Right, Left and Centre, The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Part Eight

   The Lady Moves From Left To Right by Dave Jaffe



    By the time of her late 40's, Mary Anne Burns was a rich woman. She was a good lawyer and had always been a strong personality. When someone told her that he was Jewish, she said. "Oh you're a Jew are you?  Jews do things that they don't always want to do. But they do them to succeed." The man replied that this was true of many immigrants to Canada.
    "Maybe," Mary Ann replied. "But I think it's truer of Jews than anyone else."
     She told a man who kept coming around to see her. "I don't want you around me anymore. You're always looking at me in a strange scanning way. Just stay away from me. ."
      Another man who told her he was using New Age therapy to improve his life, was told that Burns didn't have any faith in such type of therapy. "The only therapy that counts for me," she told him, "is therapy whose results can be measured scientifically. You can't do that with New Age therapy. That's why I have no time for it."
   Burns' personality gave her an edge in courtroom and office showdowns. She wasn't scared of confrontations. She welcomed them and often won them.
     One day in the 1990's she went to a provincial Conservative meeting just for a change. The New Democratic Party was in power in Ontario but it wasn't popular. And Burns didn't like the federal Liberals either. "They're always trying to hug the middle ground," someone told her. That didn't appeal to Burns.
    At the Conservative meeting Burns saw and heard the new Conservative leader pitch his so-called "Common Sense Revolution". Burns was enthralled.  "I just loved what he was saying," she said. "It was just awesome.He talked about tax cuts, getting rid of wasteful social programs, and stopping governments from strangling businesses in red tape - I liked all of this. "
     Like most conservatives, who didn't like welfare or unemployment insurance programs, Harris said nothing about the billions of dollars in subsidies that private businesses get every year from governments. In the 1990's for example, the energy industries were getting an annual total of over $35 billion in subsidies from all governments. Burns in the past ten years had worked with private resource firms that faced government regulation. The government laws often frustrated Burns's clients as did the bureaucratic arrogance she claimed that came her way from government officials.
     Also Burns may have felt a little guilty about her yippie past. She remained a radical. This was who she was. So she swung from the extreme left to the far right. So she joined the Conservative Party. She helped write its very conservative policies. She raised money for the Tories. Yet she never ran for office. She kept in the background. She was now a hard core right winger.
      After she'd spoken to Barry Nakamura, he never saw her again. And he knew that seeing her again would be a bad idea. Like many others before her, this lady had left the left forever.