Whose Country Is This Anyway

Review Dalton Camp has been Canada's best-known behind-the-scenes Tory since his dramatic role in the ejection of John Diefenbaker from the leadership in the 1960s. In the imaginings of Diefenbaker loyalists and other traditional Tories, he has been behind more scenes than he ever knew about. He was first active in politics as a Young Liberal. He became a Tory simply on being invited to become executive secretary of the New Brunswick party at twenty-nine, as a bright boy who had been to the Columbia School of Journalism and, on a Beaverbrook scholarship, the London School of Economics. For over forty years he has served the party formally or informally, finally serving Mulroney as a senior policy adviser in the Privy Council Office from 1986 to 1988. His reputation has been as an organizer, speech-writer, and campaign strategist. He served and worked with Tories of all stripes, including Diefenbaker. He had a particular soft spot for George Drew. If he was called a Red Tory it was more as a term of abuse coming from older Tories suspicious of his influence than any serious assessment of his political position, which was inscrutable. Whose Country is This Anyway? is a collection of his journalism from recent years, largely columns in the Toronto Star. As I do not read the Star, I had not observed Camp's emergence as a scourge of the New Right, corporations, and Americans and champion of the deficit, taxes, and big government. His book comes with praise from Linda McQuaig and Rick Salutin. Perhaps because he cannot attack free trade head on, only Maude Barlow is missing. In retirement in New Brunswick, Camp at full throttle seems no longer Tory and just Red. Lest I expose myself to the scorn Camp dumps on a Young Tory who, Camp reports, accused Jean Charest of Communist tendencies-who knows, the young man may have been on to something; no-one else has been able to discern any political principles in Charest yet-I hasten to say that there is no evidence that Camp is a Communist or a Socialist or subscribes to any particular political doctrine. It's just that when he gets a little heated he looks a bit reddish: "It is simply a disgrace that the failure of capitalism-its chaotic dysfunction and its disastrous default of social responsibility-has made a civic virtue of selfishness and turned the middle class upon the victims of its failure." Few writers can collect columns and make a decent book of it. Camp is not one. He can write well, but does not always do so, and not as well as he fancies. There is sometimes a self-consciousness to his writing that is wearing at book length. He has some wit but little humour. "It is the function of the columnist," he writes modestly, "to say what he thinks...with grace, preferably with wit, and with the full strength of his conviction." There is little grace and doubtful conviction in a book almost relentless in its sneering. It comes oddly from him to criticize Kenneth Whyte's Saturday Night for snideness. He seems as upset by the youth of the New Right as by its doctrines. The book is divided into sections, the first headed "Carpet Bombing the Deficit". Interestingly, it begins with one of the oldest columns reprinted, praising Michael Wilson's first budget. In May 1985 he thinks the deficit is a problem, blaming it on a "protracted reign of fiscal irresponsibility under the previous government." He likes it that Wilson raised taxes. Wilson also cut spending and Camp does not comment on that. Ten years later, the deficit is still with us, the national debt has doubled, and Camp thinks the deficit is not a priority, though he is ready to pay more tax and make the rich and corporations pay more: the left's fantasy solution to all fiscal problems. The attack on the attack on the deficit runs through the book long after the subject has been exhausted. Four columns make fun of an alarmist editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and despite Camp's promising to drop the subject, digs at the Jou