The media working overtime to spread the lie that Harper and Baird "have harmed Canada's international reputation"

If there's anything that shows the blatant media bias against the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, to the point of outright distortion and lies, it's the ongoing meme they push that Canada's international reputation has suffered under him.

Like Goebbels' Big Lie theory that if you tell a lie big enough, and repeat it often enough, people will come to believe it, we keep hearing the same falsehood in mainstream Canadian media about Canada's international decline since Harper became Prime Minister.

We're getting it again in The Globe and Mail from Paul Heinbecker, a former diplomat under Brian Mulroney, who is a director of the Trudeau Foundation alongside Pierre Trudeau's son Alexandre, who makes propaganda films supporting the Iranian dictatorship.

Heinbecker wrote a nonsensical article called "Ten ways the new foreign minister can undo Baird’s damage," and if he were to be believed on his word, "over all, the government’s idiosyncratic foreign policy has damaged Canada’s reputation and vitiated our interests. "

That would be terrible if it were true. But the actual evidence shows that Heinbecker is lying.

Not only has Canada's reputation not suffered during the tenure of Stephen Harper and Foreign Affair Minister John Baird, but it has actually improved significantly compared with the previous Liberal government.

"The 2013 Country Ratings Poll of the BBC World Service found that out of 22 major countries being tracked, Canada was the 2nd most favorably viewed -- in a survey which interviewed more than 26,000 people across 25 countries. Further, the survey shows that fewer people think negatively of Canada than of any among the other 21 countries tracked. Most importantly perhaps, for those who argue that our reputation is falling under Harper, between 2012 and 2013, more people have come to think positively of Canada and fewer people negatively. With that, even the oft-mentioned argument that Canada's current reputation is but residual completely fails.

The findings of the BBC survey are further validated by this year's report by the Reputation Institute in New York, which ranked Canada first, out of fifty countries, when it comes to international reputation. Canada was actually ranked second in 2009, but has since risen through the Conservative administration, ranking first for the last three years.  "

Under Harper and Baird, Canada has moved from a country that tries to be a moral equivocator and take the path of least resistance to one that takes moral stands. There are people in the media and among the government's political opponents who desperately wish that was bad for Canada, so they lie and say that it's bad for Canada in total contradiction of fact. As it turns out, countries that have a tradition of democratic values and freedom respect the stances our country has taken under the current government.

"In the U.S., 84 per cent of respondents view Canada positively, compared to 82 per cent in France, 80 per cent in the U.K., and 79 per cent in Australia. "

However, there are indeed quarters in which Canada's reputation over the last few years has declined.

"Canada is regarded least favourably in Pakistan, where 27 per cent of respondents view Canada positively."

For many, being viewed negatively by Islamist hellholes like Iran's dictatorship and Pakistan, the country that has enabled the Taliban and sheltered Osama bin Laden, would be considered a positive outcome.

But not so for the moral equivocators and weak-spined cultural relativists who nostalgically reminisce of the times when Canadian foreign policy was that of an unprincipled, so-called "honest broker" that lacked a moral compass.

The whole matter of standing in international reputation and whether it moves up or down by a couple of popularity points is a ridiculous one. It's mainly fostered by insecure, ethical insects more obsessed with how others think of them than they are concerned with principle.

But nonetheless, interestingly, despite Canada's supposed "bad reputation" among Islamic countries, we are deluged with immigrants and immigration applications from those lands from which we are supposedly being viewed so poorly.

Could it be that they want to come to Canada to influence us to correct the err of our ways by importing their culture to ours? Or perhaps instead, that the values our government upholds, but which moral jellyfishes like those at the Trudeau Foundation and in our media consider detrimental, are so admirable that immigrants from around the world are desperate to uproot themselves to embrace them.