essay

 

Why Canada Slept

 

“When they said, Repent, repent.

I don’t know what they meant.”

 

                            Leonard Cohen

                            “The End”

 

    When, at the conclusion of the previous installment, I alluded to God’s hard lesson which I see Canada as beginning to be  made to suffer (justifiably—as all of God’s hard lessons are irrefutably justifiable) for Canada’s overweening self-importance as it continues to shirk its masculine responsibilities in the world, what I had in mind was the recent minor outbreak of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in the Greater Toronto Area.  As a storyteller, I am consistently awed by the measured appropriateness of God’s (for want of a better term) “plot devices.”  There could be no more appropriate punishment for a quasi-nation of Chicken Little “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” hypochondriacs than a new infectious disease.

    [Any nation with Marxist national healthcare will, inevitably, become a nation of hypochondriacs.  Two examples should suffice:  a) the average Ontarian consumes $500 worth of taxpayer-subsidized prescription medicine in a given year and b) an outbreak of tuberculosis in two Toronto homeless shelters in 2001—that saw 15 men develop an active form of the disease and three of them die of related complications—is described by The Tuberculosis Action Group as an “epidemic”].

    With the SARS outbreak, God, it seemed to me, was saying quite eloquently, “You don’t want to participate with the United States in the war on terrorism?  You want to abandon your friends and allies, the U.S., Australia and Britain to take the side of Syria, Russia, France and…China?  Okay, here’s a little gift from your new friends, the Chinese.  It’s called SARS and they got it from wild animals whose flesh they eat in the misbegotten pagan belief that it will make them stronger. If that’s the direction you want to go, by all  means, here, let Me give you a helping hand.” (of course, for those lacking faith in God, events like the SARS outbreak which took place only in Canada—of all Western countries—and only in Toronto—of all North American cities, when Vancouver and San Francisco both have much larger Asian populations—are easily dismissed as coincidences however self-evidently astronomical the odds against their occurrence.  To the secular-minded the sheer astronomical unlikelihood of only Toronto suffering a SARS outbreak is refuted as an astronomical unlikelihood simply because it has occurred.  This short-circuited, “snake-eating-its-tail” brand of “logic” consistently amazes me ).

   It isn’t just that SARS will take a nice, big chunk of change out of the Canadian economy (a billion dollars or more is the current estimate) which economy, by our shirking of our masculine responsibilities since 11 September, has been artificially inflated relative to the U.S. economy—the most  shameful brand of wartime profiteering imaginable: “Look how much richer we’ve become by making you shoulder our military responsibilities” making munitions manufacturers (who are, at least, making a contribution) look absolutely saintly by comparison.  Along with God’s characteristic measured appropriateness of financial consequence, there was the devastating blow to the self-important MMT (Marxist Metropolitan Toronto) ego which so craves the good opinion of the world upon which it so frequently looks down its parochial, self-important, collectivist nose.  Having made no effort, post-11 September, to conceal its soul-deep malignant anti-Americanism—with many of the charter members of the Toronto media politburo openly decrying the world’s vanguard democracy as warmongers, tyrants and murderers and attempting to persuade others of the validity of that scurrilous viewpoint—turnabout was certainly fair play as Toronto’s citizens found themselves, in April and May, being turned away by international cruise lines and tourist destinations, scrutinized for tell-tale SARS symptoms at American airport security (with—it’s not difficult to imagine—the air of unmistakable distaste one would reserve for examining someone else’s used Kleenex).  I’m sure that National Post columnist Sharon Dunn wasn’t alone in self-consciously assuring her hosts on a visit to Alberta that she hadn’t been back to Toronto in quite some time (and exaggerating the length of time so as to put her at a greater remove from her city of residence).  How many Torontonians, in just so Judas-like a fashion, abandoned their previously beloved city in conversations in foreign lands just as they had abandoned the United States in its time of greatest need?  While it would be unlikely that they would have experienced a sense of shame in doing this—shame requires morality, after all, and morality is most unfashionable among the Marxists—they at least would have experienced the inescapable discomfort of the pariah.  A “pariahdom” which was entirely unjustified—the risk of contracting SARS from a Torontonian was virtually non-existent even at the height of the “crisis” in  mid-April—just as their own attempts over the previous year-and-a-half to make the United States into a pariah nation were, likewise, entirely unjustified. There alone the sign of God’s immutable—but, again, scrupulously  measured—disfavour would be in inescapable evidence.  But, as Isaiah says, “for all this, His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still” when it came to which parts of the economy would be hardest hit by SARS.  First, the hotels and restaurants of Toronto which—as the Canadian dollar was in steep decline in the late ‘90s—had indulged in (no other term for it, and I speak as a regular patron of Toronto hotels) price-gouging, ensuring that the cost of a Toronto hotel room and meal always matched the cost of a New York hotel room and meal, dollar-for-dollar, putting a Toronto hotel stay and restaurant meal arbitrarily out of the price range of virtually all Canadians.  Second, our bloated-but-still-insatiable Marxist healthcare system which continues to devour tens of billions upon tens of billions of tax dollars with little-to-no accountability even as the quality of healthcare declines.  Last but not least, and ancillary to that second point, it meant that the over-paid fellow-travelers of the Marxist Nurses Unions at last and for a brief period earned their keep both in the hazard to their health (the only real threat the SARS “crisis” posed was to hospital patients and health care workers) and in the fact that the members of their inflated ranks had, at last, to do some real work for a change as vast numbers of them were quarantined.  The fact that the hospitals continued to function with vast numbers of nurses under quarantine would, in any other venue besides a Marxist state, indicate that there is (to put it as politely as possible) something of an “over-staffing problem” nurse-wise.

    [Allow me to indulge in a short digression which somewhat widens the aim of my heavy artillery to include the tendency of ALL of the Western democracies at budget time to cut funding to “everything except Health and Education,” the two professions most overwhelmingly dominated by women.  The willful blindness to this transparent cash grab by the Marxist-feminists will, I’m sure, be seen as the first of the global village’s worldwide con games of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (which, hopefully, will be called the Sim Syndrome after its discoverer, a cartoonist and essayist of the time much maligned by Marxist-feminists as an evil misogynist.) (An uncharacteristically lucid observation on the state of Marxist health care in this country came last fall from a former Quebec health minister, Claude Forget, who noted “Canadians need to discard the obsolete concept of comprehensiveness, and focus public spending where it is most appropriate—toward prevention, costly research and development technologies and care for patients with severe illnesses.  Regular doctor visits and everyday primary hospital care can be handled more efficiently through affordable private insurance programs.” Affordable, that is, for responsible individuals, less affordable for hypochondriacs, which is how it should be.)]

   When the provincial government of Premier Ernie Eves offered bonus pay to those nurses who worked at the handful of affected Toronto hospitals, the nurse’s unions—in a misguided but characteristic Marxist AND feminist misapprehension of “fairness”—demanded that ALL of Ontario’s nurses should get an equal amount of bonus pay. Christie Blatchford struck, I think, a telling and resonant note in her column of 7 June—after observing that the public support which had been so much in evidence post-11 September for firemen and policemen had proven conspicuous by its absence when it came to nurses in the SARS “crisis”—in quoting from a Globe and Mail story about the retirement of Kathleen Connors,

 

the fiery retiring president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, who, the story said, has “forged a reputation as one of the most successful labour organizers in Canadian history” and led the way in replacing “the stereotype of the meek handmaiden” with that “of the self-assured militant.”  Ms. Connors herself has battled cancer, and she sounds like an admirable woman, and I mean her no disrespect.  But the victory the paper credits in large measure to her strikes me as rather Pyrrhic.  That old handmaiden may have been meek, but by God, she was good, she was kind, and she was loved, if not always respected. 

 

     “But for all this, His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.”

