She’s the champion of identity politics. He’s the champion of common sense.
She is the most unpopular political leader in Canada. He is Canada’s most popular psychologist.
He’s also hated. Not sure if she’s feeling the love.
She is Kathleen Wynne, the Liberal premier of Ontario, with unsightly baggage larger than two gas plants. He is Jordan Peterson, the psychologist who inspired Tanya Granic Allen to run for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party, and who in turn, was the kingmaker, crowning Doug Ford as the new PC leader. Ford could be the next premier.
Peterson, like Allen and Ford, arrived on the scene as a fresh voice. He’s not one to hold his tongue. His 30-minute interview in which he silenced a tongue-tied BBC provocateuse has now been seen online by more than 8-million people. He likes to call things by what they are. A spade is a spade. Dumb is dumb. His second book, 12 Rules for Life, has topped sales charts around the world. He has received 25,000 letters from readers in about eight months thanking him for bringing them back from the brink of destruction. He does not hesitate when he calls Kathleen Wynne “the most dangerous woman in Canada.” For her part, cat’s got her tongue.
Just when you might have thought that burning her way through billions of dollars to turn Ontario into a have-not province with a massive debt, while inadvertently putting a lid on investment and business expansion, was Wynne’s most sinister play on her peeps, a clinic psychologist and University of Toronto professor comes along to tell us of offences even worse.
According to Peterson, she is not even a Liberal. She has moved further left than the NDP. Identity politics is her socialist agenda, creating victims by identifiable groups since the working class is doing just fine. Under Wynne’s watch, universities fanned the flames of hate-filled protests against so-called hate speech that turned out to be simply a difference of opinion. Peterson says she is also responsible for campus social justice tribunals and a human rights tribunal that don’t let the law get in the way of ideological judgments.
When government gets into the ideology business, we’re accelerating toward socialism. The Liberals have had 14 years to chart this course. So, we should worry when Wynne campaigns on tweets like “Government can be a force for good.”
How much more government “good” can we take? Government has always been a necessary but clunky, awkward and inefficient entity. Most people, old enough to have experience with government, see that the best thing government does is set the rules of fair play, then get out of the way.
We should also worry when Wynne promotes “investment in people.” Neil Mohinda points out in the National Post that this is a euphemism for government spending.
We can’t handle much more government spending. The Liberal government has doubled provincial spending since 2003, ran deficits in 12 of its 15 years in power and tripled the debt to $312 billion (that means we owe 312,000 stacks of a million loonies). The debt is so high it could be used to replace all of Ontario’s 143 hospitals with stunning, state-of-the-art hospitals and there would still be enough money left-over to build about 3,400 state-of-the-art schools. The fastest-growing provincial expense is the interest on debt. The province is like an irresponsible spender who only pays interest on the credit card each month, never pays off the balance, and has the nerve to repeatedly ask for a credit limit increase.
Every ideologue on the socialist road eventually discovers the bandwagon breaks down. Identity politics alienates more people than it thinks it’s helping. The socialist path to big government that promises to solve all problems never works because in the end, we discover that government is the problem.
The Liberal government has jammed its nose into almost everything, including the air we breathe. It taxes carbon dioxide emissions (without even knowing if carbon dioxide has any relationship to global temperature) and harnesses the wind with more than 2,500 wind turbines, every one of them losing money. The province is the self-proclaimed forecaster of future climate, controls your electricity costs, restricts the seeds you’re allowed to buy and has even transformed sex, according to its sex education program, into an extra-curricular activity like tennis while turning a child’s gender into a choice.
But it all starts with wanting more of your money. As Peterson notes, socialists are just as interested in money as everyone else. But socialists want to be the ones to decide how to spend your money and how much of it. You get to decide in June if that works for you.
Patrick Meagher is editor of Farmers Forum and can be reached at westerneditor@farmersforum.com.
