back to notes

Insulting the U.S. with impunity

March 19, 2003 | G&M | John Ibbitson.

Liberal members of Parliament will tell you they aren't anti-American, just anti-Bush. This is only half true.

The Liberal back-bench standing ovation for Jean Chrétien when he announced Canada would not support the United States and Britain on the Iraq question spoke both to the Liberal Party's pointed contempt for the Republican President, and to an entrenched resentment of American values and culture.

John Cannis, (Scarborough Centre) described the coalition nations as "the gang of war." Worse, the American government has "fanned the flames of war," decried Karen Kraft Sloan (York North). She ridiculed Mr. Bush's conservative religious beliefs, warning "it is indeed a dangerous and volatile cocktail when religion and politics are mixed."

The Prime Minister and his cabinet are hardly so strident. But they appear to have concluded, along with many European governments, that George W. Bush is, indeed, a rogue President. According to this reasoning, Mr. Bush began single-handedly dismantling the established world order from the day he became President, withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto accord, the International Criminal Court and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Now he is leading an unjustified war against Iraq, which might even violate international law.

Under the circumstances, it is in the long-term best interests of America's allies to seek distance from the present administration, hoping that Mr. Bush's pigeons will eventually come home to roost through an economic depression, bringing the Democrats back to office in 2004.

But though they would publicly never admit it, many Liberals take a certain satisfaction in George W. Bush. He represents everything they like least about the United States.

These Liberals, who congregate mainly in Southern Ontario, Ottawa and Montreal, have great respect for American high culture: its universities, its philosophers, its renowned artists and great newspapers.

But that America has been trumped, they believe, by an America of infotainment, charlatan evangelists, redneck conservatives and isolationist imperialists, personified in this Bible-thumping, warmongering president.

We heard them in the 1960s, telling us there was little moral difference between the American and Soviet empires. We heard them in the 1980s, warning us that Ronald Reagan would lead us into World War III. We heard them this week in the voice of Liberal MP Yvon Charbonneau (Anjou-Rivière-des-Prairies), who asked: "What gives Americans under the Bush administration the right to dictate international law, when for the past 30 or 40 years they have supported, trained and armed dictatorships on all continents, including in association with (Osama) bin Laden and Saddam Hussein?"

They applauded Jean Chrétien's declaration of neutrality on Iraq as part of an honourable tradition inaugurated by Lester Pearson, personified by Pierre Trudeau and resuscitated by Jean Chrétien, in which Canada distances itself from the crass colossus.

There is, of course, another Canadian view, one that identifies the United States as an essentially beneficent power, so intimately intertwined with Canada through ties of language, culture and -- literally -- family that it is ridiculous to believe we could have common cause with anyone else.

This view is found among many conservatives, most westerners and even a minority in the back bench of the Liberal Party. So David Price (Compton-Stanstead) and David Pratt (Nepean-Carleton) sat glumly while their Liberal colleagues rose in ovation. But this view is, for now, not welcome at better dinner tables.

Instead, Liberal MPs can rise in the House of Commons and repeatedly insult the government of the United States with impunity. Apparently, they believe they can do so without consequences. jibbitson@globeandmail.ca