PRAVDA

A friend of mine who was born and grew up in the Soviet Union told me the story of how the Encyclopedia Sovietica would regularly send a kit of illustrated instructions to its subscribers, scalpel and glue included, on how to extract specified pages from it and replace them with the ones in the kit. References to a purged apparatchik were ordered removed, and an article about Siberian fauna, for example, would replace it. In this way, each collaborating citizen became his own Winston Smith.

In 2001, 15 000 copies of the Canadian Encyclopedia were printed, and through a series of moves from one side of the print shop to another, the Lafleur Liberal ad agency charged the federal government tens of thousands of dollars to distribute them. They even made $7 622 commission on the untendered $43 185 posting charges by Canada Post, even though Lafleur had already received an additional $135 000 from Ottawa for the distribution of the encyclopedia. In the end, about 15 000 undistributed copies were destroyed, and are likely padding some landfill on the south shore.

What could be so crucial in the Canadian Encyclopedia being delivered to schools that the feds would spend so lavishly? The prime minister under whose orders the project was funded, we learn from Le Devoir, appears in the encyclopedia's entry as

"an expressive and convincing orator," well loved both in Quebec as in the rest of Canada. "Expressing himself in a language popular and rich in imagery, in English as well as in French, he knows how to touch his audience."

We paid for these truths to be manufactured, printed and delivered to our children in schools. Soon we'll have to manufacture, print and distribute the Martinista version, I am sure. We are our own versions of Winston Smith.

To quote a recent speech by a cultured, expressive and convincing Liberal orator, "The world needs more Canada. And Canada needs more liberalism."