Rex Murphy: Government communication is mostly a contradiction in terms. Leaders have abandoned anything like straight declarations of their opinions or their policies. They hose their replies to questions with torrents of ambiguity. When not deliberately ambiguous and slippery in reply, they adopt an even more callous manner when faced with questions they cannot furnish with glib reply.
However a light flickers; out of this Stygian pit of dead English and greasy equivocation comes a singular government communication — a letter from a leader — that says what it means, says it with clarity and force, and even — this may be unlawful in political communications — has some fun in doing so.
I refer to Jason Kenney’s recent reply to a certain confused and apparently under-worked nuisance at Amnesty International Canada. Said nuisance raised the fraught charge that the Alberta government, in setting up a fund to research the voluminous alarms, thunderbolts, lies and slanders that have for three decades now been hurled upon the workers and industry of Canada’s oilsands by huffy NGOs, various self-declared environmentalists and busybodies of the global warming establishment, is violating “human rights.”
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