If America was trying to keep the bubonic plague out of its hemisphere, Canadians would import it just to show their independence of American foreign policy.

I have been lucky enough to have had the opportunity of travelling across this country and enduring all the classic situations that go with talking to people.

Our society is not perfect and this will come as no surprise to many of you. But liberty, you see, that precious child of our liberal democracy only two hundred years old, has one notable side effect. When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice. In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system.

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

Indeed, we Jews were at the leading edge of communist totalitarianism, one of the most murderous movements of the 20th century.

Here in Canada, in the Western world, we are inside the walls. Outside the walls are the barbarians.

The same liberty that protects me also protects members of the Mafia.