Thomas Flanagan - Revisited
I've been googling Thomas Flanagan to find out more about Stephen Harper's main man and I notice that he didn't go to Vietnam to fight Communists, but came up here to Canada to fight them, instead.
Safer, I guess. Anyway, Marci McDonald's piece in The Walrus is still considered the "must read" article on Prof. Flanagan, so here it is in full:
It's full of ironies, of course, the most notable being that Prof. Flanagan has pursued his... crusade against Indian Rights (land claims, reserve system) with big fat government grants (isn't it always the way with these anti-government Conservatives, Dear Reader) so he's pretty much been on the government teat since... escaping to Canada, but here is what is said about him, nonetheless:
Flanagan's expert-witness stints have not proved unrewarding, but friends insist he is driven not by money but ideology. "He's concerned the state should not adopt people as wards," says Allan Kornberg. "It eventually has a corrosive effect on the entire society."
Sure. I guess. Unless you're the white professor from the United States adopted pretty much as a ward by the Canadian government.
Overall Flanagan seems to be a nasty and hilariously hypocritical piece of work but I'm curious as to the name of this textbook and where one might find a copy:
Today, Flanagan's work remains an explosive topic, but few of his colleagues are willing to criticize him - at least on the record. After an introductory political-science textbook he co-authored was dropped from Ontario's approved list of high-school texts because of its "racial, religious, and sex bias" against women and Jews, he became active in the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, an aggressive lobby of professors fighting political correctness, on whose board he now sits.
Anyway, I don't see much on abortion in the article, so I'm going to do a bit more googling. He does have a book called: "Game Theory and Canadian Politics" and I read someone's critique of its passages on abortion (the reviewer seemed underwhelmed by Prof. Flanagan's scholarship, by the way) which certainly indicate to me that Bill C-484 is exactly how the Alberta Reformers turned New Conservatives plan to begin the recriminalization of abortion.
But, you knew that already, didn't you, Dear Reader.
Ah well, who knows what else lurks in the shadows. Back to googling Thomas Flanagan.
