China: Canada: Stockwell Day, former Bad Boy now Tory critic for Foreign Affairs wins praise from China e-Lobby

D.J. McGuire that inveterate, exacting China-watcher has picked up on, and strongly praised, a speech given at the University of Toronto recently, by none other than Stockwell Day. For a brief period, Day led the opposition Reform Party / Canadian Alliance in the House of Commons, having had no previous Federal political experience. He proved himself to be in well-over his head. Since that time, however, and since the merging of RP / CA with the Progressive Conservative Party, the united party led by Stephen Harper with Day now also in the larger grouping, he seems to have grown in stature over the years with his portfolio in the Opposition's shadow cabinet.

McGuire cawt onto the picture of Day's growth as an articulator of alternative foreign policy via Canadian blog Between Heaven and Earth which I'm just now checking out, produced by MaKina, a China Human Rights activist based in Victoria, British Columbia, and deserving of high praise in her own right. Summing up Day's day at the U of T:

The Canada file: ...Between Heaven and Earth does the blogosphere a tremendous service by reprinting in full Conservative MP Stockwell Day's excellent speech on Communist China at the University of Toronto. That the Conservatives had the wisdom to appoint Day their foreign policy critic (i.e., shadow foreign minister) was the tipping point behind our endorsement of them in next month's Canadian election. This speech is a must read. Between Heaven and Earth also has a speech by David Kilgour, a retiring MP who bolted the governing Liberal Party in disgust this year, on the value of democracy in the modern world.

Stockwell Day is notable also, despite any flaws exhibited earlier on the Federal level, for being a forthright evangelical Christian.

As a matter of fact, the news media and state-supported comedy shows on CBC had constantly mingled Day's presumed flaws otherwise, with his evangelical Christian faith, which somehow was made out to be even more offensive because he had connections with the Pentecostal wing of Canadian Evangelicalism. The Christianophobia deployed by Liberals and the media has been presented in refWrite blog entries before. Day's was such a case earlier, and I'm bracing myself for the phase of the current Federal election campaign when outgoing Prime Minister Paul Martin begins desperately an all-out demonize-&-smear phase of the Lib campaign beyond even its present tactics. Martin may be expected to wrap himself in the Charter of Rights in the gelatin of goo-words recently used to demote traditional marriage to a generic business arrangement only, while playing with the other side of his mouth the Abortion card as well.

Lookout for, I would suggest, for the campaign vicissitudes the Martinites may visit upon Member of Parliament, Cheryl Gallant, who represents most fully the Pro-Life prioritizers in the Tory camp, and lookout for Stockwell Day who represents the diplomacy-for-democracy forces among the Tories. Both these candidates may be vulnerable, along with the Party, to an avalanche of subtly-advanced religious bigoty by the Liberal campaign.

We need someone as Minister of Foreign Affairs who will put the plight of millions of house-church Christians, papacy-aligned Catholics, Falun Gong practioners, unregistered Buddhist groupings, and persecuted Uigher Muslims (falsely painted as terrorists because of their grumbling for the liberation of now Communist China-controlled East Turkmenistan): we need someone who will put rights at the top of the priority list in dealing with the slave-state capitalist government of mainland China. We need a Foreign Affairs Minister, sitting in the Commons, to defend a diplomacy of democratization for China; and in the Ministry, working out the patient but telling practice of such a diplomacy that would bring it up to the level of Taiwan, a Chinese democratic republic. We need someone strong enuff to take the project of the re-direction of the Foreign Service diplomats and bureaucrats - among whom are well-nested incorrigible Pearsonians who pretend that 9/11 never happened and is not relevant to Canada, more concerned to back up Martin's constant bitching at the USA in regard to softwood lumber. Next to that, we need such a Foreign Affairs Minister who is savvy to the security-jeapardy to all of us as a consequence of China's aggressive efforts to purchase Canadian corporations and natural resources, while engaging in shakey business practices detrimental to Canadian investors who followed Martin to get themselves cawt in the labyrinth of the tidal wave of corruption bedevilling China's industrial establishment, with no free trade union movements.

If Stockwell Day does become Minister of Foreign Affairs (should he be re-elected) in consequence of a Conservative Party elevated to govern as a minority (majority governments may be a thing of the past in Canada), his China policy should have a strong backup of experts on the financial side - and, fortunately, Day himself has experience in the field as former Finance Minister of the Province of Alberta. Oil is a key issue for both Alberta (revenues) and China (fuelling its slave-state capitalist empire and voraciously manoeuvering to wedge into the Canadian industry). - Politicarp