Mark,
Re: Canadian National Handbagging of Men Day
Dammit, I missed asking you to re-run your column on the Ecole Polytechniqe massacre.
My youngest Daughter is going to Brescia College and has been hijacked into going to public breast-beating sessions of Man-hate. I would really appreciate you re-running your column of who exactly " Mark Lepine" was and what his real name actually is.
Thanks and kindest regards,
Your biggest fan in Trudeaupia,
Simon
London, Ontario
MARK SAYS: I took an executive corporate group-wide decision not to rerun it this December 6th, on the grounds that even by acknowledging the date we were colluding in the semi-formalization of it as a national occasion up there with Victoria Day et al. But, since you asked, here goes. Oh, and that 55-cent loonie down toward the end looks as if it's been postponed a year or three:
A billion here, a billion there...
from The National Post, December 12th 2002
I loathe the annual commemorations of the Montreal Massacre. I especially dislike the way it's become a state occasion, with lowered flags, like Remembrance Day. But, in this case, whatever honour we do the dead, we spend as much time dishonouring the living -- or at least the roughly 50% of Canadians who happen to be male: For women's groups, the Montreal Massacre is an atrocity that taints all men, and for which all men must acknowledge their guilt. Marc Lepine symbolizes the murderous misogyny that lurks within us all.
M. Lepine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, whose brutalized spouse told the court at their divorce hearing that her husband "had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men." At 18, young Gamil took his mother's maiden name. The Gazette in Montreal mentioned this in its immediate reports of the massacre. The name "Gamil Gharbi" has not sullied its pages in the 12 years since.
Ah, well, I would bring that up, wouldn't I? Just for the record, I'm not saying that M. Lepine is representative of Algerian manhood or Muslim manhood. I'm saying he shouldn't be representative of anything -- least of all, the best efforts of women's groups and the convenient gloss of that pure laine name notwithstanding, Canadian manhood. The defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate -- an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The "men" stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
This spring, there was an attempted gun massacre at the Appalachian School of Law in West Virginia. But, alas for the Appalachians' M. Lepine, there were two gun-totin' students present who were able to pin down the would-be mass murderer until the cops arrived. Allan Rock stepping forward to recite the relevant portions of the gun registry requirements would have been far less effective. Generally speaking, when the psycho shows up and opens fire, your best hope is that there's someone else around with a gun to hand -- a situation Canadian law has now rendered all but impossible.
Extreme cases make bad law, and just because it's a cliche doesn't mean the Liberal Party of Canada can't take it to hitherto undreamt of heights. Our disarmed Dominion will be the first jurisdiction on the planet with a one-billion dollar gun-registry. It was supposed to cost two million, but, as Dr. Evil learned in Austin Powers, these days that's just chump change, they'll laugh at you. No self-respecting government plan should cost less than ONE BILLION DOLLARS!!!!! Roy Romanow's health plan needs $15-billion and all we can say for certain is that it's bound not to be enough. Kyoto? Overspend-wise, think of the gun registry as a National Film Board documentary short and Kyoto as Waterworld.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talkin' real money. More to the point, as there's only 30 million of us, you're talkin' our money. So far the gun registry has managed to register three million guns for $700-million. That's $233.33 per gun. Given that many of those guns are old and rusty, it's not an unreasonable presumption that the gun registry's already cost more than the guns. Which is pretty expensive for what was supposed to be a cheap way for the Liberal government to demonstrate its ideological bona fides to those who deplore the coast-to-coast "culture of male violence" as revealed by one crazy Algerian-Canadian son of a Muslim spousal-abuser.
According to police, the gun registry is officially 25% inaccurate. I'd figure that makes it unofficially 40% inaccurate. But last week, while cynical Liberal bigwigs were openly boasting that this record-breaking government fraud would just be another one of those things you hear about for a couple of days that then mysteriously vaporizes somewhere over Shawinigan, the radio call-in shows were full of concerned, earnest, reasonable, moderate Canadians saying that, even if it did cost a billion, it still "sends the right message" on gun control. Which is just as well, as it'll still be sending the right message when it's up to two billion.
