National Post

Clearly a conflict of interest

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Re: What Progressiv­es Can’t See, Barbara Kay; Keeping Politician­s Honest, Lauren Heuser, both, March 16.

It’s an example of Barbara Kay’s “hemispatia­l neglect” that our politicall­y correct media have not yet called out Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould for her clear actual and apparent conflict of interest position. She was the B.C. regional chief of the Associatio­n of First Nations before running for the Liberals. In that position she supported all the AFN’s anti- Crown sovereignt­y positions, including Perry Bellegarde’s ringing declaratio­n when he was elected that “Canada is Indian land.”

Wilson-Raybould has already delivered to the AFN chiefs by supporting the cancellati­on of the First Nations Financial Transparen­cy Act. Now Lauren Heuser reveals she and her husband are still at the Indian industry public trough. This is disgracefu­l.

When Wilson- Raybould took office, she swore an oath to defend the sovereignt­y and powers of the Queen. How can she carry out that oath when much of her career — for which she is wrongly lionized and which she has never disavowed — was devoted to the AFN’s goal of challengin­g and eroding Crown sovereignt­y? She is a fox in the henhouse of the crucially needed, vastly under appreciate­d ( by our courts and elites), strong and absolute Crown sovereignt­y.

Peter Best, Sudbury, Ont. It seems Barbara Kay never fails to find a powerful analogy, in this case the neurologic­al condition of “hemi-spatial neglect,” to illustrate her penetratin­g insight into the behaviour of people who classify themselves as “progressiv­es.” As her arguments illustrate, they would be more accurately classified as “oppressive­s,” but this is a topic for another day. Everyone suffers from blind spots but it seems likely that the current structure of university education exacerbate­s this problem, since it produces a prepondera­nce of arts graduates with strong synthesis skills and few or no quantitati­ve, analytical skills.

Lack of quantitati­ve analytic skills makes people live in a “yes-no,” “good-bad,” “black-white” world, when much of life requires a capacity to make resource allocation trade- offs between legitimate­ly competing interests. In the absence of quantitati­ve analysis skills, one has no way of assessing the optimality of any trade- offs that are made, a situation that could be characteri­zed as resulting from “hemi- skill neglect”.

James Cripps, North Vancouver, B. C.

 ?? SEAN KILPATRICK / THE CANADIAN PRESS ?? Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada Jody Wilson-Raybould
SEAN KILPATRICK / THE CANADIAN PRESS Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada Jody Wilson-Raybould

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