Free Republic

Here's a statistic guaranteed to set your teeth on edge: Of the 15,000 Lebanese citizens evacuated from Beirut by Canadian Forces during last month's war -- the largest such operation this country has mounted since the Second World War, at a cost of $85-million -- some 7,000 are reported to have returned home. Home, as in Lebanon. Why were Canadian ships sent thousands of miles across the sea to pluck another country's citizens out of harm's way? Because, as you well know, they are also Canadian citizens. That is, they are dual citizens, beneficiaries of a 1977 change in immigration...

Empires do not end, typically, in revolution. They dissolve by stages. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire took hundreds of years. The Liberal empire has taken two elections, and may take a third. But it is going, if not gone. The first one, 2004’s near-miss in which they were lucky to escape with a minority, cracked the Liberal aura of invincibility. The party’s weakness revealed, Gomery did the rest: once it was clear that it was possible to change the government, the public’s seeming apathy about Liberal corruption was dispelled. It was not apathy, it turned out, that...

[Stephen Harper] will also have to make reforms to Canada's outmoded democratic institutions, notably the appointed Senate, in which the Liberals, quelle surprise, hold a majority of the seats. Last, he will have to set aside some of his own privileges, placing limits on the powers of patronage with which prime ministers have consolidated their rule. The Conservatives must plan for when they are again out of power and remove the instruments by which they were kept out. Previous Conservative prime ministers aspired only to run the Liberal machine for themselves, leaving the motor running for the Liberals when they...

The Ceaucescu moment in Paul Martin's short, disgraceful career as prime minister, the instant it was clear the jig was well and truly up, occurred not this year but last; not during the long, slow humiliation of the present election campaign, but in his hour of maximum triumph, perhaps the finest achievement of his premiership: the luring of Belinda Stronach, by means of a Cabinet bauble or two, into the Liberal fold. You remember: the press conference, a nervous Ms. Stronach, a beaming prime minister. Someone asks about the political impact of her defection, just days before that crucial vote...

Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. And Canada has always been against nuclear missile defence. Or is it, Canada has always been in favour? Damn. I have given up trying to keep pace with the twists and turns of Liberal foreign policy. The Chrétien government has a quite unnerving mastery of doublethink: to hold two entirely opposed thoughts in their heads at the same time is child's play to them. So it isn't quite true to say they have done an about-face on national missile defence, merely because at one time they...

Well surprise, surprise. Documents found in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service, show that Saddam Hussein's people were talking to Osama bin Laden's people, according to a story in the Toronto Star. Actually, make that "STAR FINDS DOCUMENTS LINKING BIN LADEN, IRAQ" -- at the Toronto Star, the Toronto Star is always the story. The minor detail that a reporter for the Daily Telegraph was also present when the documents were found, or that the crucial reference to bin Laden was spotted by their interpreter, played rather below the fold. Still, it is fortuitous that the Star,...

Even the bloodbath of Sept. 11 was, to America's critics, mere confirmation of America's guilt. What must it have done, they asked themselves, to provoke such an attack? Needless to say, they had no trouble answering. The same pattern has now repeated itself with regard to the war in Iraq. Months of patient effort having proved unable to persuade the Security Council to enforce its own resolutions, the fault, naturally, lay with the Americans. Even supporters of the war like to pair this with an evenhanded lament for the "failure of diplomacy" that left the United States "isolated," alone but...

We are always right. Or at least, we are never wrong Hundreds of jubilant Iraqis mobbed a convoy of U.S. Marines on Wednesday, cheering, dancing and waving as American troops swept toward central Baghdad through slums and leafy suburbs from the east. Crowds threw flowers at the Marines as they drove past the Martyrs' Monument, just three kilometres east of the central Jumhuriya Bridge over the Tigris River. -- Reuters, April 9 There are so many things we will have to teach the people of Iraq. They must know why we opposed this war, why we could not go to...