     But, even as I prepared to document my view on the SARS “crisis”,  it became apparent that God was not, by any means, finished dealing with Canada and Ontario quite yet.  In the “bolt from the blue” fashion which is so characteristic of God’s justice (the sudden occurrence which, again, is entirely inexplicable but for the fact that it has, self-evidently, occurred), word quite unexpectedly arrived that the Ontario Court of Appeal had not only declared same-sex marriage legal in the province of Ontario, but had instituted the change as a fait accompli, which would take effect immediately.  Following the lead of the unelected judges (two unelected hollowed-out ventriloquist puppet husbands and an unelected feminist), the Chrétien government declined to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, even though the whole issue of separate homosexual rights had been flatly rejected by the politicians who framed the Canadian Charter of Rights back in the 1980s, even though nearly every legislature in the country has voted against recognizing same-sex marriages, even though the federal government itself recently went out of its way to include the notion in law that marriage is a union of a man and a woman “to the exclusion of all others” and even though the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights—having traveled to 12 cities, heard almost 500 witnesses and received 250,000 letters—was in the midst of composing a first draft of its report on the subject, gay marriage pro or con (“It was not a good week for parliamentary participatory democracy,” wrote committee co-chair, John McKay in a letter to the National Post, 14 June, by way of a public apology to those 500 witnesses).  Pro it is, and, overnight—by overturning all prior mandates and with no input from the citizenry of our quasi-nation state, quasi-dominion, with no debate in our largely irrelevant House of Commons and no vote by our elected representatives—Canada became only the third country in the world (the other two are Belgium and the Netherlands) to legalize homosexual  marriage. 

    If you’re wondering how this can happen in an ostensibly democratic country, Mark Steyn in his column of 6 August of last year anticipated our present situation of Marxist judicial activism when he wrote;

 

The left has an hilarious bumper sticker: “Celebrate Diversity.” In the newsrooms of America, they celebrate diversity of race, diversity of gender, diversity of orientation, diversity of everything except the only diversity that matters: diversity of thought.  In Canada, the ruthless homogeneity of diversity is even more advanced.  Someone asked me recently why I hardly ever write about domestic politics these days.  As James Baker said of the Balkans, I don’t have a dog in this fight.  The “ gay marriage” argument sums up Canadian politics very nicely: All the action’s between the Liberal government and an even more “progressive” court.  The court stakes out its turf, the government adopts a position a smidgeonette to the right of the court, and thereby claims to be pragmatic, moderate, a restraining influence on judicial activism.  The role of the conservative movement in all this is totally irrelevant, though from time to time some obscure western backbencher will sportingly offer some off-the-cuff soundbite enabling him to be denounced as a homophobic cross-burning Holocaust denier.

 

    If it had not been for 11 September, I would probably never have written anything about the politics of my own country for the reason citied by Mr. Steyn.  The Marxist-feminist extremism of Canadian policy-making and its judicial hyper-activism, whereby its highest courts enact Marxist-feminist policy—at a great remove from democratic accountability in any sensible definition of the term—has made participation in Canadian democracy meaningless for anyone besides Marxist-feminists.  One votes and that is all one can do (in my case, for a candidate representing one of Canada’s two conservative parties, in the remote possibility that he might possess vestigial testicles of some sort—a remote possibility, indeed, in an environment where inherent squishiness is perceived to be the highest good) and then one takes it as a given that the Supreme Court of Canada will just institute the Marxist-feminist agenda one program at a time between elections.  Or allow the Ontario Court of Appeal to do so by simply rubber stamping the lower court’s government-by-fiat.

    [The historical reason behind our Supreme Court being so peculiarly unaccountable was neatly encapsulated by Jacob Ziegel, professor of law emeritus at the University of Toronto who wrote in “A Supreme democratic deficit” (National Post 12 August 02):  “Canada’s Constitution doesn’t even mention the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court Act, which governs appointments to the Court, was adopted long before Canada became a full sovereign nation and while the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London was still the final tribunal for the resolution of questions of Canadian constitutional and private law.  Consequently, for many years, appointments to the Supreme Court were treated not very differently from appointments to provincial superior courts and rested ultimately in the discretion of the incumbent prime minister.” Our extended national adolescence—partly out on our own, partly still living in Mother England’s basement—has resulted in a number of atrophied and truncated national traits avoided by the United States in starting from square one with a clean slate.  Someone had to provide checks and balances on Supreme Court Justices, ergo “advise and consent” hearings. Canada contented itself with the assurance that if our Supreme Court really started getting “off the rails” the deputy undersecretary to the Chairman of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council would always be there to say, “Don’t be silly. Go to your room.” And presumably he was, right up until the point—the repatriation of our Constitution in 1982—where he suddenly wasn’t, so we could no longer say, through diplomatic channels “Daaaad! Beverly’s being a Marxist poopy-head.” And get the whole thing sorted out. “Boy, are you EVER going to get it, NOW, Beverly.”]

    As the Supreme Court has continued about its unelected, unilateral dismantling of so many institutions which many of us in this country (more the fools, we) thought of as the bedrock foundations of our quasi-nation, quasi-dominion, Beverly McLachlin, the Chief Justice of our Supreme Court—in a speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto characteristic of her “because I said so” feminist style—reiterated her frequently stated view that judges are mere interpreters of the law and not the initiators of it:  This brand of “positive reinforcement” is something the Chief Justice is called upon to deliver rather more often than her predecessors had been. So far she seems more than happy to do so no matter how at odds with reality her interpretation of events continues to be (although the psychic weight of sustaining Canada’s judicial reality on the shaky foundation of “because I said so” has caused her to look progressively more haggard and worn in her news photos):

 

    “This activity of interpretation is more than simply deciding what these and those words mean,” she said.  Rather, it involves assigning meaning where it is unclear, applying straightforward laws to complex situations, harmonizing laws that appear to be in conflict, and determining whether challenged laws are constitutional. 

   “All this is high level, specialized, intellectual work,” she said. “Contrary to public myth, judges do not pluck meanings from the air according to their political stripe…The judge is more like a gardener, shaping and nurturing the plants so that they grow as intended, occasionally pulling out a weed that offends the plan on which the garden is based.”

        

   This is characteristic of Marxist-feminist newspeak inasmuch as it seeks to obfuscate its own self-evident political bias through a simple, blatant, bald-faced  denial of the facts. The facts, as documented in a National Post editorial marking the appointment of Quebec’s Marie Deschamps to the Court—“Until the moment that Justice Deschamps’ selection was announced on Thursday, only a select few were even aware that she was under consideration”—(“How to pick judges,” 10 August 02):  “Whereas the high court overturned just one law in the 20 years preceding the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it has since become one of the country’s most potent political forces.  Since 1982, it has set policy on capital punishment, abortion, minority rights, labour law, and countless other issues.”  As Vic Toews, the Canadian Alliance justice critic pointed out in reaction to the Chief Justice’s speech, “Specifically, in respect of the inclusion of sexual orientation under the Charter, during the course of its deliberations on that issue, Parliament voted on a number of occasions not to include the phrase.  As a result, it was not included by Parliament in the final text of the Charter.  However, this deliberate choice on the part of Parliament was simply ignored by the Supreme Court, which subsequently decided to ‘read in’ sexual orientation into the charter.” If Madame Justice McLachlin is accused of instituting a political agenda in contravention of every current and historical precedent in this country and in open defiance of the democratic will of the people of Canada as expressed through Parliament (as we have seen), Marxist-feminism requires only that she reassure us that that is not the case and we are all expected to be content with that. As she said elsewhere in her speech, “In a pluralistic constitutional democracy, majorities are not permitted to impose their moral values, their conception of the good life, at the expense of those who do not control political life.” The Chief Justice even coined a pejorative, “majoritarianism” to deplore what I had previously supposed to be the cornerstone of democracy: that the majority view is supposed to prevail.  Silly me. It seems to be the Chief Justice’s view that the imposing of moral values must be left to representatives of the Marxist-feminist constituency who—as unelected Supreme Court appointees—do, for the most part, now control all meaningful aspects of political life in this country. As to her decidedly Yoohwhooist, goddess-of-the-national-garden analogy—Peter Sellers Goes to the Supreme Court, so to speak—it’s hard not to be curious as to what the metaphorical weed in the garden of Canadian jurisprudence was that so badly needed pulling in the instituting of same sex marriage, and what was the plan on which the garden is based against which that weed allegedly offended?  I suppose it really depends on whose garden you’re talking about and whose weed is getting pulled.      

   In a comparable fashion, when an Ipsos-Reid poll indicated that judges were rated lower in the public’s estimation than were police officers (barely 50% thought they were doing a good job while 48% said they were doing an average or poor job):

 

   Judge McLachlin said she is not alarmed about the survey’s findings because there have also been polls reporting that judges are doing a good job. 

