Conservative majority means that Canada can finally return the finger Quebec has been giving the country for two decades

An insightful column from the always astute Angello Persichilli in the Toronto Star discusses how Stephen Harper and Dalton McGuinty have changed the way Parliament can deal with Quebec's parochial politics.

From The Toronto Star: Tories beating Liberals at their own game

We’re now told that multicultural Canadians are just plain Canadians. They don’t want to be targeted by predatory Tory operatives who tailor their political pitches in a supposedly sinister form of ethnic profiling.  

And when did this newfound electoral correctness emerge? At about the time Liberals started losing their stranglehold on ethnic enclaves.

..When Liberals pandered to new immigrants and profited from their votes, it was an accepted quid pro quo for the natural governing party — a historic ethnic entitlement. From the birth of multiculturalism under Pierre Trudeau to the proliferation of ethnic delegates in Liberal leadership campaigns, harvesting immigrant votes was a grand electoral bargain.  

In government, the Liberals never missed a foreign policy opportunity to grab a domestic ethnic opportunity: whether rushing to recognize an independent Ukraine or turning a blind eye to the terrorist antics of the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka’s civil war, they always eyed the electoral calculus at home.  

Liberal politicians reflexively made the pilgrimage to Punjab so they could circumambulate the Golden Shrine revered by Sikhs in Amritsar, and even opened a dubious consulate in the state to please Punjabi Canadian voters. Now that the Conservatives have caught on and caught up, the Liberals are crying foul — suggesting that demographics is anti-democratic.

Read all of Martin Regg Cohn's column in The Toronto Star

ALSO: Angelo Persichilli: Liberals shooting blanks at a ghost

Playing Heather Mallick's psycho-sexual "Where's Waldo?"

I don't read Toronto Star columnists on a daily basis.

Oh, what he would have made of Heather!

With the exception of Angelo Persichilli, they really don't offer much that justifies the time, no matter how brief. Although I have to confess a rather perverse interest in reading Heather Mallick on occasion. Not because she's interesting or clever or insightful. I don't find her to be any of those things. But reading her column is like playing a game of sexual "Where's Waldo?"

No matter how inappropriate, no matter how irrelevant, she always, always, seems to find some way of sexualizing her subject. And not pleasant sex, but violent, coercive sex. It's like Mallick's devoted her life's work to proving Sigmund Freud right. And to my shame, every so often, I'll read her column to see where her psycho-sexual obsession will pop up.

It's been some time since I played that game. It became too easy, as if Waldo was standing right in the front of the picture, arms akimbo. But I decided to go try it again with Mallick's last two columns to see if she's outgrown her old habit, or perhaps found some apparently needed help.

She hasn't.

Last Friday, she wrote a predictable (for her) condemnation of British PM David Cameron's sensible observations about the failure of multiculturalism. I made it through most of the column without encountering a bizarre sexual metaphor and thought, "This could be it! Mallick, albeit late, has begun a new chapter in her life!"

No such luck.  The last third of her column invokes, for reasons unknown to anyone but Heather Mallick, a non-sequitur mention of a scene from the TV show The Sopranos, where a stripper is beaten to death.

That was just one sentence in an otherwise routine column. I figured it'd be worth a look at her next Star column to see if maybe, just maybe, there was at least movement in the right direction.

Her next column was about Amy Chua's memoir,  Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.   Chua, who is an accomplished lawyer, academic and author, wrote about using draconian child-rearing techniques to produce highly successful children. One may agree or disagree about whether Chua's ideas are ultimately beneficial.

But Mallick, in her disdain for Chua, applies criticism through her signature, and seemingly only literary device; weird sexual projection. This time involving Chua's then-14 year old daughter:   

Chua is hopeless about sex and cannot see that the photo of Sophia playing at Carnegie Hall shows a 14-year-old wearing a charcoal strapless gown, her legs fanned, her arms arched in a purely erotic pose. When a vicious piano teacher in Budapest (Elfriede Jelinek won a Nobel Prize for writing about women like this) whips Lulu’s playing fingers with a pencil and Chua backs the teacher, you wonder what Chua would have done if the teacher had fondled the child’s breasts. Tell Lulu to pull herself together and shut up?

I know who I'd like to tell to pull herself together and shut up.

Maybe that's not fair. Heather needs to express her feelings. Whether they would be more appropriately addressed to a psychiatrist than the Toronto Star's readers is another question.

Angelo Persichilli has some interesting observations about Justin Trudeau's political hara-kiri

From The Toronto Star

..he should understand that there are basic rules of engagement.

