Whose Country Is This Anyway?

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

A self-confessed Red Tory, Dalton Camp—who writes a column in The
Toronto Star and articles elsewhere—has earned a reputation as a
sharp-witted, tart-tongued commentator on the follies of government. His
credentials are of the best: advertising whiz, a skilled backroom
operator for the Tory Party under Diefenbaker, a main challenger of the
Chief, a Stanfield supporter, and a stint in Mulroney’s office. He
also ran for parliament unsuccessfully and contemplated a run for the
Conservative leadership.

This Tory record makes the thrust of Camp’s writing all the more
credible and controversial. He scorns the budget-cutting,
social-program–slashing tories who seem to be in charge of all
Canada’s parties (“Whose country is this anyway?). He denounces
multiculturalism for hiving ethnics off into easily manipulated little
groupings, prey to every political party. And he is a sensitive
commentator on Mulroney, still the country’s most hated politician. In
one longish piece, Camp recalls seeing Mulroney, all elbows and knees,
weeping in the airport on his way home for his father’s funeral, and
raging at his enemies after his first try for the leadership failed in
1976. But then the royal jelly develops and Mulroney begins to show all
those characteristics of grandeur that so appalled his countrymen.

There is another fine essay, written about Camp’s wait in an Ottawa
hotel room for a heart transplant. Indeed, almost everything Camp writes
has the ability to move and inform.