    ‘There was one just a couple of months ago that suggested the Canadian public places enormous confidence in the judiciary and indeed suggested that most Canadians would rather have judges than politicians decide some of the issues,” she said. 

     “Not that I endorse that. I believe the political process has a primary role to play in resolving social issues.”

 

     The role of the political process, evidently, being to get out of the way of Chief Justice McLachlin and her colleagues as they institute their feminist agenda. Small wonder that they are so opposed to American-style “vetting” of candidates for the Supreme Court, denouncing the U.S. Senate “advise and consent” confirmation hearings as a “politicization” of the  judicial branch of government.  I can see her point.  Forced to publicly answer questions about one’s lunatic fringe opinions is apt to skew the direction of the Court towards the mainstream of Canadian public opinion.  And we can’t have that.  A National Post reader in a 20 June letter to the editor pointed out that as far as the politicizing of appointments to the Supreme Court go, you can’t get much more politicized than the system that we have, where the Justices are chosen by means of “a secretive selection process that takes place within the Liberal party.”   

    The legalization of gay marriage and the subversion of democracy under which it was achieved was, for me, personally, on so many levels, a gratifying validation of what I had identified two years ago in “Tangent”(Tangent II, to be precise) as the feminist-homosexualist axis and a perfect example of how Marxist- feminist-homosexualists in this country actively undermine democracy in the interests of their own mutual agenda.  At another level, I see in this, as well, God’s handiwork, which seems more relevant to the present topic of the post-Sept. 11 repercussions which Canadians have brought upon themselves and “Why Canada Slept” with our ongoing, vile and unconscionable choices and actions since then. Only this one, I see as being directed specifically at Canada’s men—or, more accurately, Canada’s hollowed-out ventriloquist puppet husbands.  That is, I think God engineered the removal of all meaningful impediments to the legalization of homosexual marriage as a way of saying to Canada’s husbands, “Listen, as long as you’re as comfortable as you appear to be with shirking your masculine responsibilities, allowing Canada’s military to erode to a level of complete irrelevance, sneering at the Real Men of the United States who are taking up the slack and profiteering at their expense,  you don’t mind if we make it official do you?  You don’t mind if we pass a law making Canada’s husbands officially interchangeable with a bunch of homosexuals?” If there was, on the part of Canada’s husbands, any reaction to this in that realm of spirit—in the dark counsels of our sleep, as Norman Mailer once put it—in which all dialogues with God are conducted, I assume that the reaction of Canada’s husbands was a certain uneasy shuffling of their spiritual feet, nervous spiritual laughter and uneasy spiritual glances darting in the direction of their wives (long the custodians of what once were, long, long ago their pre-husbandly testicles and, consequently, the court of first and last resort for all husbandly opinions in this country). I don’t imagine, however, that apart from these minor bits of “stage business”  there was any formal reply—either from the husbands to God or from the wives (to the husbands’ pleading looks for matrimonial guidance).  Nor do I think God (quite apart from His omniscience) expected one.  “That’s what I figured.  Okay. Now it’s official. Canada’s husbands are, by law, interchangeable with a bunch of homosexuals.”

   “But for all this, His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.”

    If there was ignorant, gleeful celebration in the Marxist-feminist-homosexualist ranks at this diminishment of Canada’s husbands in their own eyes (or whatever parts of their anatomy have not been fully excavated by their wives) and in the eyes of the world—and all Marxist-feminist-homosexualist gleeful celebration will, inevitably, be founded on ignorance—it will, I think, prove to be short-lived.  In the Marxist-feminist ranks because the ruling really does serve to pull aside the curtain which has previously concealed the linkage between them—that is, their joint championing of redistribution of wealth in our society based not on merit, not on thrift, not on investment, not on achievement, but purely on the basis of existence.  Just as the Marxists believe that simply by virtue of his or her existence, a common labourer has a valid claim on his or her fair and substantial share of the wealth of the industrialist who employs him or her, so too do feminists believe that simply by virtue of existing they are entitled to a fair share of men’s possessions:  women are entitled to men’s jobs, women are entitled to men’s positions at universities, women must have equal access (which they don’t believe is a reciprocal right for men) to all venues where men gather and women who share domestic accommodations with men (for periods of time which the Marxist-feminist courts are actively whittling down from years to months) are entitled to half of their possessions, half of their accumulated wealth, half of all their future earnings. 

    The first anecdotal evidence of what happens when you add homosexualists to this unholy Marxist-feminist belief in implicit-entitlement-by-virtue-of-existence, arrives with the morning’s newspaper.  Two gay men in Toronto who had lived together happily for a number of years are, having obtained a marriage license, now on the verge of breaking up.  One wanted a prenuptial agreement saying that if the marriage dissolved neither partner was obliged to support the other financially, while the other (presumably less wealthy partner) rebelled at this. Three guesses as to which one was listed on the marriage license as “bride” (our Marxist-feminist courts, in their unseemly haste, have, evidently, left the Municipal governments of this province with inadequate and culturally insensitive marriage license application forms which demand that one of the partners has to be designated as the bride in a given union. When this appalling breech of political correctness is addressed—hopefully before the Implicit Entitlement Brigade can file a class action lawsuit seeking six-figure redress at taxpayer expense for the grievous and lasting emotional damage that filling out such a form has collectively inflicted upon their eggshell-fragile and sensitive selves—it would be interesting to see the look on a young heterosexual fiancée’s face as he is forced to check off whether he is Groom 1 or Groom 2.  Any feminist absolutist worth her (or her husband’s) salt, of course, would maintain that under the inviolate terms of a Woman’s Right to Choose, it should be up to the woman to decide whether she wants to be called a bride or a groom.  Any feminist absolutist likewise worth her (or her husband’s) salt would also maintain that it should be up to the woman as to whether her hubby-to-be will officially enter the legal record as “bride” or “groom”.  Fortunately, given the complete lack of so much as a mouse’s squeak of demurral on the part of Canada’s husbands at being made officially interchangeable with a bunch of homosexuals, this should not pose any great difficulty for Madame Bride or Madame Groom.  He will be Mr. Bride or Mr. Groom at her discretion and he will learn to like it if he knows what’s good for him.

    “But for all this, His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.”

     However, even taken as a given (and what evidence do we have to the contrary?) that all of Canada’s present husbands have happily acquiesced to being deemed legally interchangeable with a bunch of homosexuals, that does lead to some larger questions centering on Canada’s potential or future husbands that will, in my opinion, cause the present feminist glee at Canada’s legalization of homosexual marriage to be extremely short-lived, indeed.  The first large question is: how many Men are there in Canada?  Since we are examining this from Madame Bride/Madame Groom’s feminist vantage point, let me slightly reframe the question.  How many Harrison Fords and Sean Connerys (not the actors themselves, which are unknown private commodities, but their real-world counterparts in the Masculine/Iconic sense) are there in Canada?  That is, how many “men’s men who are highly desirable to women” exist in the available pool of potential Canadian husbands?  I think its safe to assume that after three decades of Marxist-feminist totalitarian indoctrination and brainwashing (a.k.a. the Canadian public school system) and the ubiquity of the feminist-homosexualist axis that, whatever the exact numbers of that population, those numbers are getting smaller and smaller by the day.

     Only women could actively pursue three decades-plus of a “take no prisoners” program of legal, judicial, personal and parental castration and at the end of it plaintively wail, “Where have all the real men gone?” Very much of a piece with “be careful what you wish for,” I think a lot of women now regret, too late, the “power plays” they have insisted on boxing their boyfriends and husbands into.  Women win—the issue at hand—and still lose—by having emasculated their partners in their own eyes and in his. I remember my last girlfriend, in the heat of a discussion about feminism’s onset in 1970,  tossing off the observation, “I don’t understand why you let us get away with it.”  It played a substantial part in our ultimate breakup, being an irresolvable nutcracker of a dilemma. If I let her “get away with” those typical power plays in which all modern women indulge themselves—in the interests of being the strong, independent women that Oprah Winfrey assures them they must be—then I’m a pussy-whipped failure as a man both in her eyes and in my own.  If I draw the line in the sand and say, “That’s it. No more,”  I’m an unreasoning and abusive misogynist and my life becomes an on-going nightmare of having to decide where someone else’s limitations are to be drawn.  I took to telling her that what she needed was a feminist, some nice squishy guy that she could push around.  Boy, did that get a reaction.  But it was true.  If you want a strong, masculine boyfriend, you better use your woman’s right to choose to choose to do as you’re told.  If you want a squish, go find one.  But don’t go around picking fights, testing the boundaries to see what you can and can’t “get away with”.  For me, for any man, the only way out of that box is the door.

