"Some people maintain that Canada's basic and overriding interest is national sovereignty. Others are convinced that what really
matters is economic growth. Still others give basic priority to social justice. There are also those who believe that all
effort should be concentrated on transformation of the UN into a world government. Yet another view holds that the most
urgent problem we must tackle is pollution of natural environments. It is not difficult to find arguments in support of every
one of these positions. But that does not mean that any one of them qualifies as indisputable number one priority.
That place surely must be reserved for the historical priority of free men throughout the ages, namely preservation of freedom.
Without freedom there can be no national sovereignty, no social justice, no economic growth worth working for, no peace
and no enjoyment of life even in the cleanest natural environment. That fact that from time immemorial people have valued
freedom above life itself attests that there is no higher priority in the scale of human values. Doubts on this score can
only come from those who have inherited the blessings of freedom, take them for granted and have no notion what loss of freedom means."
"The intimate spiritual and material bonds between Canada and the US grew out of shared concepts of human life within the
framework of the highest degree of individual and political freedom ever attained anywhere in the world. No one maintains
that the socio-politico-economic system of North America, as practiced with minor variations in Canada and the US, is perfect.
Perfection in the sense of idealistic abstractions is beyond the grasp of human nature. But with all its obvious shortcomings our social
system provinces a flexible structure of unparalleled liberty and unparalleled affluence.
The Soviet system of coercive messianism, spawned by contempt of what Marx called "the miserable individual," and fueled
by organized hate, has produced a rigid totalitarian structure that cannot tolerate any of the expressions of freedom we take
for granted. At the same time, while building and enormous military machine and providing material privileges for the
upper crust of its self-appointed ruling clique, it maintains a low general standard of living in what is in effect an archaic police
state. It takes a peculiar mind to seek cordial relations with the rulers of such a society. And it takes a streak of
perversion (or perhaps, blindness) in that peculiar mind to set as a national goal the same type of intimate relations
with a totalitarian state that we have enjoyed, until recently, with the congenial democracy south of the border.
Mr. Trudeau has such a a peculiar mind. While he was exercising it in the ivory tower of the academe, the harm he could do,
though not negligible, was fairly limited. As Prime Minister, who commands a rubber-stamping majority in Parliament, he is in a position to put the country on collision course
with its vital interests. "
Sunday, September 16, 2007
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