Deborah Gyapong attended and writes:
Contrary to what Kathy Shaidle has written, Monday’s Free Speech and Liberty Symposium sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies was an inspiring and stimulating event that did play and important role in the restoration of real civil rights in Canada.
It was like walking into a big arsenal and loading up with a whole range of intellectual ammunition for the battle to effect cultural change in Canada.
And while some of the information I knew before, there was a whole lot that was new to me. And this new information is galvanizing. (…)I do not want to minimize the role others play, however, in what needs to be a very extensive movement that will involve many different players, including some people with degrees who wear suits. People with degrees who share our point of view are also under seige in academia and many of them have great courage. We will need our lawyers. We don’t win a war merely with scouts. We will need our engineers, our computer geeks, our publishers, our legislators, our champions in business. We need our strategists who know how to get things done and our thinkers who clafify the principles at stake.
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I notice that all the people in the final paragraph are “respectable” white collar people.
The battle against the HRCs is, in part, a class warfare battle and (not surprisingly) this is still not being adequately addressed/represented.
As far as information is concerned, I don’t see how the information generated at such a conference works its way down to the masses.
Canadians conservatives often bemoan the fact that for various reasons, we don’t have the same well-established network of think tanks and foundations they have in America.
However, the Tea Party movement seems to indicate that many of these think tanks are now out of touch/at odds with popular sentiment, and have now become objects of derision.
Is it possible that this lack of a network of think tanks will somehow work to our advantage, allowing us to “skip” that stage of development, the way African nations “skipped” building a network of telephone lines and went straight to the cell phone?
I don’t understand why anybody needs a “strategist” to tell them how to get things done in this instance, since there is no giant well of “expertise” I’m aware of regarding how to get Canadians to do something — since we don’t have a long history of doing anything anyhow. In this instance, more than ever, “an expert is just some guy from out of town.”
Why not just do things and learn by doing. Our opponents are just making this shit up as they go along — why don’t we?
Information we have plenty of already. Ordinary people instinctively understand what is at stake without someone “clarifying” things for them:
The state is too big and is encroaching on our lives to an unacceptable degree.
We need action. And those ordinary people would be less timid if they could be sure that bigshots would have their backs if they decided to take a risk. I am not convinced this is the case.
We are also far too focused on the idea of “Canada,” and developing some kind of “Canadian” strategy. That is too parochial.
Few people I know on the “free speech” side have any sense of patriotism anyhow; they have been crushed under the weight of regulation, judicial activism and bureaucracy. They gave up on a now-unrecognizable “Canada” long ago and are simply interested in fighting for their own rights and those of their children. (And this unrecognizable Canada is one that by and large, Canadian “conservatives” find hunkydory, and would only tweak slightly.)
When a fight is that personal, the idea that people in a different class are equally invested in it, or “get it,” is harder to accept.