EDITORIAL – We have lost a man of many words and unremitting patriotism

An editorial by Mel Rothenburger.

MANY’S THE TIME, as I struggle to express myself on the issues of the day, or even in the throes of somnambulant tranquility, that I wish I had the literary and intellectual capacity of Rex Murphy.

In my view, he was a genius of unambiguous singularity, a juggernaut of fearless reason. Never a man of tattered platitudes or flaccid nothing-burger declarations, he was, to the core, a true and unflinching Canadian.

Throughout his 77 years, Rex Murphy railed against the malignancy of political cowardice and phony wokeness, standing strong against the misdirected correctness of those who insist on self-flagellating themselves over the alleged short-comings of his beloved Canada.

He shared his welcome wisdom with us on his CBC Point of View editorials — which were always much anticipated and awaited on The National — Cross Country Checkup and more recently via the National Post.

His gift was in the way he connected words we seldom use in everyday conversation, in order to bring into deliciously sharp focus the issues of our time. Those words weren’t necessarily foreign to us, and not necessarily long either, but they were always like the third bowl of porridge in Goldilocks and the Three Bears — just right.

For defending our country against persistent allegations of systemic racism (his sin was to declare, “Most Canadians, the vast majority in fact, are horrified and would never participate in it. We are in fact not a racist country.”) he was almost banished from the national conversation.

But he and his brand of unremitting candor and steadfast faith in the great national mosaic would not be silenced by, as he called them, the “great catalogue of phobes.”

Rex Murphy was comfortable in his own skin, which must have been the thickness of a hard-cover print-edition Thesaurus, but he appreciated the limitations of his craft.

“Everything written,” he once stated, “if it has anything in it, will offend someone, and if the mere taking of offence was to amount to a licence to kill the offender, well the world would be sadly underpopulated of novelists, columnist, bloggers, and the writers of editorials.”

Right to the end, he wrote, and pontificated, and challenged, and faithfully filed his last columns with the National Post even as the evil ravages of cancer overtook him and, in an act of unparalleled injustice, finally silenced him.

There will never be another like Rex Murphy to tear asunder our frailties and mine so deep into the national soul. With his passing, we are unpopulated by a writer who unflinchingly wielded a scalpel on the fabric of our country’s infirmities, and for whom we’ll be eternally grateful.

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor.  He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.