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The heavy cost of false gloom and doom SALT SPRING ISLAND - It is true that like most Canadians, before I began to write for the Post, I thought myself as neither left nor right, and before I returned to Canada in '99, I was even a little proud of the Chretien government because, without thinking about it any further, I saw it as egalitarian, even a force for good that would pursue systemic racism and sexism, and protect the poor, at home and abroad with some vigour. I must have been in some kind of drunk tank of the brain. It took about 10 months of listening (trying not to listen but actually being unable to tear one's ears away from the train wreck which is the federal Liberals at work and play) to change my mind entirely. It is impossible to escape the fact that they are undemocratic, corrupt, and -- refugee policies spring easily to mind -- flat out dangerous. Plus they're wildly inefficient. They have been in power with one or two interludes for more than seventy years. And if that happens, our bureaucrats and federal appointees, supposedly neutral but never so, feel they have the God-given right to remake our culture as they see fit, without telling us about it. A reader who is a Canadian delegate to the United Nations writes about sitting agog with dismay while the U.S. delegation plotted to subvert the Bush agenda. Much bureaucratic decision making happens sub rosa and is never noticed until you realize you cannot do anything, you cannot innovate, you cannot profit, so risk is pointless, you cannot grow because you are caught in a Lilliputian web, made up of thousands and thousands of useless regulations, not to mention confiscatory taxes. And, you may remember, since the studies started in 1971, all bureaucratic budgets have been measured to be either twice or three times the size of analogous private firms operating under competition. Little wonder we are 16th on the innovation index. This has made me a huge conservative. Which means I have lost most of my friends. Lucky for me, easily half live out of Canada and don't read the Post, but if they ever did, I would be shunted off to the "oh yes, we used to know her, lovely but went mad" column. Conservatism in the delirious professions of writing, film or whatever, is tantamount to being a child abuser or religious nut, who babbles on about Jaysus all the time. So what has losing most of my friends meant to me? Good question. To which I answer: relief. Actually for a while I was upset. And a little paranoid. And even lonely. But now, I've recognized that I don't have to listen to all that complaining any more. I don't have to listen to urban scare stories about escaped mutating pathogens, the sudden suspicious uptick in cancer and I don't have to take Maude Barlow as anything but what she is: a shake-down artist for eco- stalinists. I don't have to endure common ground paranoia about the wickedness of the rest of the world, while "we" are so virtuous and powerless. I don't have to have environmentalists for dinner, and watch one, with her doctorate "proving" her probity and rightness, tip my treasured Charles Rennie McIntosh chair back onto two legs, while she impassioned to the point of insanity, feeds us utter crap about the 12,000 species a day which are going extinct. Huge relief. Huge. Besides, I've found it's possible to make new friends and when I talk to them, it is almost good enough to winkle me out of my reading chair past 10 o'clock at night and drink French Martinis till very late. Fun. Oh yes, I remember that. Vaguely. Perhaps this might penetrate the gloom of ignorance. The Right is fun. The Left is not. That is because the left, I can say with some authority, are narcissist to the core. As one friend describes an alcoholic relation: 'He's the only person who calls every day to say 'How am I today?' " Since they are in self-inflicted psychic agony about the hell of their own lives, they are exquisitely sensitive to the imagined suffering of those less privileged than themselves. Phantom sufferings. The battles of the left have been, largely, won. Many were right and useful. Were. Not any more. Nothing but mop-up operations needed. Has that stopped the left and its lapdog press? No, things are getting worse, systemic racism is somehow further entrenched, genetic even, and definitely institutional, as is systemic sexism. Plus the sky is quite literally falling! Something must be done. But we've spent all the money! There's no more! Nothing can be done! We're doomed! Unreason rules. This can be illustrated by one fact: All the residents of Greater Vancouver's Fraser Valley believe that the air is getting worse. The most precise of measuring instruments reports that the air has been improving for years. They don't believe the measurements, they'd rather believe our national alarmist David Suzuki. This is a thrall, which cannot last. And when it begins to crack we will see that our immaturity has been exploited to the nonce by that raddled old manipulator in Ottawa -- who has managed to define "Canadian" as "federal Liberal," as "dose that has gives and dose that has not, gets" in his own private Trotskyite list of beatitudes. Bend over and pay. These are not, decidedly not, the virtues that Canada, needful of more stoic determination and self-reliance than any other country to settle, was built on. Prosecuted into one more generation, it will find us controlled entirely by the United States, or foreign corporate interests, our monetary and fiscal policy out of our hands, and us, a once-proud dream, pensioned off on the ever- decreasing value of our water, our trees, our mines and our oil wells. Remittance men.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.