Compassionate liberals: Exploding the myth Canada's natural governing party is killing people with kindness ... how generous By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN -- Toronto Sun--Dec. 10, 2000 The unexamined idea, like the unexamined life, often leads to deluded thinking. One of our most unexamined ideas is the notion that conservatives take a dim, pessimistic view of human nature; liberals a generous, optimistic one. Prime Minister Jean Chretien referred to this in the just-completed election campaign when he charged the Canadian Alliance appealed to the "dark" side of human nature. Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan did so more outrageously when she spoke of the Alliance being a natural home for racists, bigots and Holocaust-deniers. (Conveniently overlooking the fact no party can possibly vet everyone who joins it. Are the federal Liberals Holocaust-deniers because Ernst Zundel ran for their party leadership in 1968?) In both Chretien and Caplan's rhetoric, the inference is that since conservatism represents the dark side of humanity, liberalism (although Liberals today are hardly classic liberals) represents the enlightened one. Liberal media often smugly parrot this view, without explaining or examining it. Today, let's do both. First, one must ask of such deep thinkers what one's view of human nature has to do with whether one is "conservative" or "liberal" - terms which today describe different points of view about the proper role, size and responsibilities of government. (Not, as some liberals claim, a debate about whether we should have government at all.) For our purposes, let's look at two examples of Liberal/liberal "compassion" raised briefly in last Sunday's editorial. Under Liberal governments, now our natural ruling party, what has happened to aboriginal Canadians, while short of a Holocaust, is clearly a human disaster on a massive scale. Time was when even Liberals (and liberals), like Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, argued the Indian Act and its entire failed system of special rights, reserves, etc. needed to be scrapped in light of the high poverty, unemployment, disease and addiction rates it was perpetuating. Sadly, this enlightened view did not prevail in the Liberal party which today routinely attacks any proposal to change the dismal status quo (as the Alliance did during the election) as racist. In Toronto last week, Chretien promised even more traditional aid for aboriginals, meaning, inevitably, more wasted tax billions and government disasters. Question: How does expanding an Indian Affairs bureaucracy which demonstrably has not worked in helping the very people we want it to, despite billions of tax dollars spent each year, represent enlightened thinking? How does it suggest a generous/optimistic view of human nature? Keeping people in poverty and perpetually dependent is compassionate? Conversely, how is trying to improve the lives of aboriginals by making them equal citizens and gradually dismantling an inefficient government bureaucracy, that even many natives say isn't helping them, racist? Why is phasing out a failed system of reserves on which aboriginals often try to preserve their way of life on some of our most polluted land, wrong? Surely, it is the PM's Liberal (liberal) insistence on expanding a system that condemns many aboriginals to perpetual poverty and dependency that represents the "dark" thinking. Surely, it also reveals a pessimistic attitude toward human nature in its rejection of the optimistic idea that people can, over time, improve themselves without government help. Turning to Ontario, what compassion was there, what optimistic, liberal view of human nature, in having successive Red Tory, Grit and NDP administrations create a lost generation of welfare recipients through foolish, failed policies? While the problem would occasionally occur to a few of the brighter bulbs on the left ("Simply paying people to sit at home is not smart" - Bob Rae, 1993) none of them did much of anything to solve it, other than to keep on raising welfare rates and hiking taxes. As a result, welfare rolls rose steadily for decades, in both good economic times and bad. Why would liberals stand for this if they are truly motivated by compassion, rather than simply a blind belief in big government? What is optimistic about this view of human nature? Why would they cruelly hurl hundreds of thousands more people into the welfare trap, based on a failed policy? Conversely, what was cruel about the Mike Harris Tories promising in 1995 to end what had clearly not worked and to instead reduce welfare premiums to slightly above the national average, while also cutting taxes? The resulting economic boom and incentive for people to get off welfare - based on the optimistic idea that people do what is in their own best interests - resulted in hundreds of thousands escaping welfare as Ontario's jobless rate plummeted. Stunned at having been proven so wrong about welfare, liberals have, of course, tried to play on public guilt ever since by carping on homelessness, ignoring that homelessness was a problem long before Harris came to power. A problem that was exasperated, again, by Red Tory, Liberal and NDP governments, who deinstitutionalized the mentally ill without putting appropriate community supports in place. Compounding the problem, liberals have now "protected" the civil liberties of the homeless to the point where we have pretty much guaranteed the right of anyone living on our streets, no matter how poor, sick, deranged or addicted they are, to die there if they wish. Liberal "compassion," indeed.       Related story