     In that context, the same-sex marriage “victory” for Canadian feminists has to turn to ashes in their mouths.  In one fell swoop, women have attained the dominant role in every marriage in the country.  Their viewpoint— that we are all one big, squishy interchangeable gender—has prevailed.  The very idea of a Canadian husband being a “real” man now needs quotation marks around it (what real man would just stand there and take it while he was made interchangeable with homosexuals?).  I think it equally safe to assume that the lavender scent of homosexuality having been added to the term “marriage,” to the term “husband,” to the term “groom,”(especially that last one which suddenly conjures visions of limp-wristed, prancing horse trainers on Victorian estates in Gothic Romance novels) has caused those marital waters—to which the intended Canadian version of “Harrison Ford/Sean Connery as Prey” are being led and from which their Palpitating Feminist Predators most fervently desire that they shall choose to deeply drink—to either recede and vanish like the mirage they have self-evidently now become or to be made so self-evidently poisonous in the eyes of a Harrison Ford or a Sean Connery as to make the avoidance of them a prime masculine directive (“Heer there bee monstors”).  That is, marriage, which could previously be diminished in the masculine mind as a “really serious form of dating” at the low end—rather like going out for dinner and a movie only on a permanent basis—and at the high end as the most honourable and noble estate to which a gentleman could devote the entirety of his life and heart in a pure conjoining with that counterpart heart—Barry Windsor-Smith’s High Romantic “puzzle in a chest” the “heart that might conjure my own” as he put it in “The Beguiling”—will now, instead (thanks to the ham-fisted bungling and cow-in-a-china-shop vandalism perpetrated upon the institution of marriage by Canada’s masculine Marxist feminists) be evermore cast in the more transparently odious  form of, “If you REALLY loved me you’d GLADLY sign up for ballet class WITH me and HAPPILY wear a leotard and slippers and BE THRILLED to prance and mince around in front of a bunch of strangers.” This is worlds apart from “dinner and a movie on a permanent basis” and/or any form of masculine High Romanticism.  In short, the matrimonial task now before Canada’s collectivist Madame Brides/Madame Grooms is to try to entice Harrison Ford or Sean Connery to join them (and their fruity allies) in their court-appointed, brand spanking new Bisexual, Transsexual and Unisexual Husbands Society of Canada.  The phrase “good fucking luck” leaps to mind.  Consider the protocols of the already “too-too camp for words” wedding ceremony itself which await.  When, as a husband, you are invited to the nuptials of your wife’s hairdresser, Troy, and his bride/groom-to-be, Lance, what will Miss Manners say is your obligation in the reception line? Will a pair of limp and dewy Troy-and-Lance handshakes suffice to (ahem) discharge your societal obligation or will you be expected to offer your cheek for them to kiss or is your own kiss upon their respective cheeks to be considered de rigueur, welcoming them as your fellow grooms to the interchangeably- gendered and hallowed halls of Canadian Husbandness?  What if Troy or Lance asks you to slow-dance at the reception?  Well, of course you should.  You aren’t a homophobe, are you? How much easier it would have been (it will seem to you, in retrospect), to just have maintained a respectable military budget in this country and to stick by our American allies.  Or maybe you and Troy and Lance will “hit it off” and the four of you interchangeable bride/grooms can do “that couples thing” and vacation at a nude beach somewhere. 

    “For all this, His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.”

    With the legalization of homosexual marriage drastically diminishing the likelihood of feminists landing themselves a Harrison Ford- or Sean Connery-type and having to restrict themselves, therefore, to candidates drawn from the “feministically-agreeable” but squishy ranks of those males who are “darned proud to be considered interchangeable with homosexuals”…

     [this jarring self-assessment—which will be made sincerely in the best squishy, liberal tradition of universal acceptance and celebration of everything and everyone, no matter what and no matter who (by the sort of people who see Yasser Arafat as a statesman)—far from reassuring the masculine women at which it is directed will instead, I think, exacerbate the entirely  justifiable fear already rampant among feminist wives that these all-too-agreeably squishy partners they have been relegated to ensnaring within the marital web are more than “a little light in the loafers” and therefore at risk of “switching teams” somewhere in the course of “happily ever after” from being agreeably squishy with a masculine woman (that is, the apprehensive  feminist in question) to being agreeably squishy with a feminine man (that is, the homosexualists they themselves so closely and squishily resemble) ]

     …I think we may have—with the large strategic and large tactical feminist blunder which the legalization of gay marriage so clearly represents—actually turned the corner in Canada and begun the endgame in our protracted game of chess (well, okay, Chinese checkers, maybe) against our feminist antagonists.  For, even as the Marxist-feminists have, at one go, eliminated the possibility of any kind of marriage taking place between themselves and any male above a 6 on the Masculinity Scale and given that none of them can face being married to anyone below a 4 on that same scale, whatever hard numbers that translates into, statistically, the net effect, I think we are safe in assuming, is a dramatically diminished pool of even vaguely masculine potential husbands.

    “For all this, His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.”

    Coupled with all recent judicial efforts by our Marxist-feminist courts (having recognized that an infinitely greater peril to their “movement” is posed by the large financial repercussions implicit in loss of access to exponentially larger masculine wealth and exponentially larger masculine earning potential, previously siphoned off in exponentially large amounts through the near-universality of marriage and through the inevitability of draconian alimony settlements, heretofore the two largest sources of feminist wealth) to widen the ensnaring strands of the marital societal web (by unilaterally declaring common-law marriage to be legally the same as real marriage…

     [Although the first attempt to legally make common-law marriage the same as real marriage in this country was rejected by the Supreme Court, I am reasonably certain that the lone dissenting opinion offered by the now-retired Justice Claire L’Heureux Dubé—“To deny them a remedy because their partner chooses to avoid certain consequences creates a situation of exploitation”—combining as it does the stripping away of freedom of choice for men and implicitly making women the aggrieved victims in any situation where they don’t get exactly what they want is a sure bet for a Marxist-feminist reversal next time out]

     …by expanding common-law union to legally include affairs where the two participants shared friends in common and spent holidays together, to make a well-heeled boyfriend or lover responsible for child support payments for children not his own at the dissolution of an affair of as little as a  few months’ duration, and to move in the direction of making divorce the only legal agreement whose result is to be considered non-binding by making it possible for the courts to “revisit” alimony settlements in the event of “changed circumstances”) and given that most of the first generation of feminists have spent what draconian alimony settlements were settled upon them when they were still of a marriageable age and who now face their dotage with whatever tactical largesse the Marxist-feminist courts will be able to scrape together for them under whatever tissue-transparent veil of lies those courts will use to mask what is, as it has always been, misguided, unbecoming, belligerent and ungrateful notions of Implicit Entitlement…

    …well, let’s just say that it’s a very bad time for the exponentially widening population of the now largely unmarriageable feminist ranks to be contemplating a dramatically diminished pool of available husbands.  Considering the solution that they have chosen is to legally make choosing to be a boyfriend an equally perilous financial choice to choosing to be a husband, to make attendance at a sagging, tired old feminist’s Christmas dinner, or anniversary party or the sharing of friends with her legal grounds for getting “taken to the cleaners”…  Well, let’s just say that a Canadian Harrison Ford or a Canadian Sean Connery becomes a pipe dream in that context.  Even someone as squishy as Pee Wee Herman might well recognize that the only sane course of action is to “toss ‘em a quick fuck from time to time,”  have no friends in common with them and make yourself scarce around any holiday, birthday or anniversary. Hardly the stuff of Cinderella fantasies.     

