Federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl found himself being compared to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin last week as Liberal MPs cranked up their rhetoric on the Canadian Wheat Board issue.
It drew a protest from the government.
On Nov. 2 during the daily question period, Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter accused Strahl of “initiating a Stalinist purge, firing a pro-board director and inserting an anti-wheat board activist.”
Government House leader Rob Nicholson protested that Easter’s words had gone too far.
Stalin’s purges involved murder, exile and anti-Jewish pogroms, he said. Easter should apologize.
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The Liberal MP withdrew the word but stuck to his analogy.
“I was merely referring to how democracy worked in Russia,” Easter said. “In Stalin’s day in communist Russia, people who did not agree simply disappeared.”
In Strahl’s Canada, when a CWB board member objected to the government’s campaign against the board monopoly “he basically disappeared. He was fired from the job and replaced by an anti-wheat board activist.”
Easter said he would withdraw the reference to Stalin, “but the fact of the matter is that it is a purge.”
Two days earlier during a House of Commons debate on the CWB, Manitoba Liberal Raymond Simard also drew an analogy between the Conservative government and communist governing tactics.
“I am beginning to understand why the PMO (prime minister’s office) is now being called the Kremlin,” said the MP, referring to the Moscow headquarters for Soviet and now Russian governments. He was not asked to withdraw the statement.
