| Diogenes
couldn’t find an honest man. But he
should have taken his lantern and toured
Vancouver’s North Shore, where he
would have found several such men. In
particular he would have found Herb
Grubel, author of “A Professor In
Parliament.”
Grubel is an internationally
respected economist, and in 1993 he
entered Parliament as the Reform Party
MP for Capilano-Howe Sound, expecting, I
believe, that the time had come for the
Common Sense Revolution. But he soon
discovered that politics and the media
have more than their due complement of
snakes.
His experiences persuade me that
another naive fellow (myself, that is)
would have also been bitten below the
belt, if I had chosen to ignore Preston
Manning’s impossible demands and run
in the 1988 election. Still, it would
have been easier for an Angry Old Man
like me because I would neither have
expected nor given any quarter. Grubel,
on the other hand, is more of a
gentleman and gentlemen get more
headaches.,
One of his biggest headaches was
Manning. Preston had one of the
brightest minds in economics at his
disposal but was afraid to use it. Why?
Because the professor is politically
incorrect and was given to stating the
obvious on subjects like immigration,
the mismanagement of Indian affairs,
medicare, and much else. So, after a
serving for a while as Reform’s
“titular” Finance Critic — largely
ignored by Manning. — he’d had
enough.
One of the things he didn’t
understand was that all is not fair in
love and war, and that the most idiotic
barbs thrown by his critics would
quickly become atom bombs. That started
even before he was elected, when Pete
McMartin of the misnamed Progressive
Conservatives branded him as a racist.
The occasion was an all-candidates
meeting during which Grubel pointed out
that under the family reunification and
refugee rules, immigrants can select
themselves for entry to this country
rather than being selected. The
consequence, he pointed out, was that
people with zero qualifications were
coming in in large numbers and costing
us plenty. In saner times the opposite
had been the case.
Alan Dutton of the
government-financed B.C. Organization to
Fight Racism echoed McMartin’s cry and
the useful idiots in the media took up
the refrain. “Anti-racist group
targets two Reform candidates,” ran
the front-page headline in the Vancouver
Sun, just as if Dutton and his commie
comrades were pillars of society.
On Peter Gzowski’s Morningside
program, Manning was twice asked why he
didn’t drop Grubel. He didn’t drop
him, but neither did he defend him. And
relations between him and the professor
were always cool. |
God
forbid that awkward truths should roil
the waters. By the standards of the
politically correct, the professor
frequently put his foot in it.
“Candidate: objective economist or
extreme right winger?” was another
Vancouver Sun headline.
Reporter Frances Bula had gone out to
Simon Fraser University searching for
dirt. She got nowhere with the head of
the Economics Department, but found a
woman in Political Science who didn’t
like Grubel’s opposition to special
funding for radical feminist programs.
“He out right-wings the right wing,”
stated this character. “He’s
outrageous in his anti-feminism and
he’s a dangerous man with his view on
minorities.”
The “extreme right-winger”
headline was spread right across the
Sun’s Page Three. Later, as an MP, the
professor got into trouble for comparing
Indian reserves with life on the South
Sea Islands. All he was trying to say
was that the billions spent on Indian
welfare were getting them nowhere and
that a different approach was needed.
Once again the media went after him, and
once again Manning did nothing to
support him, even though the mail ran
massively in Grubel’s favor.
The (Vancouver) Province excelled
itself. It invited HERR Grubel, who was
born in Germany, to go back where he
came from. Would it have told a Jew to
“go back to Israel, Hymie”? Such are
the double standards.
A CBC fem told him she had
“heard” he was a “Holocaust
denier”, something that brought him
and his wife to tears.
The grass roots support he got in all
this showed what I have always believed:
opponents of political correctness
should speak out because most Canadians
don’t go for that garbage. “Right
wing” politicians should make the
media follow them rather than trying to
follow the media, and to hell with the
Duttons, the Vancouver Sun, etc. It’s
the only thing that can save this
country from its lunatics. Men are
needed, not mice.
Sadly, Grubel decided he didn’t
need all the grief and elected not to
run for a second term.
His book is not one large collection
of the sort of thing I have picked out.
It is mostly about economics as it
affects Canada, and can sometimes lead
to glazed eyes for peasants like me. But
economics cannot be separated from
politics, and you could learn a lot from
“A Professor in Parliament”. |
