Frances Russell writes that the Mad Men who currently reside in Ottawa's executive suites are destroying the Canada that their wiser forebears built after World War II:
In keeping with the world-wide market mania of the last two decades, Canada’s dominant political and economic ideology demonizes government and the state except as a tool of social control, defence and war.
Driven by the bully pulpit of corporate think tanks and right-wing politicians, the push is on to shrivel, if not dismantle, all the achievements of Canada’s last half-century and more of nation-building.
They seek to transform the nation, convinced that Canadians have become fat and lazy:
From equalization to medicare, from unemployment insurance to collective bargaining, from affordable housing to pensions and from social programs to quality affordable education, all are supposedly crippling distortions of that pinnacle of human intellect and success — the untrammelled free market. And so all must be downsized or abolished.
She then goes on to quote choice passages from several think tanks, which claim to be fonts of wisdom. Consider this pearl from Brian Lee Crowley, president of the Macdoanld-Lauier Institute:
“Subsidizing poorly-performing parts of Canada is in truth a policy of refusing to make people face the consequences of the poor policy choices they have made over the years,”
Russell then juxtaposes Crowley's nostrum to this passage from the Rowell-Sirois Report, which was commissioned to examine the causes of and remedies to The Great Depression:
“The most economically distressed areas are the ones least capable of supporting those services and yet are also the ones in which the needs are likely to be the greatest. Not only national duty and decency, if Canada is to be a nation at all, but equity and national self-interest demand that the residents of these areas be given average services and equal opportunities …
History shines a harsh light our present day "best and brightest." They are truly Mad Men.