     And we’re just at the beginning of that fundamental erosion in the living standards and the happiness of the philosophical contemporaries, the political daughters and the ideological  granddaughters of Betty Friedan…

    [as Robert Fulford wrote in “The many breeds of liar” National Post 24 May 03 “Betty Friedan, we now know, re-invented her life in The Feminine Mystique, the book that launched contemporary feminism.  She depicted herself as a naïve housewife, imprisoned in the suburbs, who finally rebelled.  We believed her story, till Daniel Horowitz of Amherst College, a Friedan admirer, discovered that for 15 years before her book appeared she had been writing about social issues for communist and other publications and organizing protests even in the dreaded suburbs. Betty the Innocent Housewife never existed.”]

    …Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer and their ilk.  As bad as things are for them now, they are only going to get worse—far, far worse—from here on in. Having myself been—gleefully—made a pariah by Marxist- feminists for the better part of ten years now, I must heartily concur with that old axiom that revenge is, indeed, a dish best savored cold. Even better, I had to do nothing at all myself in order to bring it about.  .

     And with that, I now begin the eighth and final installment of “Why Canada Slept”.

 

* * * * * * * *

 

    In summing up the various reasons “Why Canada Slept,” and why Canada continues to sleep its way through the early part of the Twenty-First Century; in drawing together all those threads which have—in the years since World War II—taken this country from the exalted heights of a first-class nation, with a proud and effective military very much in the vanguard of those who champion freedom and democracy everywhere around the globe, into the degraded cesspool of being one of Marxism’s last unhappy outposts among civilized nations, “feminism” seems to neatly encapsulate “where it all went wrong.” It is the centerpiece of my thesis that all of that last century’s “isms”—feminism, socialism, communism, multiculturalism, bilingualism—have as their unifying theme a belief in the mythology of life’s inherent unfairness.  The fetid breeding ground and the most fertile soil in which such belief most surely takes root and brings forth its most prodigious vegetation is in the female of the human species. 

    When Annika Sorenstam, recently, by invitation, eroded the early stages of an otherwise dignified PGA tour event into a media circus it seems to me that it distilled the centrality of the problem (her participation, inescapably, another Act of God—inexplicable as it was in any other way except that it self-evidently happened).  Essentially she, the Greatest Woman Golfer in the World was given a “bye” into a Men’s Only event—that is, she was not required to go through the initial qualifying events.  The feminist world literally trembled upon its now permanently wobbly axis at the prospect.  Generations of women raised on the implausibility of fairy tales and now sucking balefully at the withered teat of a more exponentially larger implausibility  (let us conservatively estimate the greater unlikelihood as being increased by a factor of ten) of the Charlie’s Angels Syndrome (for want of a better term)—that is, Women Who Kick Serious Butt (You Go, Girl) having excited themselves to a near orgasmic level at the prospect of Sorenstam triumphing over a hundred-and-some-odd men in the qualifying round and then whipping all of the remaining masculine asses over the ensuing weekend to emerge triumphant, Palas Athena, Diana of the Hunt and all that other Alan Moorian nonsense rolled into one… 

     I exaggerate?  Scarcely so. Either about the golfer herself or the Harry Potter happenstance she anticipated.  When queried, Sorenstam made it clear that she shared whole-heartedly in the feminist mass delusion, claiming (with a straight face) that her goal was total and absolute victory and that such a thing was, indeed, possible, “if all the stars line up correctly.” 

    Well.

     There you go.

     What can one say of a civilization that allows itself to be led to believe for one second that the greatest, most talented and most dedicated men, hard at their chosen profession as Professional Golfers will be scattered like ten pins by a woman “if all the stars line up correctly”?  Then there was the female columnist who, on the cusp of this earth-shattering event, ventured the opinion that absolute victory would be a great thing because, “it would give the men something to think about.” 

     Now, the stars have no influence over anything whatever.  They are pathetic, sagging hydrogen-and-helium chemical experimental attempts to imitate the Big Bang, guttering candle flames (writ however large).  Whether they line up or whether they hurtle across space-time and stick each other’s heads up their respective stellar  bums, they are not going to be able to make a woman win a PGA tournament.  Not today, not tomorrow, not fifty years from now.

    God could make it happen, of course. It would take some doing (mostly making sure that every man in the event, simultaneously, and by a wide margin had the worst professional day of his entire golfing life), but for an omnipotent being it would, I imagine, involve an exertion of Deistic power several orders of magnitude below that which had been required to, let us say,  part the Red Sea.

    But even if He had chosen to do so, even if Sorenstam—in a once-in-a-trillion-billion-to-the-power-of-a-quinitillion-sextillion chance—actually got onto the leader board and stayed there (let’s leave aside the exponentially more remote chance that she actually won the whole thing), what, exactly, would it have given the men to think about?  There would be a next tournament where (this time, presumably) Sorenstam would be required to jump through all the hoops the PGA had allowed her to bypass the first time.  What are the odds, do you suppose, that she could make it through even the first hoop?  Well, looking at how she ultimately did when she was given a “bye”—she finished 97th out of 109 contenders—the odds are that that would have been the last we would’ve heard from her.  Except in feminist circles, where they would still be doing victory laps fifty years from now and trumpeting the Greatest Achievement of All Time in Professional Golf on the basis of that one, fluke leader board appearance— even when Annika Sorenstam lay withered and gasping upon her deathbed.

     Quite the contrary to what the feminist columnist intended, far from the results of this once-in-a-lifetime (please, God) experiment giving men something to think about—those men of the PGA foolish enough to offer an opinion to the feminist barracudas of the international media, that Sorenstam was, self-evidently, toast even before she stepped up to the first tee were, to a man, proven right as events unfolded—it should have, but as usual didn’t give feminists something to think about.  To feminists, the reason that Sorenstam didn’t win the PGA event walking away is that the “stars didn’t line up correctly.”  Although they didn’t say it, most of them probably suspected a masculine conspiracy, someone spiked Sorenstam’s orange juice or hid tiny radio transmitters in her golf shoes because they just couldn’t bear the thought of all of them getting their asses kicked by a woman.  As usual, the men were diplomatic at the completely irrefutable humiliation that Annika Sorenstam underwent on behalf of feminists everywhere.  No one likes the idea of being humiliated and professional sports figures know that better than anyone.  One week you’re atop the leader board and the next week you fail to make the cut.  It happens.  When it comes to gloating, there is no purer example of “whatever goes around comes around” than professional sports, so in professional sports the vague non-answer has always and will always be the order of the day.  Tiger Woods ventured the opinion that she should be allowed to try to qualify for  more tournaments to give a more accurate idea of whether she can make the grade, rather than this “one chance to make-or-break”.  I’m pretty sure that he knew that what he was, in essence, proposing was that she should be allowed to humiliate herself as many times as she wanted, but in his high profile position, it sounded less cruel than what it would ultimately have proven to be if anyone had been foolish enough to institute it. 

     As with all of this feminist Alice Kicks Ass in Wonderland stuff,  they also refuse, in the squalid depths of  their three-decade-plus mass delusion to recognize an even more central and self-evident truth about the inherent foolishness of feminism.  That is, what would prevent any one of the golfers—in whose company Sorenstam found herself, at the bottom of everyone’s scorecard—from saying, “Say, what’s the big pot at the Ladies’ PGA event worth these days?  Seriously?  That much?  Hmm.  I got three kids that are going to be going to college in the next few years.  I guess I might take some time off the PGA circuit and see how I do on the LPGA circuit.”  Offhand, just from that one PGA event, there are at least fifty, perhaps as many as seventy-five professional golfers who are men who could smoke every feminist ass on the LPGA circuit, without breaking a sweat.  And make some good bucks (bucks is bucks) into the bargain.  But they wouldn’t.  And the masculine reason why they wouldn’t is why there’s a lesson in the Sorenstam Fiasco for feminists that they just won’t face:            

       For a man to win an LPGA tournament would be humiliating for the man.  It would be like entering a children’s T-ball tournament and really tearing up the base-paths and smacking some major home runs.  There isn’t enough money in the world to overcome the resulting humiliation of knowingly competing against…(pay attention, “ladies”)… 

       …inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings. 

