are advised to click here; those interested in the effects of unbridled immigration on American law enforcement are advised to click here; those interested in the effects of unbridled immigration on the quality of life in California are advised to click here.)

What shocked and saddened me about Terry's piece was his insinuation that the flag he and I grew up under is somehow redolent of "racism":

[Paul] Fromm denies he is a racist, but does admit to concerns about the ethnic background of recent newcomers to Canada. His website carries an image of the old Canadian red-ensign flag [sic], which hearkens back to a time when most immigrants were white Europeans.

Red Ensign: A 'hate' symbol?

By this logic, the Canadian Coat of Arms (which incorporates the national symbols of the Red Ensign) and the provincial flags of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and the Yukon (all of which incorporate one or more of the following: the Union Jack, the Cross of St. George, the Cross of St. Andrew, the royal lion of England, the royal lion of Scotland, the royal fleurs-de-lis of France) all hearken back to a time when most immigrants were white Europeans.

Yes, and they also hearken back to a time when most Canadians were not ashamed of their history. Oh Terry, how could you?

Kevin Michael Grace, 6.00 a.m., May 5, 2004►

YOU COULD LOOK IT UP

Stephen Harper's office has now responded to the as yet unaired Liberal attack ads. It has quite correctly pointed out it is "patently false" to assert that Harper would prevent "new Canadians" (one presumes everyone means "new Canadian citizens") from voting. So far, so good. But the Opposition Press Office press release also accuses the Liberals of lying about Stephen Harper's position on Iraq.

Liberal Lie: “If Stephen Harper was prime minister last year, Canadians would be in Iraq this year.”

Reality: Stephen Harper believes Canada should have morally supported our allies and to our troops who the Liberals sent to the Iraq region.  He wishes our allies success in helping to stabilize, democratize and rebuild Iraq.

The actual reality: On March 20, 2003, the House of Commons voted on a motion proposed by Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe:

That this House call upon the government not to participate in the military intervention initiated by the United States in Iraq.

Yeas were 153; nays 50. The nays were:

Abbott
Ablonczy
Anders
Barnes (Gander—Grand Falls)
Benoit
Borotsik
Burton
Cadman
Chatters
Clark
Day
Duncan
Epp
Forseth
Gallant
Goldring
Gouk
Grey
Harper
Harris
Hearn
Hill (Macleod)
Hilstrom
Hinton
Jaffer
Johnston
Keddy (South Shore)
Kenney (Calgary Southeast)
Lunney (Nanaimo—Alberni)
MacKay (Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough)
Meredith
Merrifield
Mills (Red Deer)
Moore
Obhrai
Rajotte
Reid (Lanark—Carleton)
Reynolds
Ritz
Schmidt
Skelton
Solberg
Sorenson
Stinson
Strahl
Thompson (New Brunswick Southwest)
Thompson (Wild Rose)
Toews
White (North Vancouver)
Williams

Readers will notice that this list includes Stephen Harper. Indeed, it includes every single Canadian Alliance MP who voted, except for Keith Martin. 

Who's lying now, Mr. Harper?

Kevin Michael Grace, 3.00 p.m., May 4, 2004►

GUESS WHO’S READING THE AMBLER?

Paul Martin’s election team, that who. According to Jane Taber in today’s Globe and Mail,

Liberal Party officials are examining a series of election attack television ads that portray Conservative Leader Stephen Harper as a man who believes that new Canadians "shouldn't be allowed to vote" and who wants "U.S.-style health care."

So when did Stephen Harper suggest that "new Canadians" (so much more "vibrant" than "old Canadians," doncha know) shouldn’t be allowed to vote?

An ad called "West of Winnipeg" criticizes Mr. Harper's views on immigrants and the West and features a still picture of him in the House of Commons as a male narrator says:

Stephen Harper says, quote, west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from Eastern Canada, people who live in ghettos and who are not integrated into Western Canadian society.

"What's Harper saying? New Canadians shouldn't be allowed to vote."

Now why does that quotation sound familiar? Ah, because Harper said those words to me. No, not the words about immigrants not being allowed to vote, because Harper never said them and doesn’t believe that. (But note the Liberals's conflation of "new Canadians" and "citizens.")

I had asked Harper for comments regarding the fury that had possessed Western Canada after Jean Chretien had won a third consecutive majority government by trashing the Canadian Alliance as "extremist" and insinuating that Western Canadians were not fully-fledged Canadians. Specifically, I asked Harper to identify the Western Canadians voters that chose to identify with the Liberal Party despite its contempt for the West. The answer Harper gave was the correct one, and everyone knows it. Is it an accident, for instance, that the Reform/Canadian Alliance never won a single seat in the City of Vancouver despite all but sweeping B.C. in 1993, 1997 and 2000? Of course not. A Liberal friend of mine once took me as an observer to a Liberal fundraising dinner in Edmonton. Apart from the elected officials present, the two of us possessed almost the only white faces in the room. I could list many other such examples.

The Liberals are playing a dangerous game. It is the same game they played to such success in 2000. Warren Kinsella announced some time before that election was called that his party would characterize the Canadian Alliance as not in tune with "Canadian values." For the first time, abortion was introduced as a campaign issue. Did the Liberals really want the campaign to be a referendum on abortion, specifically the fact that Canada has no restrictions whatsoever on it? Certainly not. They gambled that Alliance leader Stockwell Day would run and hide. And he did, simpering about his "agenda of respect," even as he threatened to sue Chretien.

How will Stephen Harper respond to the Liberal attacks? The 2002 Canadian Alliance leadership campaign provides a clue. It is almost forgotten now, but during that campaign, Harper was accused of "bigotry" by the Stockwell Day and Grant Hill campaigns. One excuse for this libel was Harper’s employment of Betty Granger as a campaign organizer. Granger had been forced to resign as an Alliance candidate in 2000 after she made some entirely sensible comments about the social effects of large-scale Asian immigration on British Columbia. Not so sensible was Granger's declaration, "We've got to have [an] open-door [immigration] policy for many, many reasons," but no one paid any attention to that.

Stockwell Day refused to support Granger in 2000; he grovelled instead, reminding everyone yet again he has a Philippina grandchild. And Stephen Harper refused to support Granger in 2002. Carolyn Stewart Olsen, then as now Harper’s press secretary, whined that Day’s campaign team "must sleep with Warren Kinsella’s book under their pillows." Tom Flanagan, then Harper’s campaign manager and now tipped to run the Conservatives's 2004 election campaign, told me, "I can’t stop people in other campaigns from doing what they do. Stephen can’t build his campaign around her."

The accusations made against the Harper campaign two years ago of "bigotry" and "homophobia" (yes!) didn’t much impress Canadian Alliance members. But these accusations were a time bomb inserted under Stephen Harper’s future. Harper isn’t running against am