Liberals, Left Field, and Liberation Therapy

Two Liberal MPs come out swinging in favour of the controversial multiple sclerosis treatment, and the National Post's Chris Selley swings back harder.

Liberal MPs Ujjal Dosanjh and Kirsty Duncan called out the government in the Ottawa Citizen Tuesday for failing to take up the controversial MS treatment known as liberation therapy. Government working groups on MS did not consult liberation therapy experts, they said, and consisted of “no experts, no experience, and many undeclared conflicts of interests.” It’s a compelling article, but it also reveals the major problem with the whole debate surrounding liberation therapy. Politicians like Michael Ignatieff have rushed to embrace the treatment even though it goes against most mainstream MS science, and it’s all too tempting to view their hasty endorsement of the therapy as a political gambit. Donsanjh and Duncan’s article would be more convincing if it didn’t conclude with a screed that sounds a lot like a question period tirade: “We are frustrated with the government, and want an investigation into how this file was handled so badly … how the minister repeatedly failed to advocate on behalf of suffering Canadians … And ultimately, who was responsible for repeatedly failing to take leadership, and who must be held accountable[?]”

The National Post’s Chris Selley is having none of it. “I claim no significant expertise on MS … but I know bad arguments when I see them,” he writes. (Full disclosure: pithy Selley is a bit of a hero to us in The Mark Newsroom. His picture hangs on our wall, just below the shinning portrait, Lenin-style, of our other hero: The Mark EIC Jordan Himelfarb, whose words of wisdom/dementedness are recorded here.) Selley accuses Dosanjh and Duncan of recklessly impugning the respected members of the working groups and pulls out some stats of his own that indicate liberation therapy is not nearly as clear-cut as the pair makes it out to be. “The Liberals like to portray themselves as the party of science and reason and the Conservatives as the party of mulish right-wing stupidity,” he writes. “On the MS file, however, the Liberals are way out in left field. And we all know why: Because there’s nothing in it, politically, for them not to be.”