Rex Murphy gets it right again....

He's slowly becoming one of my favorite commentators...

Sarah McLachlan, obviously, is not as much of a fan of diversity as I am. She came to Canada Day wearing a PETA T-shirt. Whatever else PETA is, most sensible people will agree it is tasteless, vulgar and vile. It has had some of the very crudest and most insensitive exercises in the history of so-called protest, of which I will cite only “the Holocaust on your plate” campaign, which, in my judgment, reached the level of a blasphemy against the memory of the six million Jewish people exterminated in Hitler's death camps.

How crude that was you may easily measure for yourself: It featured a picture of a starving man in a concentration camp next to the picture of a starving cow. I wrote “crude” just now, but that word is far too feeble to convey the abject, garish viciousness of such a juxtaposition. A PETA T-shirt, as this example demonstrates, is not the banner of a serious moral sensibility.

Once again, Ms. McLachlan's own words on the seal hunt this Canada Day are far more descriptive of PETA's outrages than anything she is protesting. “Perverse and sick” is how she described the hunt. Well, I'm not so sure. Exploiting the memory of six million dead for cheap publicity, putting a “cow” in any equivalence with history's greatest crime, that is “perverse and sick.”

Actually, I think putting on a PETA T-shirt might be one signal that you've surrendered any moral leverage you may vaguely possess to lecture anyone about anything. And calling the traditional lifeline of some of Canada's northern aboriginals “perverse and sick” might suggest the person doing the calling is less familiar with the concepts of tolerance and diversity than most would hope. As does slandering those on the East Coast who have found the hunt a needed resource for more than a century and a half.

But Ms. McLachlan does have Pamela Anderson in her corner – and what is time and native culture against that bulwark? A queen of soft-core porn and PETA: There's an alliance.

Ms. McLachlan could learn a lot on this issue from a far more worthy source. Our own Governor-General, who, by her gesture of respect to the hunt a near month ago, showed more class and understanding than PETA and its camera-hungry devotees - on Canada Day or any other - can ever hope to approach.

And, yeah, pushing the cause on Canada Day was just tacky.