First, you don’t risk your life if you know that the person you want to save is “seriously dead.”

Second, stick to creating a career for yourself based not on your last name but on personal merit.

Persichilli on the failure of Canadian multiculturalism

Forty years ago, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau created a policy — multiculturalism — that allowed immigrants to become Canadians by integrating into our culture without abandoning their own. He was trying to differentiate between Canadian integration and American assimilation (the melting pot).

Without question, integration is more appealing to newcomers than assimilation. But is it working for everyone?

In reality, the origin of multiculturalism predates the 1970s. It all started when the first Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald, said: “A British subject I was born and a British subject I will die.” While Thomas Jefferson decided to create America and Americans, Macdonald decided to create Canada but not Canadians...

Did it work? In my opinion, no. In fact, I would argue that the current system penalizes new and old immigrants.

But multiculturalism became a mantra for the Liberals to secure votes from the “ethnics” and is now wielded by multicultural prophets who muzzle debate in order to protect their own interests. 

They have erected a media and political firewall around the concept of multiculturalism (and immigration) that blocks any criticism of international criminals, dishonest consultants and sneaky individuals who take advantage of our generosity at the expense of those in real need of help or who are willing to come into our country to work and prosper with us.

This intransigence is forcing Canadians, who in general have supported the policies of multiculturalism and immigration, to take a second look at them because they want to make sure that our country remains a destination for people in need of help, not a cow to milk.

This is an important read that you can see in its entirety here.

Persichilli: One of the few voices of sanity at al-Starzeera

There's one columnist at al-Starzeera whom I haven't mentioned previously in this blog and I regret that.

Partially, it's because his column only appears once a week on Sundays and the other reason is that his main gig is as political editor of the Italian-Canadian newspaper Corriere Canadese, so I don't think of him so much as being a Star columnist.

But he is and he deserves mention, because he is one of the few editorial anomalies in the organization that gives a forum to the habitually uninformed hysteria of James Travers, Heather Mallick, Haroon Siddiqui, Christopher Hume, Antonia Zerbisias, Linda McQuaig, et cetera.

There are a couple of others, like Martin Regg Cohn, to be sure, but they are the rare exceptions in that organization.

Angelo Persichilli's column are routinely informative, insightful and he actually has the connections in Ottawa and the Liberal Party to be able to report based on credible information rather than wild, paranoid speculation.

Today he wrote a column about what Rob Ford's candidacy represents that has shown a level of insight and maturity that reminded me how out of place he is at The Toronto Star.  I don't agree with Persichilli about his notion of bike lanes being such a representation of the urban/suburban and elitist/public divide. If that were the case than Rocco Rossi wouldn't be the last-place candidate with single digit polling numbers. But basically, Persichilli nails it:

Rob Ford is neither a candidate to fear nor a political phenomenon. He is only an individual who is in the right place at the right time. The Oct. 25 vote is not about Ford, it’s a referendum on outgoing Mayor David Miller and his cronies.

This campaign is about four things: the repudiation of Miller’s vision of Toronto; the revolt of the suburban “colonies”; the frustration of people in the downtown core; and the inability of the other candidates to understand the first three of these factors.

Miller thinks that his Toronto is the real Canada. He’s wrong. Miller’s Toronto it’s only a distillation of this complex country seen through magnifying, distorting glasses. His Toronto is a concentration of Canadian virtues and imperfections, blown up and stuffed together into a few square kilometres around city hall.

There we have the best museums, art galleries and universities, but also a lot of ignorance just a few hundred metres away from those institutions. There are religious icons like St. Michael’s Cathedral, but also in the same street many organizations that are challenging Catholic doctrine. You find the opulent banks at Bay and King, but also food banks around the corner. There are the beautiful houses of the Rosedale enclave, but also a lot of homeless people. There are expensive and fancy cars, but also people who cannot even afford the TTC.

Miller didn’t deal with any of these contradictions. He made them worse by promoting petty projects like bike lanes that were sold as a social revolution, an environmental game-changer. His approach to government has been much like the behaviour of rich socialites who pollute the environment with their SUVs and private planes or sully the lakes in Muskoka with their powerboats and then engage in petty projects such as sending their children to volunteer at the food bank or to some camp in a Third World country for a photo-op to fabricate a social conscience.

Miller’s administration is identified with traffic jams that are fouling the environment; a “special relationship” with the unions and friendly, costly contractors; the garbage strike, which exposed his lack of leadership; waste; tax increases and, most of all, the typical in-your-face attitude of a messiah who thinks he can disregard the opinions of his ignorant subjects.

Read the rest of his column here.