CANADA ACCIDENTALLY RECOGNIZES INDEPENDENCE OF BASQUE COUNTRY, TRANSNISTRIA, NAGORNO-KARABAKH, ABKHAZIA, SOUTH OSSETIA, QUEBEC
McLeans Magazine
t=20080320_121651_6872
March 20 2008
Canada
Must-reads: George Jonas on Kosovo; Peter Worthington on Obama.
American grab-bag
Racist preachers, adulterous state governors and Ed Stelmach, together
under one heading!
An admiring Peter Worthington post-mortems Barack Obama’s "A More
Perfect Nation" speech in the Toronto Sun, arguing he’s likely saved
his skin as far as the Democratic nomination goes. But he says "the
real damage may come if (when) he wins the nomination and moves into
the presidential campaign against Republican John McCain." For better
or for worse, he argues, race is now a part of this campaign. And
"Hillary’s ‘white’ supporters, in unknown numbers, may opt for McCain
over voting for Obama."
"At the moment," The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson notes, "there are
three senators, 11 representatives and nine former representatives
who have been indicted or who are under investigation" for various
kinds of malfeasance. The ex-governor of New Jersey may or may not
have had a "hardcore consensual sex orgy" with his gay lover and
wife, who is furiously denying the allegation for the purposes of
the couple’s extremely messy divorce. And incoming New York governor
David Paterson "disclosed this week that, yes, he had had several
affairs during his marriage. But that was okay; so had his wife."
Considering the "nation expects its leaders to demonstrate their
Christian commitment," Ibbitson thinks, "there are an awful lot of
misbehaving public figures, these days."
Continued Below
If Obama or Clinton find themselves in the White House and stick
by their protectionist guns, the Edmonton Journal’s Graham Thomson
reports they’ll soon be engaging the Alberta government in a duel
over so-called "country of origin" food labelling. Supporters say
they just want Americans to know where their food comes from, but as
Ed Stelmach recently said, "how do you label a Campbell’s soup can"
in 2008? Protectionists don’t much care, says Thomson. They just know
"some food-processing companies will buy 100-per-cent American raw
materials so they don’t have to through the bureaucratic bother of
figuring out where the various ingredients came from."
Unintended consequences and the Balkans
Kosovo’s independence is the inevitable result of a war launched by
"politicians who emerged from a 1960s generation of confused peaceniks,
eco-freaks and draft resisters," George Jonas writes in the National
Post. The hippies sought to forestall the ethnic cleansing of Albanians
and facilitated that of Serbs, in short, and Jonas thinks superior
men and women would have foreseen that outcome.
"[P]erhaps we hesitated recognizing [Kosovo]," he suggests, "because
we recognized that we should have hesitated going to war for it."
The Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom, meanwhile, is one of these people
who believe Canada has set a precedent in Kosovo-that the government
must now recognize "any ethnically based province that decides to
unilaterally break away from a larger state." Why is this the case,
you might ask? Because of Hamas, of course-what are you, simple?
Because Stephen Harper "has insisted on injecting what he calls a
moral element into foreign policy"-for example, by not speaking to
the legitimately elected government in the Gaza Strip-Walkom believes
that recognizing Kosovo must indicate moral acceptance of ethnic
nationalism and unilateral declarations of independence.
It seems to us, however, that the moralist approach actually gives
a government more leeway than the "all nations are equal" approach
to make such distinctions. But then, it also seems to us that Quebec
is about as much like Kosovo as it is like Nigeria, so clearly we’re
missing something.
Duly noted Behold the Star’s James Travers, Master of Ledes: "Bob
Rae is just too good to be entirely true to Stephane Dion." We lost
count of the number of things that could mean at about eight. What
Travers wants it to mean is that while "[b]uilding a more robust
team" is in the Liberal party’s interests, it necessarily comes at
the price of Rae’s own leadership ambitions and at the risk of what
Travers sees as innate suspicion among Canadians of "government by
committee." And while Rae reduced months of Liberal capitulation to
a handy catchphrase, "strategic patience," where Dion struggled for
months to articulate the strategy, Travers says no one man can shore
up the party’s "flimsy platform planks."
"It’s hard to imagine" how Jean Charest’s $75,000-per-year salary
top-up from the Quebec Liberals "makes Charest any more obligated than
he already is to the party that got him his job in the first place,
and on which he depends to keep it," says the Montreal Gazette’s Don
MacPherson. As such, he argues, it’s especially eyebrow-raising that
the party didn’t bother telling anyone about it for 10 years. What
account did it come out of, he wonders? Can a donor contribute directly
to that account, and, if so, "does Charest know the identities of
his benefactors?" All are questions the Liberals could have avoided
with proactive disclosure, MacPherson writes, and that the province
could prevent by joining every other Canadian province and legislating
disclosure of outside sources of politicians’ income.
The Globe’s Christie Blatchford reports from the trial of three army
reservists charged with murdering a 59-year-old Toronto man, ostensibly
for the crime of sleeping on a park bench. The defence strategy is
beginning to emerge, she relates: the three men were drunk as lords,
and the victim, Paul Croutch, may not have been as helpless as it
appears. We have yet to discern the relevance of whether the three
men were "weekend warrior" soldiers, as per their defence attorney
John Rosen, or seasoned "combat soldiers," as prosecutors allege. But
we can certainly see why Blatchford would want to cover this trial.