Sunday, January 03, 2010

Malign Dictatorship

One of the favored memes of the Canadian right when out of power was how undemocratic Canada was, a benign dictatorship of the PMO running roughshod over the views of the opposition and ignoring the public will.

Turns out that was just the Conservatives laying out their plans for whenever they came to power.

Harper and Flanagan, in their desperate search for a politically successful conservative party, lashed out at successive Liberal governments' seemingly endless benign dictatorship over Parliament and the Ottawa bureaucracy. Their contention was: "Although we like to think of ourselves as living in a mature democracy, we live, instead, in something little better than a benign dictatorship, not under a strict one-party rule, but under a one-party-plus system beset by the factionalism, regionalism and cronyism that accompany any such system. Our parliamentary government creates a concentrated power structure out of step with other aspects of society."

Irony of ironies, their critique can and should now be thrown back into their faces. Prime Minister Harper is challenging the constitutional powers of Parliament by systematically denying MPs access to uncensored papers and documents, as well as the MPs' rights to call any and all persons to testify before parliamentary committees.

It is becoming patently obvious Harper now presides over a minority government that can all-too-readily be characterized as a not-so-benign dictatorship. Harper successfully exploits the first-past-the-post electoral system -- which he and Flanagan denounced as immature -- and the ideological and political divisions within the opposition parties, to impose his unflinching will on his cabinet, caucus, and what he characterizes as an utterly dysfunctional House of Commons, one made so by the government itself. With his appointment of yet more Conservatives to the Senate, Harper will exercise full and unfettered power over Parliament, a power which he will readily use to cow the judicial branch of government with his so-called tough-on-crime legislation.
In election after election the Canadian people have signaled that they don't want the Conservative Party to have the untrammeled power of a majority, but a weak and out of touch Liberal Party, utterly beholden to Bay Street at the expense of the progressive wing of their base has given it to them.

2 comments:

Robert McBean. said...

every single idea that American and Canadian conservatives hold dear is based on some type of situational ethics.

tdwebste said...

Democracy works when an educated public votes in fair elections.

The problem is Canadian people are not actually very well educated and as result don't vote. The message is not getting out. It doesn't matter what Harper does to damage democracy, if the message does not get out. The long list of measures Harper has applied to weaken democracy include; removing the independence of the judiciary selection process, disregard of electioneering spending guidelines and intent, abuse of national security clause to hid politically damaging information such as excessive military speeding and waste, abuse of government information services to provide public placement of Conservative Party members and the Conservative Party “pictures of government officials and party emblems do not belong on government web sites or information”, complete disregard of the mission in Afghanistan to mentor in the good governance of transparent Afghan government mostly free of corruption, able to win hearts and minds of the Afghan people, ...

If we cannot and will not mentor the Afghan Government in good governance, then we have wasted the lives of every Canadian who has died trying to bring peace and security there.

Harper has wasted the lives of so many Canadians in Afghanistan. Worst still, this was our only chance to mentor the Afghan in good governance and make the world a safer place. Instead Harper with his support of torture and legal corruption within the Afghan government, has shown that the west supports a corrupt Afghan government.

Harper runs away. The fact was he could hid that he does not believe in good governance, transparency or fair justice system free of torture and other judicial corruption. And as long as we let him do it, he will have the authority to oppress our freedoms. This is what we deserve for our apathy and ignorance. We are naive and apathetic fools oppressed by megalomaniac fool.

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