A rchive Date
[ 23-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]

And Zundel used to be a Liberal

By PAUL STANWAY

-- Edmonton Sun

November 17, 2000

I've looked for Stockwell Day's horns and I haven't been able to find them.

He didn't have any the last time I talked to him, but that was months ago and with everything I've been reading about the Alliance leader I thought I ought to check.

Some weeks ago I predicted that this federal election campaign would be one of the nastiest on record, and so far I haven't been disappointed. The Liberal strategy has been very clear, since the moment Jean Chretien explained that the main reason we're having this election is the need to save the country from Day and the Alliance.

There's some sound political logic to that. Why give a revitalized Alliance, under a new leader and reaching for broader national support, the time to get comfortable?

Hit them with an election campaign before they're properly organized and before Days get comfortable with his new national role.

But once the writ is dropped, elections are notorious for developing a personality all their own. And this one is decidedly ugly.

Without much of a record or a vision for the future, the Liberals have fallen back on the demonization of Day and the Alliance as the main plank of their campaign. This is no longer an argument about policy and taxes, if it ever was. It has become a blatant attempt to slander Day, his party and his supporters. In the simplistic rhetoric of the 2000 election campaign, the Grits are the good guys and Day and the Alliance are scary people. Perhaps even evil people.

So far, Toronto Liberal MP, and former Ontario cabinet minister, Elinor Caplan has been the most direct in voicing this claim. According to Caplan, you can best know somebody by the company they keep, and Stock Day's Alliance and its supporters are "Holocaust deniers, prominent bigots and racists."

As usual in politics, there is a practical side to this slander. The Chretien government has recently taken heat from the Jewish community for its support of anti-Israel motions at the United Nations, while the Alliance opposes such motions. As a prominent Jew in the Chretien government Caplan is particularly vulnerable to criticism, and a handy way to deflect that is to suggest Day and the Alliance are a home for anti-Semites.

Presumably she is referring to Doug Christie, onetime western separatist and the lawyer who defended both Jim Keegstra and Ernst Zundel. Christie has expressed support for Day and even bought an Alliance membership - which the party revoked as soon as it was discovered. But is that any more significant than the fact Zundel was once a Liberal and even campaigned for the Liberal leadership in 1968?

If Christie's brief association with the Alliance makes Day a bigot and a racist, doesn't Zundel's involvement with the Grits leave Chretien, and perhaps even Caplan, open to the same charge? What exactly are the rules of guilt by association?

And then there's Day's open Christian faith. Our live-and-let-live, secular society tends to be scared of people with strong moral convictions. It's easy to suggest that they will "force" their beliefs on others.

But presumably Chretien and Caplan have moral convictions, too. Why is it we assume their personal beliefs will not impact on their political judgment, while we're encouraged to believe that Day's will?

This week CBC (that would be the CBC the Alliance would like to privatize) trotted out an old, unflattering television profile of Day, including a claim by a teacher at Red Deer College that Day once told a student audience he believes, literally, in the biblical version of creation. So what? In recent years some cutting edge science has produced evidence to support the view that creation was more than random.

The point is that in a decade and a half as a legislator in Alberta, Day didn't "force" his beliefs on the province. He appears to understand that many people don't share his views.

The intolerance in this election campaign has so far been all in one direction. It is intolerance of ideas, of reform and, ultimately, of change. And that, folks, really is very scary.

Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com

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