The Fraser Institute, now world-renowned and respected—if only secretly respected by liberal-left zealots who fear and loathe them and try their hardest to ignore or downplay every report that they churn out—was created 30 years ago. But still, after 30 years, the liberal-left media can’t utter or type the name without prefixing the label “the right-wing” before any utterance of “Fraser Institute” anytime they (reluctantly) mention them. Of course if they had any common sense, which they don’t, they’d instead prefix “the intelligent visionary which if all their advice was taken Canada would be twice the country it is today” to “Fraser Institute”.
But if the liberal-left media insist on quantifying the degree to which things are “right-wing”, as if warning Canadians ahead of time, I’m going to join them in that war and beat them, as all conservatives should. (Long-time readers of my column know that I actually joined this battle a long time ago).
Today’s Windsor Star editorial dares mention them in a positive light. Expect none of this kind of tribute from the (totally biased left-wing LLLLiberal) Globe and Mail, and the (extreme left-wing near-Marxist joke) Toronto Star. And at the extreme-left-wing state-run media giant, the CBC? Well their tiny elitist liberal air-filled self-important art-heads would simultaneously explode, scattering bits of pink socialist gaseous nothingness about their 362 mega-studios located on prime real estate across Canada, if they ever said a positive thing about the Fraser Institute.
[…]
With every new study or book from the Fraser Institute, the Canadian establishment just about had a collective aneurysm. Rethink rent control? Abolish minimum-wage laws? Impose standardized testing in public schools? The country’s power-brokers in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor—the civil service, academics, the media—saw the Fraser folks as an alien western invader in the body politic. Any news report about the Fraser Institute inevitably contained the dismissive epithet “right-wing.”
The great irony is that we’re all “right wing” now. Even the Canadian Labour Congress has finally admitted that free trade is good for the country. Thanks in part to the Fraser Institute, there’s also a consensus that government deficits are a bad thing, and that any political party that doesn’t at least pay lip service to fiscal discipline is unelectable. As Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty once put it, running a balanced budget is today the price of admission for government. (Mr. McGuinty needs reminding of those words, but that’s another editorial.)
At a recent dinner in Calgary honouring the Institute’s 30th anniversary, Preston Manning recalled how in the 1980s he and other members of the Reform Party were labelled “extremist” because they championed fiscal conservatism, only to see the Liberal government shamelessly steal those very ideas. Former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien and then-finance minister Paul Martin will go down in the history books as deficit slayers, but they owe their own debt to Mr. Manning and his economic advisers who, in turn, were influenced by the Fraser Institute.
My hat is off to the intelligent visionary which if all their advice was taken Canada would be twice the country it is today Fraser Institute.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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