Call me alarmist if you will, but Canada is in a statist crisis. Our country is on the path towards state intervention in nearly every corner of life. This includes education, the economy, family policy, health, human rights and welfare. Our largest province was captured by the NDP in September, and recent polls indicate that the Socialists may take over the entire country in the next federal election.

Even if Socialism has softened somewhat in the well-heralded demise of the cold war, we are still at the mercy of radicals.

The road to hell, so the old saying goes, is paved with good intentions. But in the political sphere, the road to hell is being paved with socialism.

Lesbians

In recent days, the wackos at the Toronto Board of Education moved to make it illegal for parents to protect their children from sex education; homosexuals will now be permitted in public school rooms to teach Grade 6 students that it’s quite acceptable to be gay and lesbian.

Mushy socialist thinking has already had a terrible effect on our next generation. As John V. Saras so eloquently puts it in the Northern Foundation’s Continuing Crisis series, “Time is running out:

“The majority of young (or younger) people are accepting as normal the prevailing ethics and ideas of the sickest levels of this society.”

Richard Hummel

A textbook example of the “Me, Myself, My Rights and I” school of political theory espoused, most officially, in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the victimization, at public expense, of the University of Toronto’s brilliant engineer, Professor Richard Hummel.

The professor was the victim of the very first sexual harassment formal hearing at U of T. Accused of “prolonged and intense staring” at a female swimmer in the Hart House swimming pool, the sexual harassment banned Hummel from all Hart House activities for a period of five years. And that’s just the legal antidote.

Mocked at his work place by feminist-originated sings such as ‘Drown him,’ ‘Poke his eyes out,’ Professor Hummel had all his savings wiped out a year before retirement in an attempt to fight it out and clear his good name.

The female swimmer who accused him of staring had her court costs underwritten by U of T.

Sexual harassment of U of T

Last December when the university held a press conference to announce that in a three-to-two vote, the appeal board had upheld the original judgment, U of T Vice-president Gordon Cressy (who as former chairman of the Toronto United Way doled out taxpayers’ dollars to left-wing causes) linked the verdict to the student massacre in Montreal.

For the cause of defending human rights, staring now becomes a crime as heinous as wholesale human slaughter. In the media which made Hummel known the world over as “the leering professor,” little was mentioned about the necessary interruption of Hummel’s leading work in engineering patents; that the ongoing court case had racked up a bill of a whopping $200,000; and that Professor Hummel cannot see properly, let alone leer, because of a diagnosed stigmatism!

It boggles the mind when one thinks of the sheer number of sexual harassment cases which could be launched by U of T. Nancy Adamson, who heads the university’s sexual harassment team, reportedly claims that 60 per cent of the female graduate students are sexually harassed in university.

A “liberated” world

All of this begs the question where the Western democracies are headed in the 1990s. We should all take not of the eloquent words of one Alexander Solzhenitsyn, commenting on the malaise of the now spoiled and thoroughly secularized West.

He writes: “A total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries, with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.” The Western world, he observes, has lost its civil courage. This is especially noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

Law for its own sake

According to Solzhenitsyn, another clear signal of the decline of the West is a preoccupation with law and legal procedures without regard to any other consideration.

He tells us: “I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed.”

“But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man. A society that is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very small advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.

“And it will be, simply, impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of legalistic structure.” (“The Exhausted West,” Harvard Magazine. July/August 1978, pp. 21-26.)