       No, see.  You “shut down” again.  You’re shooting the messenger, Dave Sim the evil misogynist.  If we are all equal, or near-equal, then why wouldn’t a man be allowed to compete in an LPGA event?  By your own standards, under the terms of your own delusion, you should welcome Tiger Woods or any other male golfer to compete in the LPGA.  What could more accurately convey that having separate events constitutes patriarchal oppression and gender apartheid?  Having Tiger Woods or any other male golfer at an LPGA event would spur feminist golfers to dizzying new heights of greatness, wouldn’t it?  Well, wouldn’t it?  In contemplating sports figures being spurred to dizzying new heights of greatness by a sudden influx of outside talent, I’m reminded of the words of Leo Durocher (quoted by David Halberstam in Summer of ’49, his book about the Yankees-Red Sox series of that year) who, in spring training of 1947, headed off an early protest by some of his white players when Jackie Robinson became the first black man admitted into Major League Baseball, “He’s just the first. Just the first. They’re all going to come, and they’re going to be hungry, damned hungry, and if you don’t put out, they’ll take your jobs.”  And he was right.  He was right in 1947 and he’s right today.  There are a lot of different nationalities in Major League Baseball, a lot of different colours.  What’s the ratio of white guys to black guys in the Major Leagues today?  Who cares?  No one would even consider for a moment keeping a statistic like that (I spoke too soon: in their continuing program of finding racism here, there and everywhere, the Marxist-feminist Toronto Star has just made a Marxist-feminist splash with a piece on the Toronto Blue Jays called “The White Jays?”  It turns out that, statistically, the Toronto Blue Jays have three fewer ethnic minority players and three more Caucasian  players than the Major League Baseball team average.  They’ll be burning crosses on lawns any minute now).  The case is closed, the point is moot. 

     The reason that segregation was the inviolate rule before 1947 was simple, ugly, unreasoning prejudice, an unfair blockade of black men which was detrimental to baseball itself.  Since 1947, with genuine competition across the colour barrier, the caliber of player has improved across the board.  Different countries produce better players.  A disproportionate number of top-flight major leaguers come from the Dominican Republic.  One dinky little island.  Half of one dinky little island (the other half is Haiti).  But no one says, “You can’t play big league ball, you’re from half-a-dinky-little-island.”  Hell, no.  The scouts look for the best talent and bring them to training camp and a lot of those guys from that half-a-dinky-little-island make the cut and, in their rookie years, are clocking in at the top, whatever position they play. 

      There are, however, no women playing Major League Baseball. 

      But that isn’t because of prejudice, that is because of self-evident common sense.  If you brought a woman to training camp with 109 guys, she would clock in around 97 or so—if she was the Best Female Baseball Player in the World.  If every player from the Dominican Republic who was given a shot in the major leagues ended up clocking in at #97, you would see a lot fewer scouts flying to the DR.  Japan produces some good pitchers.  The first few pitchers from Japan weren’t so good.  They were amazing in Japan and so-so in North America.  For a while it looked as if Japanese pitchers were just going to be a fad that came and went.  But now there are enough Japanese pitchers who are amazing in Japan and amazing in North America that you will continue to see baseball scouts flying to Japan.  But they are only scouting pitchers.  Fielding and hitting, the Japanese just aren’t in the same league.  Is that prejudice?  If there is a sudden wave of amazing fielders and hitters from Japan dominating their positions, hell, yes, that will have turned out to be prejudice.  But, right now?  No.  The absolute best pitchers in Japan can compete in North America, they can fill a role.  Some of them can only pitch a few innings, some are only starters, some are only closers.  But some can pitch nine innings of top-notch ball (as, to my regret, Tomo Okha did last night, pitching for the Montreal Expos against the Blue Jays and beating them 10-2 in a two-hit complete game).  But hitters and fielders? No. Not from Japan.  At least, not right now.

     The affirmative action approach, if it were to be allowed, would be to turn Major League Baseball into a different game by limiting the speed at which you could pitch, imposing limitations on men and skewing female statistics so that men and women could compete in equal numbers in the same game.  Whatever the resulting atrocity would be, it would be a game in name only and it would bear only a cursory similarity to Major League Baseball.  The masculine way of things is to establish a minimum number of ground rules which apply to everyone and within which everyone is thereby enabled to perform to the highest extent of their own abilities, to achieve their own personal highest form of excellence.  The feminist approach would be to establish on Opening Day which team was most deserving of winning the World Series on the basis of its ability to meet exacting quotas of representation and to exhibit good cooperative social skills and to spend the rest of the season monkeying around with everyone’s stats until the desired result was achieved. 

     I maintain that these are across-the-board facts.  That the top hundred or two hundred members of any profession or discipline are going to be men.  The best woman in any profession or discipline is going to clock in, on a good day, around 97.  Feminism can and does skew this reality by all means, fair and foul, judicial and extra-legal (picketing, protest rallies, stacking rules committees, judging panels and personnel—excuse me, human resource—departments with Marxist-feminists).  There exists no established criteria that feminism is not willing to subvert, pervert, invert or otherwise monkey with, to no higher purpose than to see a female name in the top 10.  Of anything.  The purpose of women invading the court systems and using the court systems to pervert the legislative systems and using the school systems to indoctrinate and brainwash children into believing that the genders are interchangeable, is to entrench the lie that the only reason women previously clocked in at #97 is that men are jealous of women’s inherent superiority and that the top fifty positions, wherever and whenever and in whatever construct they exist must, in the interests of fairness,  consist either of twenty-five women and twenty-five men or anywhere up to and including fifty women and no men.

      To those still clinging to the fragile hope that feminists are interested in numerical parity only—that is, that feminists do not think the top fifty in any environment should consist half of women as a starting point and that any disproportion favouring women beyond that is all to the good, I cite the words of Quebec’s Francine Mathieu-Millaire, vice-president of the province’s Federation of Medical Specialists, addressing the disproportionately large number of female students occupying positions in the province’s medical courses—74% of the first-year medical class at Sherbrooke, 72% at Montreal and 67% at Laval (“Medical Dean Laments ‘The Absence of Men’”

National Post 8 November 02):

 

    “For once, when women establish themselves in a field, instead of analyzing why men are not going any more, we are going to give special treatment to a category of people?  I think that would be too bad,” she said.  When she was a medical student in the early 1970s, she was one of about a dozen women in her class. “We never heard anyone complaining, ‘It’s horrible, it’s all men in medicine,’” she said.

 

     On the contrary, I think that is exactly what we all heard, loudly and clearly from 1970 on, “It’s horrible, it’s all men in (fill in the blank).”  And, if I’m not mistaken, all skewing of criteria since then by our institutes of higher brainwashing…er…learning, including arbitrary quotas, were undertaken with the assurance that what the perpetrators were interested in was equality (or numerical parity, the feminists do tend to confuse the two).  Now that the disproportion skews the other way, we find that men are described as “a category of people” and that the ambition of numerical parity now constitutes “special treatment” for the members of that “category of people” and that it would be “too bad” if that disproportion was addressed. 

    The problem is endemic.  As Heather Sokoloff documents in her article “UN’s 30% rule on women a ‘forgotten target’” (National Post 2 February 02)—and, in the process, proving more self-revelatory than feminists have tended to be in these areas:

 

A quick count reveals more than 23% of Jean Chrétien’s 39-member Cabinet are women, a number that exceeds the percentage of women in the House of Commons (20.6%).  Even so, the figure falls short of the goal put forward by the United Nations.  In a report last year titled Progress of the World’s Women, the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) called for 30% of the world’s legislatures to be made up by women.

 

   To describe this as “undemocratic” is to understate the case dramatically.   The purpose of a democracy is to elect members to a given country’s legislature by the popular will of the people of that country, not to appoint them in numbers approved of by fiat of the world’s roving Marxist-feminists.  Anyway, it turns out that since the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women (what better place for such a conference?) “only eight countries have managed to surpass the 30% mark”.  But what is truly self-revealing is Miss or Mrs. Sokoloff’s next observation:

 

Of the 10 countries where women hold at least a quarter of parliamentary seats, almost all have instituted special measures to get women elected.  These include setting aside party nominations for women or legislating a minimum percentage of female representation.  The New South African constitution, for example , reserves 30% of seats in the national legislature for women.  Vietnam, Mozambique and Cuba have similar legislation.

