CKNW Editorial
for September 1, 1999

We deserve what we get in this country – never again should we criticize politicians. We deserve the Donald Marshall case, the Milgaard case and the Morin case where the end justified the means and the police made up the rules as they went along. We deserve an authoritarian form of government getting more and more dictatorial every passing month. We deserve police departments which confiscate things they have no right to confiscate and nullify votes they have no right to nullify. We have no one but ourselves to blame for a premier who refused to do the honourable thing and an attorney-general who didn’t have the courage to force him to do it.

Why do we deserve these things? Because most of us support a guy like John Reynolds who brands people as criminals before a word of evidence is heard … most of us support denying due process to people who are guaranteed that due process by the Supreme Court of our country … and because most of us only support the rule of law and due process when it suits us. Even NW newscasts, which should know better, spoke all day yesterday about illegal immigrants and suspected illegal migrants. Suspected by whom? Why not suspected legitimate refugees? Since when do News Departments speculate, as hard news, the outcome of hearings yet to be held? But these are the standards we accept when it suits us so let’s hear no more bitching about corruptness in government or politicians who don’t do the proper thing. Why should they have any more respect for the rule of law and due process than the people who elect them? They can only play to the peanut gallery because there is one.

On another matter, I was utterly astonished at the naivete of Alexa McDonough yesterday. The sweet innocence was breathtaking.

The NDP will recognize Quebeckers as a “people” without the faintest, foggiest notion of what constitutional and governmental impact that will have. It’s so typical of them. It’s the same way Mike Harcourt, Premier Dan Miller and Dave Zirnhelt airily took timber licences away from Carrier Lumber – a bigger disgrace, incidentally, than the Glen Clark affair. As long as something looks and feels good, is sort of warm and fuzzy – why not do it? There can be no bad consequences for doing what makes you feel good, now, can there?

The history of the long struggle for equality of provinces, waged especially by the far western provinces, means absolutely nothing to the NDP – all they can see is the possibility of some votes in the next election. It’s as if, of course, there was no referendum in 1992 – that has become, to the establishment, the non event of the century.

Then there is the approach to globalization with Ms McDonough telling us all about the Tobin tax. I must admit it caught me by surprise – I had some vague recollection of something called that but couldn’t recall what it was. Greg, a producer for the Bill Good show, as I canvassed the floor for answers, directed us to the right spot and my ladies did some internet research. This is an old hoary economic chestnut … what Ms McDonough told us yesterday was that her party relies, for their policy on globalization, upon a scheme whereby all the countries in the world which have securities or futures marketplaces, will band together to tax any what they call “spot” transactions which is to say speculations which are intended only to turn a quick profit rather than accomplish some nobler ideal such as giving stability to, say, pork bellies or banana crops.

Never mind the mind boggling effort it will take to get this done – remember, as long as there is a market anywhere, the game will be played except once the game goes elsewhere all income and capital gains taxes will be lost to the country whose tax has discouraged it. Never mind the numbing bureaucratic effort monitoring such activity, and insuperable difficulties the sorting out the gambling from the investment will require  … this is the NDP’s national answer to globalization! Lots of merry bureaucrats at work, happily tossing the investment baby out with the gambling bath water then wondering where the money went.

But, we happily note from her own lips, Alexa McDonough is a dreamer. Isn’t that comforting – as people like George Soros take on and beat entire banking systems from computers in New York while the party of Alexa McDonough will dream their way to an unenforceable tax notion which will require the unanimous approval of all … every single one of developed and developing nations. Moreover, it’s so typical that for a solution they find a discredited 20 year old notion. Although I must admit for the NDP to be merely 20 years behind the times is progress of a sort.

How good the NDP are at articulating problems – how inept they are at coming up with solutions. But it is encouraging, is it not, to note that the NDP is still here to dream the impossible dream?