If you’re a Hong Kong protester, Canada sure isn’t ‘ back.’

Remember when Canada was back? After the cold, hard, cynical Harper Darkness in foreign policy, we’d have human rights, joy, respect and all good things including a shiny UN Security Council seat. Yeah. They’re having trouble remembering in Hong Kong too.

After months of culpable silence our government finally oozed a statement on the struggle for democracy against the Butchers of Beijing that immediately made you wish they’d shut up again. Instead of praising freedom it told the protesters to pipe down and stop rocking the gravy train.

Obviously I paraphrase. No official statement could attain such rhetorical clarity let alone the intellectual kind. What our Minister of Foreign Affairs actually burbled, along with “the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/vice-president of the European Commission” ( the longer the title, the less significant the individual) was “Canada and the European Union recall their close relations with Hong Kong under the ‘ one country, two systems’ principle and their strong stake in its continued stability and prosperity.

For the last two months, large numbers of citizens have been exercising their fundamental right of assembly. However, there has recently been a rising number of unacceptable violent incidents, with risks of further violence and instability. It is crucial that restraint be exercised, violence rejected and urgent steps taken to de- escalate the situation. Engagement in a process of broad

based and inclusive dialogue, involving all key stakeholders, is essential. Fundamental freedoms, including the right of peaceful assembly, and Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy under the ‘ one country, two systems’ principle, are enshrined in the Basic Law and in international agreements and must continue to be upheld.” Want that on your monument?

Note among its other failings the pervasive governmental passive voice. Mistakes were made, money was wasted, windows were jumped out of. But no identifiable person did it. Thus “restraint be exercised” avoids saying who should back down, those advocating liberty or those crushing it. Instead a nebulous wish is expressed that the whole thing would go away and with it the need to make hard decisions and take principled stands.

It recalls Australian poet James Mcauley’s contrast between “living language” and words that “feel like chewed paper”. How can people bear to churn out press releases full of stale, wadded- up phrases like Acadians have “cultivated a distinct identity that shines around the world” ( someone in the PMO claiming the boss is celebrating National Acadian Day) and, if the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Multiculturalism is to be believed, will celebrate by banging “pots and spoons.”

Perhaps it seems a trite digression with life and limb at stake in Hong Kong. But the habit of slick or sludgy deceit in small matters enters into the soul. You start by pretending to believe things like people around the world know about Acadians’ “tintamarres”, and the ceaseless, hypnotizing pretence dulls your wits and moral sensibilities until the harrowing showdown in Hong Kong elicits the facsimile of human speech Orwell denounced in “Politics and the English language.”

Orwell identified the hallmarks of this nauseating parody as “staleness of image” and “lack of precision.” Drivel about “engagement” and “broad- based and inclusive dialogue” might be considered a PR feature not a bug in helping avoid controversy by tedious vagueness. But when the infection proceeds from tongue to brain it creates real problems when reality intrudes.

Newspaper columnists may sometimes offend too. But at least our job is its own punishment because while we hate being wrong and our errors of fact, logic or prediction are horribly public, we also hate being right because our predictions are generally pretty bleak.

It’s one thing to satirize press releases advertising “important” announcements and get more. I know. I just did. It’s quite another to predict the crushing of freedom in Hong Kong as I did in a June 1997 column “Tien An Kong.”

It took a while. But I knew liberty and tyranny are ultimately incompatible. And while it might seem an abstract and academic view, nothing is more practical than principles.

Our government has been caught flat- footed and - tongued on Hong Kong because of the failure to grasp that communism can’t tolerate freedom on which our whole strategy of cuddling up to the panda depends. Like our PM’S admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship”: He knew, but he didn’t understand.

In principle you could argue for ignoring Hong Kong. You could say repression abroad matters but we can’t do anything, or domestic and foreign policy are unrelated so it doesn’t threaten our security. But you cannot decently proclaim that we are back as a beacon of human decency then fail to stand squarely with the protesters from some ugly combination of pre- chewed language, muddled thought, fatuous arrogance and moral sloth.

If that’s back, we need to get front.

Our government has been caught flat-footed and -tongued on Hong Kong.