 

     South Africa, Vietnam, Mozambique and Cuba, those staunch bastions of freedom and democracy for all the world’s people.  Wait, it gets better;

 

     In Germany, where women make up 33.6% of the government, political parties have made public commitments to promoting female politicians.  Germany’s Social Democratic Party requires 33% of its candidates to be women…In Canada, women make up under 21% of parliament; in Australia, 22%; the United Kingdom, 18.4%; and the United States, 12.5%.  None of these nations has formal quotas in place.

 

    I find the blithe diffidence with which this is enunciated—as if eschewing quotas in a democracy is evidence of something other than a reinforcement of democratic values—to be absolutely breathtaking.  Wait, it gets better:

 

    “The evidence suggests that, unless countries institute specific measures—and it doesn’t have to be quotas, but something—it is hard for women to make progress in parliament,” according to Professor Dianne Elson [wait for it] Professor of Global Social Change and Human Rights at the University of Essex, England.  In the 1993 and 1997 federal elections, Mr. Chrétien parachuted some female candidates into ridings, giving them the party nominations despite local riding opposition. 

    Critics decried the practice, saying the nominations should be based on merit alone, and it was dropped for the last election.  The number of women running in all of Canada’s national parties has also fallen off for each election since 1993. 

    Yet women are surpassing men in other fields without quotas or laws requiring a minimum level of female representation. 

   In Canada, women make up 48% of the paid labour force, and more than half of newly graduated doctors, lawyers and PhDs. 

   Why not politics?

 

    Perhaps because in politics you have to, you know, appeal to people?  They have to trust you enough to choose you to represent them?  That if you play by the rules in a parliamentary democracy you have to contend against actual opponents both in seeking a nomination and in standing for election?  That, in a parliamentary democracy, you aren’t just foisted upon people?  And that people in general don’t trust people who have been foisted upon them, as female medical and female legal students are in the Marxist-feminist University system?  One would suspect Miss or Mrs. Sokoloff of being disingenuous (does she honestly believe that there are no gender quotas imposed in this country’s medical and legal schools and graduate programs?) but I suspect such is not the case.  As much a product of her Marxist-feminist upbringing as any mid-50’s Soviet commissar, she is certain that she is discussing her subject in an intelligent fashion even as she scrupulously circumnavigates it.  “If the results don’t suit the facts then the facts must be mistaken, comrade.”  “Some” unnamed individuals come to her assistance in endeavouring to alleviate Miss or Mrs. Sokoloff’s  Marxist-feminist bewilderment:

 

Some say parliaments in Canada and the United Kingdom are too confrontational.  “Some women find that distasteful.  They would prefer something more cooperative,” Lisa Young, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, said. 

 

    Something along the “cooperative” lines which doubtless dictate how many women the political science department at the University of Calgary is required to employ and/or promote within the department at any given time.  Cooperative to the point of outright capitulation, in other words. 

 

“It’s just a miserable life, particularly in a giant country like Canada.  Imagine trying to have a family, particularly young children, and commuting back and forth from Prince George to Ottawa each week.  It’s craziness.”

 

    The Marxist-feminists serve notice that simply being airlifted into a given riding and by-passing the democratic process is inadequate to their purposes.  Either the House of Commons must install playground equipment within its chamber or arrange to move every riding in the country to within a twenty-minute drive of downtown Ottawa. 

 

     Christy Clark, Deputy Premier of British Columbia, who is charged with recruiting more women to the governing Liberal party, says the dearth of women in government has more to do with their increasing ambivalence towards politics. 

    ‘Women are doers, they are task-oriented.  They run households, take care of children and have careers.  As public skepticism about politics grows, they say, ‘Why would I waste my time in politics, you guys never get anything done?’” 

     M[anuscript] Clark, who is also the Education Minister, says she had to sit down with each potential female candidate and plead with them to run.  And that was in an election where Liberal candidates were virtually guaranteed a seat. 

 

     Now, call me old-fashioned, but if you are reduced to pleading with people to participate in the democratic process, then you are obviously talking to the wrong people.  A political candidate has to be more than willing, he has to be determined to win, secure in the conviction that his election will be for the betterment of his riding.  He may not run a household or take care of children, but perhaps those aren’t the two foremost credentials required for participation in good government.  Perhaps those who attain a place in our legislatures might find grounding in other disciplines useful.  Perhaps finding really nice clothes on sale and knowing all the latest gossip on Ben and JLo might even be (dare I say it) counter-productive to the very highest purposes of good democratic government?

      Now what is both interesting and terribly amusing (if you are as resigned as myself to sitting back and enjoying the comedic hi-jinks of High Liberalism in action) is that Sokoloff’s article had followed on the heels of a cabinet shuffle in January of last year, a parliamentary tradition at mid-term as various ministers get advanced, moved sideways or shuffled to the backbenches depending on their performance.  Well, a number of cabinet ministers had made a proper mess of things and most, if not all of them, were women.  Jane Stewart at Human Resources had just sort of…misplaced…a billion dollars in grants.  The money had been paid out, it just wasn’t clear to whom and there was no paper trail.  Elinor Caplan was, unfortunately, sitting in the Immigration seat when the 11 September music stopped and found herself quite out of her depth as a knee-jerk Marxist-feminist suddenly under the more watchful eye of the suddenly and understandably rather more unforgiving U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization, Anne McLellan, with a voice like a fog-horn, just blew anyone out of the Commons who dared call into question any of her odd decisions at Health and Hedy Fry, our Multiculturalism Minister (yes, yes, we actually have one of those) occupied headlines for several days by claiming in the Commons that “crosses were being burned on lawns in Prince George, even as we speak,”  which came as a complete surprise to the citizens of Prince George since this was the first they—or anyone else, including the Prince George Police Dept.— had heard of it.

      No, no, no, wait.  That isn’t the funny part.

      The funny part is that the Prime Minister, in shuffling his cabinet, quickly realized that he couldn’t get rid of a single one of them.  Why?  Because only 23% of his cabinet was composed of women, and if he got rid of all the incompetent women in his cabinet, that would leave him with a smaller percentage—like, say, 0%.  So, like everyone at the March Hare’s tea party, all the incompetent women just moved over one space, into another portfolio. 

       No, no, no, wait.  That isn’t the funniest part.

       The funniest part, is that having sustained all this damage below the waterline of his political credibility (the thinnest part of his hull to begin with) at the hands of all these Marxist-feminists that he had airlifted into ridings against the democratic will of the riding associations, all these Marxist-feminists who when they were elected, he promoted into cabinet way ahead of most of their more senior male colleagues, thereby sustaining more damage below the waterline of his political credibility—this time within his own party, here, at the first caucus meeting after the shuffle, Dr. Carolyn Bennett, Liberal MP for Toronto-St. Paul’s  (she who would soon have her own infamous Marxist-feminist moment-in-the-sun by declaring, “Americans. Hate those bastards.” as her own…singular…contribution to the post-11 September state of the Canada-U.S. alliance) Dr. Carolyn Bennett stands up at the caucus meeting and wants to know why the Prime Minister didn’t appoint more women to his cabinet instead of just shuffling the ones that he had!

      Well, Aline Chrétien’s dear hollowed-out ventriloquist puppet Prime Minister of a husband, by all accounts, just lost it.  Pounding on the table and ranting at the good doctor (doctor of what, I wonder?) about his irrefutable feminist bona fides.  And even at the time, he must’ve known that that was a very, very bad idea.  You can’t yell at a Marxist-feminist.  If you yell at a Marxist-feminist they stop even pretending to listen.  And they win.  It doesn’t matter how wrong they are, as with a wife, if you yell at them, they’re right and you’re wrong.  I’m chuckling to myself even as I’m picturing it.  The Prime Minister hoist to his own Marxist-feminist petard.  Having turned himself inside out and upside down and literally moved parliamentary heaven and earth to outfit his cabinet with incompetent individuals who would be out of their depth on a high school student council and then realizing that he was forced to retain every one of them (well, actually, Hedy Fry got the boot.  Even for a Marxist-feminist party, a minister claiming that imaginary crosses were, at that moment, being burned on imaginary lawns on the other side of the country—even when that minister is a female which the prime minister has had to scrape the bottom of the political barrel to find and which he would have to scrape even more deeply to replace—that proved to be beyond the pale of allowable ministerial conduct) now he’s being asked, with a straight face, to explain why we can’t have more of them.  A frosty reception from his own Madame Bride/Madame Groom must’ve awaited him upon his return to 24 Sussex Drive when word of his tantrum made it, with characteristic swiftness, through the Marxist-feminist grapevine.

