''Join my crusade! Join my crusade for Canada! Wake up Canada! Join a crusade for Canada! '' Thus John Turner last week in the Niagara Peninsula, presumably under a tent.
Turner seems to fancy himself more and more in this Elmer Gantry role - one imagines him practising in front of a mirror. Canadian anxieties respond reflexively to the least neuronationalist impulse; but couple it with a little gospel shouting, and you're going places.
It's comical, but it's also a little scary. There is a weird, fanatic glint in Turner's eyes these days. He has tapped the power of mass hysteria; the fever carries him aloft as it rises. It was not always thus, but in the depths of his humiliation in the months past, Turner seems to have made a pact with his conscience. Thus liberated, he appears the more attractive for it.
He has discovered two remarkably effective new principles of rhetoric: one, that the larger the lie, the more likely is it to be believed; and two, that one keeps the offensive by a constant barrage of accusations, from all sides, supported or not, consistent or not, so long as the momentum of aspersion is maintained. No, of course: they're not new at all.
Indeed, the irony of the campaign is that rank protectionism has become the respectable argument against free trade. The most troglodyte objection has at least the virtue of fairly representing what's at issue. It is fair, for example, to oppose free trade because it will mean the end of state-decreed oil prices. One rather thought that debate had been settled by the failure of the National Energy Program, but so be it. It is not fair - there is no word for it but a lie - to say or imply that free trade means the U.S. will take all our oil. Okay. So Turner is playing dirty. So deal with it. If free traders console themselves with complaining about Liberal lies, they will come across as crybabies, like Michael Dukakis. How to handle a demagogue? Three simple rules:
Don't fight fear with fear. Don't raise the bogey of U.S. retaliation, or massive shutdowns, if the deal fails. You legitimize the tactic in so doing, and you can't win on those grounds. The consequences of rejection are not measured in the comforts of the present, with which Canadians are smugly familiar, but in the lost greatness of future days, of which Canadians can know nothing. Faced with a choice between the fear of action and the fear of inaction, the natural tendency is to freeze. Ask any rabbit.
Given this preference for what is, over what may be, emphasize that the Free Trade Agreement is the status quo. Both sides have signed the treaty; it's just a matter of implementing legislation. ''If we cancel it, we lose these benefits'' sounds better to Canadians than ''if we proceed with it, we gain.'' The one takes the gains as a given, and puts the onus on those who would take them away; the other makes them a promise, open to attack from the skeptics. A Canadian never thanks you for giving him something, but he howls when you take it away.
Do fight fire with fire. Constant recitation from on high of econometric estimates of employment suggests the outcome is not one of logical necessity, but statistical chance. Numbers and abstractions do not reach into the lives of individuals in a personal way; authoritative endorsements focus attention on the witnesses, not the evidence.
Free trade ought instead to be a passionate, radical, populist cause. Speak to the people in emotional terms: of the moral scandal of protectionism, of entrenched privilege picking the pockets of the poor; and of the moral imperative of nationbuilding, that great things might be done and great lives led here at home, rather than forever watching our young troop south for opportunity. If ever there were a pledge of allegiance to the American dream, it lies in a policy that would wall in Canadian dreams.
Fight a liar with a liar. First, break down a big lie into a series of little lies. They're easier to grapple with one by one, and the smaller they get, the sillier they look. ''It's the death of Canada'' has a certain grandeur to it. ''We would be forced to adopt U.S. gun laws'' is simply quaint. In the vast gales of high falsehood, truth finds no mooring. Amid the gentler buffets of petty invention, debate can be steered to the safe harbor of reason.
Then put Turner on the stand. Does he support, for example, Sheila Copps, MP, when she says free trade would lead to Canadian women being forced to become surrogate mothers? Does he stand by Mel Hurtig's assertion that the trade deal stipulates the installation of nuclear-tipped ICBMs on Baffin Island? Does he share CUPE leader Jeff Rose's vision of ''carpetbaggers with profits in their nostrils and guns on their hips?'' If so, why doesn't he say so? If not, why has he embraced these Farrakhans? Sure, it's a little unfair. But hey, this is more than an election. It's your future.