Andrew MacDougall, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's spokesman, said Wednesday that Parks Canada locations - like where the new visitors centre at the Bethune Memorial House National Historic Site is located - "cover the full spectrum of political actors (and) political thought from Canada's past."
He added that tourism dollars spent at such sites are an important part of Canada's "fragile economic recovery."
The memorial house in Gravenhurst, Ont., 170 kilometres north of Toronto - Bethune's birthplace - is a popular destination for Chinese business and government delegations, and draws some 1,000 visitors a day during high season.
But Queen's University's Bruce Gilley, an expert on China's politics, cautioned that while there's no harm in commemorating Bethune's legacy as a dedicated surgeon and inventor, it shouldn't be sugar-coated.
The controversial comrade was used by Mao Zedong - who went on to become known as one of the world's worst mass murderers - as a "moral model" of unquestioning obedience to the Communist party, he said.
"Bethune was someone we would in our contemporary Western world call a useful idiot," he said. "He more or less took leave of his moral compass and senses when he went to China and threw himself into the Communist cause."
Gilley noted it was well established by the late 1930s that the Chinese Communists were under Moscow's thumb and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had already killed millions of his own people and set up the Gulag labour camps.
"There was little doubt that what Mao planned for China was what Stalin had planned for the Soviet Union," he said.
Treasury Board President Tony Clement, who breezed in to the centre's grand opening Wednesday in a bright orange rickshaw, told the crowd he wasn't celebrating Bethune's ardent Communist ideology but his other values.
"What I see in Dr. Bethune is his spirit of humanitarianism," he said.
Still, at least one Tory backbencher is frustrated tax dollars went to fund the new centre.
"I don't doubt there's a lot of people who get warm and fuzzy when they think of Norman Bethune," Rob Anders said. "They're probably left-leaning. But he doesn't warm the cockles of my heart."
Bethune was born in 1890 and became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Canada in 1935, shortly before travelling to Spain to work as a military doctor during the Spanish Civil War. In 1938 he left for China, treating Communist troops under Mao before developing a fatal blood infection. He died in 1939.
Original Article
Source: sun news network
Author: JESSICA MUPRHY
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