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Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Desperate Men: Julian, Stephen and Justin
Cry him a river:
For 30 days Julian Fantino held his tongue, campaigning as the Conservative candidate in the suburban Toronto riding of Vaughan, surviving on pizza and trying to ignore the Liberal attacks.
He had vowed to take the high road during his campaign – and he did.
“It was difficult, if you will, to maintain that focus because it did get quite personal, quite nasty and ugly,” he said during an interview this week.
Almost like he was under siege. The normal rules of life just weren't being obeyed, and no one was helping out. Thankfully Julian just kept his mouth shut and everything turned out fine, for him anyway. Sound familiar?
He asserts the Liberals were “desperate” but that he would rather have “faced dangerous people with loaded guns than some of the nonsense” during the campaign.
So the take away from this is that the former commissioner, while physically brave, is thin-skinned when it comes to personal attacks. I'm sure he'll do fine in Ottawa. The histrionic wordplay should also stand him in good stead in our nation's capital.
“I am driven by three things: I know who I am; I know what I’m here to do and I know who I’m here to serve. All this other stuff is just noise, distraction and I am not going to be distracted by what I have to do and what the people of Vaughan have entrusted me to do. They can play their silly games all they want but, you know, sticks and stones …”
Except for one name that the former commissioner was desperate to escape during the campaign: Caledonia. Last week I wrote about how Julian Fantino's by-election is a battle in a long-war against the Harper Tories.
Having long ago abandoned the pretence of being financially conservative, the Conservative Party has, in its promotion of Julian Fantino's political career, destroyed their credibility on law and order. Yet this is only the latest in a series of incidents that show that the Conservatives are not serious about protecting Canadians. Rather than offering an agenda that focuses on fighting violent criminals, they instead target petty fraudsters and perpetrators of victimless "crimes," while dismantling effective rehabilitation strategies. When faced with a challenged to Canada's archaic prostitution laws, the Prime Minister could only crack bad jokes.
After the amateur stand-up, Stephen Harper went on to say that prostitution is "bad for society." I'm sure it is. There are many things which are bad for society. Governments, especially ones as financially strained as ours, need to prioritize.
Hassling the desperate and pathetic, however immoral their actions, is a waste of police resources. What consenting adults do out of sight of the rest of us is their concern. It isn't so much that most Canadians want to keep prostitution illegal, it's that they want it kept away from their families and neighbourhoods. Municipal ordinances can accomplish the same end, but that would not allow the Prime Minister to grandstand as a defender of Canadian decency.
What the Harper Tories are offering Canadians, despite the howling from the paranoid Left, is not conservatism, but it's opposite, a sort of kitsch conservatism. Instead of the real deal, we get an imitation so cheap and shabby it insults the original.
Rather than bringing into a government a real cop, willing to take on judges who play amateur sociologist, we get a politician in uniform, who looked the other way as the rule of law was subverted in rural Canada. Instead of fighting real criminals, we get crusades against petty hustlers, gamblers and whores. This isn't puritanism - the puritans believed the law should be applied equally - but political sleight of hand. See how hard we are cracking down on crime? Belying the rhetoric, real action is needed to overhaul our courts and prisons.
The Prime Minister faces no real opposition. Both Michael Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau are afraid of touching Caledonia, or challenging the Tory's potemkin village of law and order. Any criticism of the so-called crack down on petty offenders, for nonsensical crimes, would immediately get the Grit leader targeted as a "hug-thug" politician. A silly bit of mud slinging that Julian Fantino directed at Justin Trudeau last week. It was a response to the son of the former Prime Minister's over the top attack on Fantino, based on the former commissioner's criticisms of the Charter of Rights. Both Fantino and Trudeau, however, remained silent on Caledonia through out the campaign.
In modern politics even the most trivial of indiscretions is quickly transformed into a scandal, with the inevitable "gate" suffix soon appended. There is no Caledoniagate. That is the scandal. Recruiting a law and order candidate who didn't uphold the laws should be as laughable as a finance minister who has filed for bankruptcy. The latter would never happen, because it would be bad optics. The former is happening for the same reason.
The impeccably liberal Justin Trudeau, the Crown Prince of Grits, is not going to take on a cause that might have him branded as a racist. The nominally conservative Stephen Harper, who is presumed to be a bigot by many simply because of his party label, is definitely not going to risk the charge of racism. This has allowed the real racists of the Caledonia tragedy to go unpunished, those who have exploited the two-tier policing of the occupied lands to their own ends. The near silence from our political class, and the media, is the biggest scandal in Canada today.
Posted by Richard Anderson on December 7, 2010 | Permalink
Comments
"The near silence from our political class, and the media, is the biggest scandal in Canada today."
Basically, PUBLIUS, Canadian politicians are cowed by the media in Canada, a coterie of progressive leftist SHI* !!
Posted by: Joe Molnar | 2010-12-07 9:53:10 AM
"The Prime Minister faces no real opposition. Both Michael Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau are afraid of touching Caledonia...."
The PM is not in opposition of Iggy and the Spawn of Satan so much as in competition for the same electorate, the mushy middle. Harper has been courting the liberal vote for years and now he needs it to stay in power. As he loses his base he needs to replace them with centrist Libs and now, faux "Law and Order" fascists.
Good Post Publius.
Posted by: John Chittick | 2010-12-07 10:01:23 AM
The biggest problem with "First Nations" is that political correctness has made them believe they are in complete control of their own domain and no one is challenging that assumption. When it has been challenged the far left judges have no problem discriminating against the whites to make up for discriminating against the Indians in the past.With a taxpayer funded army of white lawyers and political correctness on their side they can give their middle finger to the white establishment on their quest to take back the country. Emboldened by every court decision they are making great headway in that direction, knowing full well that no one has any idea on how to stop them.
Politicians have yet to learn what every mother of a large family already knows.
"If you do not treat all your children the same, there will be problems down the line".
There again, it's that damned common sense thingi that is so incompatible with government thinking.
Posted by: peterj | 2010-12-07 11:39:52 AM
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