National Affairs by Claire Hoy — Wynne’s remarks ‘McCarthyite’

December 8, 2015 · 0 Comments

Back in the early 1950s, when the Western world was worried about the spread of Communism, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy exploited the legitimate concerns people had and went several steps too far in fighting the threat to our way of life.
McCarthy’s overzealous and destructive attacks on anybody he deemed to be either an actual communist or knew or even associated with a communist, destroyed the lives and careers of many innocent people, many of which were convicted in the court of public opinion for the apparent crime of holding small “l” liberal views.
McCarthy was eventually stopped, but his work on a major Washington committee turned him into a symbol of intolerance.
So when you hear people accused of McCarthyism, it’s a sure sign that whatever the topic, they’ve gone way over the top in their quest to rid the earth of their particular bugaboo.
Which brings us, alas, to Premier Kathleen Wynne, and her recent outrageous pronouncement before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s refugee rescue plans were ultimately settled, that Canadians who opposed those plans, or even expressed reservations, were inherently racist.
Since public opinion polls at the time showed that 67 per cent of Canadians were not on board with Trudeau’s initial plans to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of December — which even Trudeau recognized was an absurd target — Wynne in essence was accusing two-thirds of Canadians of being “closet racists.”
While she has since attempted weakly to walk it back a bit, she did publicly muse, in true McCarthyite fashion, that those who questioned the refugee plans were, in fact, tapping into a “racist vein,” a scurrilous charge that prompted former British Columbia premier and one-time federal Liberal health minister under Jean Chrétien Ujjal Dosanjh to issue a strongly-worded public rebuke of Wynne (a rebuke, sadly, that much of the tame mainstream media in this province dramatically under-played. (You can bet had a Tory premier made such ill-considered remarks and been rebuked by a former Liberal premier, the Ontario media would have been all over it. But there you are.)
In a Web posting headlined: “Premier Wynne, Did you just call me a racist and a xenophobe?” Dosanjh, an Indian who emigrated to Canada by way of the U.K. when he was 20, answered his own question by writing, “Yes, you Did!”
“Did I take it personally? Yes. I took it personally on behalf of the 67 per cent Canadians who disagree with the year-end deadline imposed by the Canadian government . . .” He said that “in one fell swoop” Wynne was labelling two-thirds of Canadians as racists, “And worse, in the same breath you talked about the presence in Canada of the twin ‘devils of . . . racism and xenophonbia.’ In the instant I became a racist and a xenophobe.”
This is a man whose outspoken views in the name of freedom outraged Sikh extremists in B.C. to the point that in 1985 he suffered a broken hand and a battered head requiring 80 stitches after being attacked by a thug wielding an iron bar. Later, when he was a B.C. MLA, somebody left a burning Molotov cocktail on his office desk.
And Wynne would dare to label such a man as a racist and xenophobe for the “crime” of questioning her matinee idol Justin Trudeau? It’s beyond shameful.
Then again, Wynne followed that up in a speech to a women’s rights group by saying the government should put what she called a “race lens” on all government policies.
Two things about that: Since Wynne apparently defines racism as views which don’t coincide with her own, that’s a pretty frightening concept; and secondly, it seems that “racial profiling” — which police were accused of through carding and Wynne’s government has banned — seems to be an evil concept, except when Liberals do it.
Witness, as another example, Trudeau’s edict that Syrian refugees are welcome to Canada except, of course, if they are single straight males. Talk about profiling. Wow.
That part of the equation prompted NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair to accuse Trudeau of the same “politics of fear and exclusion” he had previously accused Stephen Harper of practising. “Excluding them in advance is not the Canadian way,” he said, which may be true for most Canadians but apparently not for Wynne and Trudeau.
And while we’re on the topic of McCarthyite overstatements, let us ponder the absurdity and offensive nature of David Suzuki, who recently compared people who favour working in the Alberta oilsands to the slave-owning 19th century plantation owners, prompting National Post columnist Rex Murphy to characterize it as “an analogy . . . so feeble, it would distress the mind of a mildly alert five-year-old . . .”
And these, dear hearts, are the people who are going to save the world for the pure and the just.
God help us.