Philippe Gohier, Macleans.ca | May 2, 2007 | 7:07 pm EST
As Macleans.ca first pointed out this morning, Green Party leader Elizabeth May is hardly the first Canadian politician to use Neville Chamberlain as a rhetorical device.
For instance, in a manner strikingly similar to May's, NDP leader Jack Layton suggested in 2005 that then-prime minister Paul Martin's failure to meet Kyoto targets made "Neville Chamberlain look like a stalwart in standing up to a crisis." Two years later, Layton is feeling a sudden surge of decorum.
"Well, we certainly would have never made any such comparison," he said Tuesday, when asked by reporters about May's comment.
Pressed by Macleans.ca to explain this seeming contradiction, Layton's press secretary said the NDP stood by Layton's previous statement and said the party would continue to condemn May's "deplorable remarks." According to Karl Bélanger, the comparison "wasn't the same at all" because when Layton brought up Chamberlain, it wasn't a specific reference to appeasement but to Chamberlain's entire oeuvre while in office.
"Neville Chamberlain was not generally recognized as a strong leader," Bélanger explained. "He was prime minister for a few years."
Calls to the offices of Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and Prime Minister Stephen Harper to explain comments made by Liberal MP Robert Thibault and Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay respectively went unanswered.
With party leaders of all stripes calling on May to retract her statement that the abandonment of Kyoto targets is "a grievance worse than Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazis," the Green leader relented somewhat on Wednesday and offered a tepid apology.
"I am dismayed that members of the Harper government have chosen to distort my comments to create a firestorm of controversy designed to distract attention from their failure to live up to Canada's Kyoto commitments," May said. "I can assure the Canadian Jewish Congress and all Canadians that I did not compare Nazi Germany and the Holocaust to any current issue. The evil of the Nazi regime is without parallel and stands alone for its deliberate, systematic and inhuman genocide."
But that didn't stop Conservative MPs from hammering away in the House of Commons on Wednesday.
Gerald Keddy, for one, denounced May's "irresponsible comparison of Canadian public policy to Chamberlain's appeasement" and called on Dion to withdraw his party's support for May. However, in 2001, Keddy himself raised the spectre of Nazi appeasement to attack then-NDP leader Alexa McDonough's reluctance to support the mission in Afghanistan.
"Mr. Speaker, to go back to another era, perhaps Neville Chamberlain should move over and the honourable member for Halifax should sit down because they are both standing in the same place," Keddy said. "This is not the time nor place in Canadian history to try to stand on both sides of a line. We very clearly have drawn a line here and now is the time to take a stand."
That same year, Stockwell Day used a similar argument against then-prime minister Jean Chrétien, suggesting the Liberal government's failure to boost military spending and its cautious approach with Iraq was putting Canadians in danger.
"I hear the echo of Neville Chamberlain in everything he says," Day said of Chrétien. "He's saying 'peace in our time' while terrorists are planning nuclear and chemical attacks on innocent populations. I don't know what it's going to take for him to wake up. He's exposing Canada as being vulnerable."
Of course, on Wednesday, Day condemned May's "horrific" statements.
In the spirit of once-and-for-all banishing this lazy bit of rhetoric, Macleans.ca presents a selection of other Chamberlain references made by MPs currently sitting in the House of Commons.
"That's the type of statement Chamberlain made before World War II." -Conservative MP Leon Benoit on the Liberal government's reluctance to back U.S. invasion of Iraq, August 2002
"It is not time for Neville Chamberlain. It's time for Winston Churchill." -Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, on the need to boost military spending, February 2002
"I remember a person in about 1939 coming back from a meeting with Adolph Hitler in Munich. He waved a piece of paper around saying 'peace in our times.' Thousands and thousands of people applauded him and said that it was a great accomplishment and that he was a man of peace. However there was another man, Sir Winston Churchill, who said that appeasement never works with evil and terrorism. These people cannot be negotiated with. They have no respect for the rule of law." -Conservative MP Brian Fitzpatrick on terrorism, October 2001
"Mr. Speaker, the minister still insists on his pathetic strategy of waiting eight months for the task force to report. He looks like Neville Chamberlain trumpeting the virtues of waiting while his foes make busy their preparations. The minister needs to acknowledge that the world does not stand still, not even for him." -NDP MP Alexa McDonough on the Chrétien government's refusal to establish a committee to look into bank mergers, February 1998
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Posted By Mark Francis to Section 15 at 5/03/2007 06:26:00 PM
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