She may call herself an Ayn Rand-loving libertarian but interim Conservative party leader Rona Ambrose is a prohibitionist neo-conservative.
She may champion liberty, but her actions speak otherwise.
She speaks of individual freedom until it brushes up against some preconceived notion that, “the government has a strong role to play to be there for people who need assistance.”
Like cannabis patients who need oils and edibles?
The courts stepped in to counter where the federal government was lacking and all she could say was that the decision was “outrageous.”
Like every other neo-conservative pandering to Canada’s small but fervent libertarian base, she’s for individual freedom until it involves something she personally disapproves of.
Ambrose cites The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as her favourite books, but assuming she has the mental capacity to read them, did she understand the content?
Atlas Shrugged is a novel about a country where the political class assumes absolute power and forces the will of millions of people to the central planning decrees of the government.
Kind of like what Harper’s Conservatives spent the last ten years doing with Canadians.
And what Justin and the Liberals will spend the next four years accomplishing with fewer media outlets opposed and with the mindless support of the “progressive” left, eager to reverse and erase the last ten years from Canada’s collective memory.
Nevertheless, just so Vice doesn’t define the narrative (despite its independent appearance, Vice is far from unbiased. They are partly owned by Fox and valued at $1.4 billion), here are three reasons Rona Ambrose is not an Ayn-Randian loving libertarian (or rather, why Ayn Rand – for better or worse – should be not classified as the politician’s favourite author).
1. Ayn Rand was not a libertarian. She made up her own philosophy called “Objectivism” and denounced libertarians as “hippies of the right.” She even said this:
“I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect. The anarchist is the scum of the intellectual world of the left, which has given them up. So the right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the Libertarian Movement.”
Maybe Rona is an objectivist?
Maybe. I don’t really care.
She’s definitely not an anarchist, nor a member of the Libertarian Party of Canada, yet she’s still a politician. That makes her suspect.
2. Ayn Rand loved smoking and so Rona must too. That’s why she called the decision of edibles and extracts “outrageous” because – like Ayn Rand – Rona must love the fire tamed at her fingertips and forcing others to feel that same joy.
Ayn Rand wrote: “I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind–and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”
Of course cigarettes kill, cannabis doesn’t. Rona didn’t call cannabis “infinitely worse” than tobacco, so maybe there’s some room (or a lot) for improvement.
3. In the Virtue of Selfishness Ayn Rand wrote:
“In a fully free society, taxation—or, to be exact, payment for governmental services—would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government—the police, the armed forces, the law courts—are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.”
If Rona Ambrose adopts that position, she’ll have my full support. But something tells me she glossed over Rand’s non-fictional stuff and concentrated on the long-winded dialogue of Atlas Shrugged.
There isn’t a single shred of evidence that Rona has abandoned her social statist conservatism for libertarian ethics.
By electing Rona as the interim leader, the Tories have clearly not learned a single lesson from the election.
Where’s Scott Reid? Maybe they’re saving him for the actual leadership race, or maybe he’ll have enough sense to jump the sinking ship that is the Conservative Party of Canada.