Columnist’s Trump/Douglas comparison offensive

Re: Losing the battle of language — Nov. 6

Indeed, the battle has apparently already been lost where one reads that “Trump may be a populist. But so was the NDP’s Tommy Douglas.”

The distinction between democratic socialism and populism has had to be spelled out to the U.S. electorate by the senior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, in his political campaigning.

Ignorance of the distinction in Canada could only be a result of greatly restricted reading on the part of the columnist or citizenry in general.

James Shaver Woodsworth, the founding leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in the early years of the Great Depression, was a divinity student at Victoria College in Toronto and took postgraduate studies (classics) at Oxford University after two years of mission work with the Methodist Church in southwestern Manitoba.

Tommy Douglas’s ministry work in rural Saskatchewan came out of the same Christian morality, as J.S. Woodsworth, the “conscience of Parliament,” in the words of Mackenzie King.

Surely, the idea that “Trump may be a populist. But so was the NDP’s Tommy Douglas,” is only the product of too many historical reviews by journalists at their favourite pub on a Friday night. It is certainly an offensive comparison.

George Burrett

Kitchener