Letters: Does this sound like a healthy nation? Readers check the national pulse, comment on PM Carney's 'theatrics,' question separatists' super-sized rights, and more.
‘Am I better off with Carney?’
A U.S. radio host once summed it up when discussing elections: “People vote with their pocketbooks.” Or in Canadian vernacular, “their wallets.” That’s voters doing a financial gut check, asking “Am I better off since (fill in the blank) was elected to run the country?”
Let’s apply this logic to the latest poll showing a “record-high” 50 per cent of Canadians support the federal Liberals, and Prime Minister Mark Carney has an even bigger fan club. Those numbers beg the question: do Liberal campers feel the impact of Liberal policies and the direction Carney is steering the country in?
As of Monday, the loonie had dipped to less than 72 cents against the U.S. greenback, a “technical recession” had been declared, food prices are in nosebleed territory, the CUSMA trade pact is on life support, and consumer insolvencies were at their highest level since 2009 in the first quarter of this year. How does any of this, for Liberal supporters, add up to a healthy country?
Dorothy Lipovenko, Westmount, Que.
The PM’s political theatrics
It was a great week for theatre! First we had Mark Carney performing at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple, where the prime minister told a hand-picked audience of the Liberal faithful that Canada has an antisemitism crisis, something they know all too well from their daily lived experience, and echoing that other piece of great theatre, Hamlet, in Act I, Scene V, where Horatio tells Hamlet, “There needs no ghost, my Lord, come from the grave to tell us this.”
But then it gets better. Carney’s solution to a crisis of epic proportions, which he himself acknowledges, is, with a nod to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, to appoint a committee to study antisemitism. Hello! Study antisemitism? Just take a stroll at Bathurst and Sheppard in Toronto on any Sunday afternoon to watch the anti-Jewish protests, or sit in on a class in any one of the “Studies” departments at a Canadian university, or visit any of the Jewish institutions that have been shot at, firebombed and vandalized.
Then there’s Carney’s committee, the composition of which is quite baffling. Among others, we have one token Jew (Marc Gold), a speedskating champion (I’m not sure what Catriona Le May Doan brings to the table, unless she can teach Jews to speedskate away from their tormentors), and former cabinet minister Omar Alghabra — a former president of the Canadian Arab Federation who, in 2004, chastised CanWest Publications for referring to terrorists as — well — terrorists, and who lobbied hard for Hamas and Hezbollah to be delisted as terrorist organizations. And then there is litigator Avnish Nanda, who defended the illegal anti-Israel encampment at the University of Alberta.