Jean Chretien will be gone soon, perhaps sooner than he thinks. He had his CanCon easy listening version of Ceausescu's final balcony speech the other week, when he appeared at a Liberal fundraiser in Toronto and he did his usual hokey Burns-&-Allen shtick about what Aline supposedly advises him and the well-heeled Bay Street crowd didn't laugh. Say goodnight, Gracie. He looked momentarily stunned, like old Nicolae. The Bay Streeters never liked him and now they don't care that he knows it. Their man's Paul Martin, though for no other discernible reason than that he's more like them -- more seemly, more bespoke, less of a bumpkin. In every other respect he's as third rate as his predecessor-in-waiting. When it comes to the drift and decline of the last decade, Martin bears as much responsibility as Chretien. On the challenges of Kyoto, terrorism, foreign policy and health care, his leadership's as bold as a vanilla blancmange.
What the Liberals had going for them was the long-held notion that they're the natural stewards of Canada, that they transcend ideology. If you want to get anything done in this country, you have to do it through the Liberals. I've heard that a thousand times. Even Barbara Amiel says it. The Aspers, I was told when this newspaper changed hands, agree. And so do millions of other Canadians, not least those of vote-rich Ontario.
But it's precisely on the competence issue, on their stewardship of the nation, that this government deserves to fall. You'd expect Trudeaupian Liberals to be lousy at defence of the realm and foreign policy. But these guys are lousy -- and wasteful and incompetent -- on their own issues, on gun control and health care.
Michael Bliss, no right-winger, put it very well on Monday: "If you want to see a real change of government in Canada in your lifetime, you're going to have to screw up your courage, swallow your reservations and vote for the Alliance in the next election. If you're not ready to do that, then you might as well stop gobbling and grumbling as the Liberals carve up you, your family and your country."
Well, you can forget about Quebec and the Maritimes. So the only question is: Will enough folks in Ontario "screw up their courage"? Will Izzy and his pals in Winnipeg?
Or will they take the easy route: put Chretien in his cement overcoat and lower him into the river as the all-purpose fall-guy and delude themselves that Paul Martin will make all the bad stuff go away? If so...
Canada, December 2007: Mr. Martin is halfway through his first mandate. The loonie has stabilized at 60 cents -- well, OK, it's been about 57-58 cents for most of the last year, but that's roughly 60, isn't it?
The gun registry costs are up around $1.4-billion, but the Minister of Justice says the system's working well and it "sends the right message." The accelerating gun crime figures in Toronto are due to "particular local cultural factors" that aren't really relevant to the broader issue. Kyoto costs are a "little higher" than expected, but the Environment Minister says the system's working well and it "sends the right message" and the unemployment figures aren't his department and it would be inappropriate for him to comment. The minister's own taxpayer-funded SUV is unfortunately necessary as he works unusual hours and has young children. There is no truth to the rumour that he owns an SUV dealership. He sold it 48 hours before the new environmental restrictions became law to a constituent who bought it with a BDC grant.
That means there's no more money for health care, or anyway not as much as was promised, but the new system's working well and "no two-tier health care is one of the important values that define us as Canadians." It also means the Minister of National Defence has quietly ordered a review of whether Canada should follow New Zealand's example and scrap its air force. Defence needs are about "prioritizing" and, as Canada's priority is its worldwide reputation in peacekeeping, maintaining fighter planes and so forth are a luxury that eats into our forces' core activities. As it happens, we're a year into Canada's five-year moratorium on international peacekeeping, ordered by the government to give our forces time to come home and "replenish" themselves. So far the moratorium's working well and has enabled the government to trim a little "fat" out of the defence budget.
Well, that's my vision of another five years of Liberal government, and I'd say it's a best-case scenario. The loonie could easily be 55 cents. We could be discussing the abolition of the entire Armed Forces. But the point is: that's not a prediction of disaster, just more of the same. The gun registry is symbolic not of Canada's predisposition to mass murder, but Canada's predisposition to mass suicide.