Brexit critics missing the point

It is a sign of the times that, according to Britain’s Daily Mail, the National Health Service is offering its staff free counselling “to help them cope with the Brexit result.” From what I’ve read coming out of Ottawa, including Tim Powers’s peevish piece last Wednesday in which he scolded Jason Kenney and Tony Clement for celebrating the Brexit vote on Twitter, perhaps OHIP should consider offering a similar service. Was Mr. Powers really surprised that two Conservative Party MPs with long records of supporting responsible government here in Canada would agree with more than 140 of their political cousins in Westminster who voted to restore accountability to their parliament? Was he absent when the Manning Centre Conference crowd greeted a robustly anti-EU keynote address by Nigel Farage with a foot-stomping standing ovation three years ago? Or when they applauded anti-EU MEP Daniel Hannan the year before? For someone often called upon for his insights into Conservative Party machinations, Mr. Powers’s accusations of hypocrisy were uncharacteristically witless. After calling Clement and Kenney “shallow” and “shameless” political weather vanes, he asked, in a question pregnant with insinuations of self-serving cynicism, why they remained silent until after the Brexit vote? That’s easy: because it was Conservative Party policy to remain publicly neutral. Why else? Does Mr. Powers really think Brexit will be a pressing issue in the Conservative Party and Alberta leadership races? Marvelling at how “these…supposedly avowed free-traders, and members of the cabinet that pushed to finish the Canada-Europe trade agreement, now Brexiters," Mr. Powers took a strangely Eurocentric perspective. Surely, he knows that Canada would long ago have concluded a free trade agreement with the U.K. but for the fact their national trade policy has been paralyzed by the diverging interests of the other 27 EU countries. Far from voting against free trade, most Brexiters believed they were liberating British foreign policy, freeing their country to conclude trade deals with Canada and the United States where the EU has failed. They also, quite reasonably, did not see why the U.K. could not continue to trade freely with the EU as non-member states Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein do. They may yet be vindicated: German industry leaders are already pressing Angela Merkel to secure free trade with the U.K., while Ms. Merkel herself is said to be furious with the punitive public line taken by Jean-Claude Juncker, the bumptious president of the European Commission. The EU has always been a political project first and a trading block second, its leaders indifferent to previous French, Dutch, and Danish national votes to halt its invasion of their national spheres. So, when David Cameron came calling for reasonable concessions to British sovereignty in a final bid to keep his country in the EU, Juncker, Merkel, and European Council President Donald Tusk were only following EU protocol in sending him home empty-handed. Something had to give, and so it did. Squinting at the Brexit vote through a myopically materialist lens, I can see how some Canadians might begrudge the British people wanting their own Parliament and courts to have the final word on British domestic and foreign policy. But people and countries have values that transcend commercial interests, including the centuries-old tradition of parliamentary democracy. British voters are used to a political system in which their leaders are kept accountable by the ultimate power of the people to “kick the bums out;" as that wasn’t possible within the EU, a majority sensibly figured the safest place to be was beyond the reach of the bums. Good for them. How many Canadians who blithely slander a majority of the British people as fearful bigots and xenophobes for wanting their own Parliament to have the final say on British domestic and foreign policy would stand by as a Canadian government gave away our power over immigration, human rights, fiscal policy, and foreign policy to Washington as a condition of expanding free trade under NAFTA? It is easy from the comfortable distance of Ottawa to be generous with other people’s freedom. Howard Anglin previously served as chief of staff for former immigration minister Jason Kenney and deputy chief of staff for former prime minister Stephen Harper.

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Brexit critics missing the point

Would Canadians stand by as our government gave away powers over immigration, human rights and fiscal policy?

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