Doing politics is at the best of times a walk through a minefield. You never know what innocent remark is going to blow up in your face..However as landmines go, Nazi comparisons of any kind are not innocent remarks. They never work. They're like a day-glo orange tin can with a golfer's flag stick beside it. You can see 'em a mile off and if you hit them anyway, you weren't paying attention..So, when in her August 19 fundraising letter Dr. Leslyn Lewis seemed to equate Canada's vaccination program with a violation of the Nuremberg Code — if that's what she meant, and if she didn't, what was she talking about? — she may not have been wrong in point of fact. (We'll come to that.).But, she was ill-advised to the point of culpability..Seriously, who the hell thought that was a good idea?.Needless to say and heedless of his own puffy-cheeked blandishments about civility in debate and unity within the party, leadership candidate Scott Aitchison jumped on her: "I’ve heard from many Canadians in recent days appalled that my colleague Leslyn Lewis is comparing the horrors of the Holocaust to the challenges we face today.".Ah, the shame, the horror. He then accused her of using a 'freight-train sized horn' as a dog-whistle..Oh? Really? A whistle to whom? Why, to a shady crowd of people — the kind perhaps the prime minister thinks have 'unacceptable opinions.' At any rate, people who have their doubts about the COVID-19 responses of Canada's various governments and health authorities..People who no doubt also want lower taxes, an end to carbon lunacy, some assurance that we're not going to kill our food industry as soon as we've nailed the coffin shut on energy... People who want their kids to be able to buy a house and raise their children to be who they were born to be, without their primary-school teacher trying to talk them out of it. Some may even drive semis..To such as these, Dr. Lewis hardly needs a dog whistle. Might we entertain the possibility her socially conservative views are sufficiently well known, that she already has their hearts and their wallets? Reasonable people could so suppose..So perhaps she merely meant what she said. Which in essence was that after the Second World War, a world horrified by what some doctors did when they were allowed to experiment on living people, decided to stake out where the limits were..They decided the voluntary consent of the person who was the subject of the experiment, mattered. They decided if such a person had had enough of it, they could withdraw from the experiment. They decided if an experiment was causing death, disability or injury, it should be terminated..They devised in fact a total of 10 principles and called it the Nuremberg Code..And manifestly, Dr. Lewis is of the view Canada has been insufficiently respectful of it..Specifically, she deplored "our failure to defend modern day abuses of any human experiment based on coercion: including attempts to entice participants, failure to give sufficient information to make an informed decision to participate, deliberately presenting false information on the treatment outcome to entice enrolment in the clinical trial, threatening punishment through ultimatums that will interfere with ones normal livelihood or mobility...".It does sound a bit grand. However, people who lost their jobs because they didn't agree to have an incompletely-tested substance injected into their bodies probably did feel coerced. And reading about others who took the jab and had an adverse reaction to it, isn't going to make them regret their decision..The Toronto Star, never known to use a scalpel where a machete might serve, headlined its report of the Lewis-Aitchison spat, 'Did a Conservative leadership hopeful compare COVID-19 vaccine to Nazi atrocities?'.It then added (to be safe) that 'Leslyn Lewis rejects ‘cowardly’ accusation.' .Dr. Lewis is smart, warm and extremely popular, even with people for whom she is not the first choice. It's not normally a compliment to say that somebody is everybody's second choice, but the way the party vote works, that might be just fine for her..Not so, Mr. Aitchison: All that's necessary to show him in the lead, is to upend the current poll standings. After September, we shall not hear much more of him. .Dr. Lewis has a constituency however, and her many friends will quickly forgive her. She will therefore be around, and she will have influence. What this little trip through the minefield shows is that even after two years in the political arena, she hasn't quite mastered the basics: Self-inflicted wounds are the easiest to avoid..However just for the record, and contra the Star's innuendo, Leslyn Lewis did not compare vaccination to Nazi atrocities..Not even close. But, note to file: Whatever point you're making, just leave the Third Reich out of it.