     In the next few days, using the near-absolute dictatorial powers of the PMO, the prime minister, through his designated thug, Marlene Catterall, ensured that Sue Barnes was elected chairthingy of the finance committee (elbowing out of the way both Roy Cullen and Nick Discepola, a senior member of the committee, who was told “we need more women.” ) and performing the same strong-arm tactics on the foreign affairs committee on behalf of Jean Augustine. 

    This is, of course, that central Marxist-feminist tribal totem, affirmative action, at work.  That tribal totem which George Jonas (“Racism and sexism? That’s an affirmative” National Post 25 June 03) effectively distilled when he wrote

 

    Affirmative action is discrimination based on sex or race—in Canada, mainly on sex; in the U.S. mainly on race.  The practice is sometimes called reverse discrimination.  This is inaccurate because the reverse of discrimination is not to discriminate.  Affirmative action is discrimination, pure and simple—or simple, anyway, for its hardly pure.  It’s discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, sometimes religion—in short, discrimination based on the very factors no one should be discriminated for or against in a liberal society.

 

     Likewise, in an earlier column, recalling the early days of the civil rights movement in the ‘60s and the early efforts of the feminists in the ‘70s:

 

    In those days the ostensible aim of both movements was to end discrimination and achieve individual equality for all regardless of race or sex.  The call was for “colour-blind” equality, not for colour- or gender-conscious “empowerment.” I wrote my first article opposing affirmative action 25 years ago, in 1977.  I remember the date because the second session of Canada’s 30th Parliament passed Bill C-25 on June 2nd of that year.  It was the first piece of legislation in the country that called for “special programs” designed to eliminate past discrimination by “improving opportunities” for certain groups.

    “While it is possible to equalize opportunities for all,” I wrote in the Canadian Lawyer, “it is impossible to increase them for one group without decreasing them for another.  This, of course, is as obvious as it is offensive, and it has to be masked by some linguistic device. Hence affirmative action.”

 

    But, returning more specifically to “Why Canada Slept” and to gender-based legislative quotas and the Ottawa Marxist-feminist grapevine, it’s worth a side trip to examine one of its biggest grapes (as it were), the Rt. Hon. Sheila Copps, Hamilton East.  With the legalization of gay marriage, Liberal MP, Heritage Minister and leadership candidate Sheila Copps is now down to one campaign issue: that two elections from now, the Liberal party should make it mandatory that 50% of the candidates standing for election be women.  Joan Bryden, an old classmate of mine, dryly notes in her article “Rock Exits, Copps to Launch Bid” (National Post  15 January), “She does not specify in the speech how she would accomplish that goal.” Give Sheila Copps control of the PMO and I guarantee she will do it by whatever undemocratic means are available to her.  In Canada’s PMO? “Let me count the ways.” We’ll be lucky if its just the Liberals who will be forced by law to scrape together 150 warm female feminist bodies to run in half of Canada’s parliamentary ridings if Sheila Copps becomes prime minister. 

    Andrew Coyne, having been given the unenviable task of having to examine Copps’ twenty-year-long parliamentary career (as he astutely put it, “Copps has been failing upward her whole career.”) concluded with some salient observations which are more than a little universal when documenting Marxist-feminists:

 

    Ah, but you know what all this is, don’t you? It’s the backlash.  Men, male journalists in particular just can’t handle a strong woman.  From the first she has had to deal with this.  Her failed provincial leadership bid, at the age of 29?  “I was OK as a token woman, but it all changed when I was seen as a potential threat to the power structure.”  Her hot-headed antics in Opposition, where she made her name as a member of the Rat Pack? “If she were male,” a sympathizer commented at the time, “all this would have been forgiven long ago.”  Her decision to appear in black leather, astride a motorcycle, on the cover of Saturday Night magazine?  “I don’t think it’s the kind of question that would have been asked of a man.”  But, in fact, Copps is where she is today not in spite of being a woman, but because she is a woman.  A man who waded about in Hamilton Harbour, dressed in a wetsuit, to “prove” the water was safe, would be dismissed as a showboat.  Where are you, Stockwell Day [former leader of the Canadian Alliance, now its foreign affairs critic, who arrived at his first press conference in a wetsuit, riding a jet-ski.  Unlike Copps, he never recovered his credibility with the electorate after his wetsuit-costumed showboating]? The male MP who suggested to his caucus mates they should fly a hang-glider into the Super Bowl to protest against free trade would be told he needed some rest.  And a man who was known for shouting down his opponents, for issuing brusque orders and playing power games—well, there’s only one word for that sort of behaviour: macho.

 

     A June 18 article (“Copps plots for win on second ballot”) by Anne Dawson neatly encapsulates the approach that represents the “flip side” of the victimization which is used by Marxist-feminists to extract political leverage: “Ms. Copps has used this campaign to reintroduce herself to Liberals as a person with a positive, appealing outlook who makes ‘people feel good about themselves,’ and insists that it has worked with Liberals across the board.”  In a Marxist-feminist world, policies and programs take a back seat to making “people feel good about themselves” as the foremost aptitude in any would-be leader.

     But the “just because I’m a woman” victimization gambit is still the court of first resort and reached its nadir with Darlene “Dar” Heatherington, a Lethbridge, Alberta Councilthingy who attempted to run the police departments of Great Falls, Montana and Las Vegas, Nevada around a number of tight delusional little feminist circles insisting that she had been kidnapped, drugged and repeatedly sexually assaulted by a mysterious stranger while on a Municipal field trip to the U.S.  She’s on her third version of the story at this point (the second one involved running off with a fellow Albertan she met on the road) and has tearfully insisted that the massive media onslaught and inquisition (whose perpetrators just won’t seem to take “because I said so” for an answer—unlike her hollowed-out ventriloquist puppet husband who has stood resolutely four-square behind each of her three revised versions) wouldn’t be happening to her if she were a man.  Having returned to her place on city council even as she has been charged with public mischief for sending sexually-explicit threatening letters to herself, she’s right about that, but not in the way that she means.

    How many of these “internally fermenting grapes” you want to take a look at, folks?  I’ve got a pile of clippings here. How about Colleen Beaumier, Liberal MP for Brampton West-Mississauga, the lone Canadian parliamentarian to accept an invitation to meet with Iraq’s leaders as the United States was being tied up in knots at the UN, during a visit organized by Donn Lovette, a long-time Liberal party activist and former vice-president of the (wait for it) United Nations Association of Canada?  Here’s a few of her direct quotes from Linda Slobodian’s “Iraqi ministers ‘extremely charming,’ Liberal MP says”:

 

(of her one-hour private session with Naji Sabri, Saddam Hussein’s Foreign Minister): “He told me they have been revisiting some of their harsh laws and regulations.  He said President Saddam Hussein has spoken to his ministers and said some of these laws are harsh and they have to be revisited.  You know, [Mr. Sabri] could be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but certainly I got a feeling of sincerity.”

 

“I did not attack the political system here.  I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t true about Saddam Hussein.  Am I enamoured with these people?  They are extremely charming.” 

         

“First of all, I informed them that I wasn’t here officially for the Canadian government.  I told them I met with the Prime Minister and he had no problem with my position [!].  I did a little bit of PR for our Prime Minister.  I said he is leading his people; he is being a true leader, not trying to manipulate them [!!].  And, you know, part of me really believes that [!!!].  I’d like to come back as a pampered princess without a conscience in my next life [!!!!].”

 

(on encouraging Iraq to “open its doors” to the UN Human Rights Commission and to allow it to set up an office in Baghdad)   “He said they have been invited.  I did a little personal soul-wrenching on myself about the sanctions, how I think the United Nations and the entire world has blood on its hands because the sanctions are completely inhumane.  I’ve extended a hand on behalf of Canadians who feel the same way about humanity as I do.  So I have established some credibility.  Probably what the Iraqi officials have done for me, more than I have done for them, is they’ve given me some credibility with Canada.”