Book review: "Canada and Other Matters of Opinion"

For thinking Canadians, Rex Murphy has become something of a National Treasure. Not exactly Don Cherry -- though Murphy admires Cherry greatly -- but then the audience isn't quite the same.

Mr. Murphy hails from Newfoundland and has that peculiar love of and feel for the English language that seems to come naturally to educated Newfoundlanders, even though some of them (hello, John Crosbie) try to disguise it when they cast a few pearls before us ordinary people. It must be the Irish ancestry, I think.

Only a Rex Murphy could use the word "objurgation" in a sentence and make it seem entirely appropriate. His Fog Index* must be atmospheric, if you'll parden the pun, but his commentaries on Canadian mores, politics and personalities are eminently readable all the same.

Mr. Murphy commentates [is dis a word? ed.] a lot. He appears Thursday nights on CBC-TV's The National, hosts CBC Radio's Cross Country Checkup on Sunday afternoons, and writes a Saturday column at the Globe and Mail. Rarely do I miss any of them.

Let me give you just one short sample from an essay called "Real Rights and Rights Commissions".

"Human rights are as profound and central a concept to the democracties of the world as we have. They constitutute the core of human freedom. They are the antidote to tyranny. They are fundamental.

"Of late, however, in Canada, this most painfully acquired understanding has been utterly unmoored. The various provincial human rights commissions and their federal godfather have been cuttings away at the core of, and extending into utter fatuity, the term 'human rights'. They are capricious, agenda-driven, a great mishmash of political correctness and 'right t hinking' bulldozing away at the basic freedoms of thought, speech and expression while they, under some osmotic impulse, investiage, prescribe and torment with zealous and self-righteous abandon."

Amen! How I wish I'd said that. How I wish I could write like that.

I borrowed Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (Doubleday Canada, 2009) from the library. I'm going to buy it.

*I refer to the Gunning-Mueller Fog Index, a test used by editors for decades to find out whether a text can be read and understood with more or less ease.