In the National Post, Jonathan Kay pokes fun at Globe and Mail columnist Gerald Caplan:
… the plucky Caplan is still at it. And his theories remain ambitious and apocalyptic. Over the weekend, for instance, he grandly declared that Canada “is no longer a united county.”
“Why? Because an “unbridgeable gap” has opened up between “extremists” and people who are “level-headed.” Caplan suggests the former category is composed of Canada’s equivalent of “The Tea Party, the Koch brothers [and] the National Rifle Association.” The latter category, meanwhile, is composed of people who think like Gerald Caplan.
A few paragraph later, Caplan tells us that “Many Canadians believe the Harper government has shattered the historic mould. Harperland is a place many Canadians do not recognize as theirs. Mr. Harper seems not to share many traditional Canadian cultural values.”
Values like what, precisely? I wondered. Universal health care? The welfare state? Equalization? Bilingualism? Gay marriage? The land of unregulated abortion?
None of those have changed.
Or maybe Caplanites feel alienated in a country without a Wheat Board and a long-gun registry. But that’s like saying you don’t “recognize” your house since your wife rearranged the tupperware drawer.
