I COME to praise Doug
Collins, not to bury him.

Doug and I didn’t agree on a
whole lot of things. The day : after
it was announced that the
Mulroney government was going
to pay compensation to Japa-~

nese-Canadians, I came out witha ©

column admitting I had cried with
joy.
Doug, in his column, almost

up.

It went like that on a lot of
issues. Doug thought my old bud-
dy Paul Watson was a fake and a
con-man, while I happen to con-
sider Paul one of the genuine
heroes of our time.

Doug’s opinion of most native
leaders was that they are spoiled
bellyachers who had it good on
welfare, while, in my view, they
are 2 truly oppressed people, vic-
timized by.the Canadian state with
its vile, soft apartheid system.

And then thers were Doug’s
views on feminists, lesbians, gays,
minorities, South Africa,
Hongcouver, Ottawa, the CBC,
and soft-headed socialists every-

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All of which added up to Doug
being a maverick. Not just any
maverick either. I think it would
be fair to describe Doug as the
rogue elephant cf Canadian jour-

n .

If he wasn’t actually blackballed
by the big Eastern-based newspa-
per chains, he was at the very least
red-flagged. At CBC, he was
definitely black-listed. He was
anathema to the liberal media.

I have some homosexual friends
who considered Doug to be 2
hatemonger, and I must say that !
found his writings on that par-
ticulas subject to be over the top.

Likewise, I have Jewish friends
who found his writings on the sub-
ject of the Holocaust to be appail-
ing, and I, too, wished he would
let it go.

Yet when he went to work on
bureaucrats, politicians and crazy
Pieces of legislation, like our con-
tradictery and bizarre immigration
regulations, Doug was plain
wonderful.

Among his colleagues in the
news biz, Doug, I know, had plen-

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ty of friends and admirers.

As for his ability to stir up reac-
tions, there is probably no one else
writing in the country who can do
it quite like Doug. When he was at
The Sun, his readership was higher
even than Fetheriz:gham’s.

A lot of people called Doug a
racist. He isn’t. I asked him

“Duz could make people mad like virtually
no other writer I know. He also told it like -
he saw it.’’

point-blank one afternoon when
we were out sailing: ‘‘Doug, what
do you really think of other
races?”’

He replied: ‘‘If I thought the
white man was superior, I'd say
so. But he’s not.””

Canadian journalism is pretty
bland, generally speaking. We
don’t have any decent muckraking
magazines, except for Western
Report. The daily newspapers are
mostly very cautious and mil-

auetoast in their opinions.

By contrast, Doug was a Fleet
Street thunderer. It’s really a
shame the Reform Party screwed
up and lost him. I wouid love to
have seen Doug in the House of
Commons, delivering a few home
truths

filter of the mass media are
screened by 2 variety of forces.
That’s why concentration of own-
ership is at least theoretically so
threatening to freedom of expres-
sion. Ultimately it is the owners
who decide which voices shall be
permitted to utter their opinions.

There are not many Doug Col-

lins clones out there in the media
trenches, and not simply because

his views were slightly to the right
of Jabba the Hutt, the pirate

The voices that pass through the

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Doug was unafraid. There were
no sacred cows with him —
whereas, in the Canadian ntedia,
as in Canadian society and politics,
there are plenty of sacred cows:
muiticulturalism, Nelson Mandela,
bilingualism, the welfare state,

. Barbara Frum and the Canada

Council, to mention a few.

Dong could make people mad
like virtually no other writer I
know. He als» toid it like he saw
it.

Yet privately, he has sucha
great sense of humor one just
knows that he deliberately in-
troduces an element of hyperbole
into his writing for the sheer j joy of

. provoking his foes.

A functioning democracy, which
depends so much on a free press,
needs all the mavericks it can get.

There is an overwhelming

tendency towarde conformity,
especial, ly in the media, which 3 is

because ofo our education levels,
backgrounds and incomes. There is
a definite wimp factor involved.

Doug isn’t a wimp, that’s for
sure. Right or wrong, he was a
warrior. You may not have liked
him. You may-in fact have ieathed
him. But 7’fi bet you read him,
even if it was just to get your juices
stirred.

That’s the mark of a talented
journalist. I’m sorry to see Doug
march away from these pages. But
I’m glad to see he went out guns
blazing in every direction, unbow-

ed, unbroken, seen