Amiel Addresses Fraser Luncheon

by Robin Gillespie
April 1981

On March 24 the Fraser Institute opened its Annual General Meeting. The keynote of the day was the address by Barbara Amiel, the noted journalist and author.

After a hot lunch, Ms. Amiel chilled a roomful of business leaders, media representatives and others with a presentation entitled "Canada: Newest Immigrant to the Third World".

With a title like that, one might have expected to hear about Prime Minister Trudeau's concern for the poor of the Third World and his recent tour of various countries promising them stacks of our money as aid.

In fact, this was hardly mentioned. What Ms. Amiel told us was more alarming. She described a program extending back through various liberal governments to Lester Pearson, a program to transform Canada culturally, economically and ideologically into a third world country.

The program got its real impetus from Trudeau when he decided he did not want to lead an insignificant Western democracy but would rather be the leader of the Third World. Because he couldn't stomach moving to the likes of Uganda or Mozambique he decided to turn Canada into a third world country.

The beginning, in the 1960s, was a campaign to convince us that Canada was little better than a colony. American cultural and economic imperialism were holding us down. In this phase the Trudeau government openly aligned itself with the Soviets. On an official visit to Moscow Trudeau spoke of the need for closer ties with the USSR as a counterbalance to our dependence on the USA.

This tactic has taken an interesting turn lately in the great constitutional debate and we are now being told we are under the colonial thumb of the British. This is so ludicrous that the present public acceptance of it defies belief.

The creation of a scapegoat is an important part of socializing a country. Socialist Lenin's scapegoats were the Romanoffs and the White Russians. Socialist Stalin's were the kulaks, the Nazi Germans and the imperialist Americans. Hitler's scapegoats were the Jews and the Communist Russians.

Directing attention and public hatred toward the scapegoat makes the people amenable to any government policy that harms the scapegoat, no matter what its consequences for the country. It is an interesting test to take some of our recent anti-American propaganda and for "American" substitute "Jew".

Along with this scapegoating went a government and media attempt to change Canada's basic value system and culture. No more was hard work to be encouraged, industry to be congratulated, success to be rewarded. Instead of immigrants from the Third World being encouraged to adapt to their new country, our culture is being changed to suit them. Instrumental in this process are the provincial Human Rights Commissions with their coercive powers and seemingly insatiable desire to trample those rights, particularly freedom of speech.

It is quite clear that government policy is ruining Canada's economy. However, Ms. Amiel would not assert that this is deliberate. She insists, rather that it is irrelevant to this "Third World mentality." Ideological considerations are all and the practical result of a policy count for nothing.

As an example of this attitude, she offered a conversation she had in Mozambique with a pair of Oxford-accented officials from a neighboring country. They were extolling the virtues of Marxism and praising the Frelimo for creating the first truly Marxist state in Africa. Remembering the people she had seen starving in the streets of Maputo, she asked if these policies weren't failures and wouldn't the people be better off with capitalism. The reply: "We don't care about the results; it is the spirit that counts."

How have Canadians been gulled into participating in this program? Why do we continue to support regimes which hold the poor of the Third World hostage to their Marxist ideology?

By the use of guilt. Our ideology of (relative) freedom has allowed us to progress far beyond the unfree world. Now we are told that we have succeeded at their expense, that we bred their misery. This guilt for having caused their plight is offered to us as the sole reason for helping those less fortunate.

In Canada, far more than in the US, the communications industry is dominated by these liberal guilt-pushers. The result is media which unquestioningly accept the official view on these matters and present it as gospel. Ms. Amiel told the members that the Fraser Institute is almost the only counterbalance to this takeover of Canadian media.

What we need are private organizations such as Accuracy In Media, journals such as Public Interest, and most importantly, writers, editors, directors, and producers who will break this monopoly in the media and present the genuine liberal view.

Ms. Amiel calls for a reversal of this tide, a reversal that we must create ourselves. "Let the Third World learn from us the lessons that we have to learn all over again; that success, learning and excellence are to be emulated, not punished. Liberal democracy is so far the best system of government an imperfect world has ever devised. Unless we start now to fight this guilt and the relentless attempt to turn our liberal democracy into the collective society, we too will be inside a prison, contemplating the exquisite wonders of the freedom we once knew."