Early values test would have solved some problems
Editor:
Although I am a month late to the gate to comment on the Canadian values issue, in my defence the radio in my planet-warming VW Gulf (sic) TDI quit about two months ago. Waiting politely for VW to ratify a US equivalent buy-out of this cloud-based Mexican-built, German-designed, sucker-driven Ottomobile I haven’t been listening to CBC or anything else for that matter. My commuting time is when I catch up on the news and I have been driving my new electric Zero motorcycle, which has no radio. Thankfully, as my friend MK says, these are all first world problems.
At a recent dinner party I was asked what I thought of the Canadian values proposal. Not knowing the context I immediately thought of ice fishing, moose hunting, Hudson Bay blankets, and Robertson screwdrivers, all of which I value quite highly as a Canadian. Once brought up to speed, my initial response was that it was a little too late to impose some filter on who gets to come to Canada.
The First Nations people should have been standing on the shores of the country with a questionnaire on Birch bark with some cryptic pictographs asking questions of the smelly, waterlogged Samuel de Champlain or John Cabot:
Is your intention to live at peace with nature and share your smelly women?
Do you have any intention of clear-cutting forests and strip-mining mineral resources to exhaustion?
How do you feel about venison medallions in a blueberry-juniper reduction?
Do those blankets have small pox on them?
Would you like fries with your pemmican?
How do you feel about us taking your smelly children away and sending them to a school to live where they can learn to read these pictographs and hopefully take a friggin’ bath once in a while?
Would you like some tobacco?
So it’s a little too late for all that, but in our defence we finally did get ourselves on top of our hygiene issues and we love the tobacco.
Having watched Dr. Leitch in a candidate’s debate for the previous election, I was underwhelmed by her showing and observed a candidate reading from a script book with no legitimate position of her own. I did not vote for her in that election, because Brian Mulroney had destroyed any conservative leaning that I had inherited from my parents, not because I guessed that she was a Harper puppet. In fact, as misguided as her Canadian values ideas seem to me, I must admit that I was wrong and that she does have her own opinions. I just happen to disagree with this particular opinion. I see Canadian values as a cultural lifestyle which is irresistible when it is at its best and self-serving, arrogant and ignorant (if one person were to define that value list) at its worst.
Murray Lackie,
Creemore.
