By Michael Nabert
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the cynical reason why Justin Trudeau hasn’t come out harshly against this hideous bill to eviscerate Canadian rights and turn us into a police state. Hoping to draw more voters from the right to support him, he and his political advisors are concerned about the idea that Harper would publicly call him “soft on terror” or “uninterested in protecting Canadians from terror” in public. It wouldn’t be true, but the media would line up behind the Prime Minister in lockstep to repeat the assertion, and it’d be another scoring point in Harper’s election rhetoric. I get that. But really, is the possibility that someone might score a political point against you with some low information voters more important than protecting the rights of citizens? The Liberals have proposed a series of amendments to C-51 which is available online.
So what’s in them? More oversight, check. Parliamentarians would know more about what Canada’s new secret police would be doing. Protection for basic Charter rights? Not so much. So apparently in Canada’s 2015 federal election, both of the only two parties that have ever given the nation Prime Ministers are quite fine with breaching currently constitutionally protected charter rights, and the only parties arguing that Canadian citizen rights should not be surrendered to the state are the Greens, who led the charge, and the NDP, who woke to the issue quickly thereafter. Both are derided as ‘fringe parties that you’d be throwing your vote away to support’ in tons of places online.
Let that sink in a little, shall we? Both the Liberals and the Conservatives are totally fine with taking away your Charter Rights and Freedoms, and they’re the only two parties that have ever been given the keys to the country.
I’m glad Trudeau the senior isn’t alive to see his son undermining the thing he is most beloved for, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that Canadians voted their third favourite thing about Canada, period. Incidentally, the thing Canadians value most about Canada is our universal health care, which is now rapidly becoming defunded by Harper, and number two was peacekeeping, which we now pretty much never do any more, since apparently bombing sovereign foreign nations without their consent or NATO’s or the UN’s is Canada’s new military raised middle finger to international justice.
Dealing with how horrible our current PM is is really bad enough. I don’t want to keep seeing news that the man most likely to replace him might give the nation some moderately more progressive policies about relatively small matters, like cannabis legalization, while likely to give us more of exactly the same in all of the big things that matter most, like Tar Sands development coming before climate sanity, but pipeline projects, foreign ‘trade’ deals corrosive to Canadian sovereignty, and more.
About Michael Nabert: During the last Federal election, I was naive enough to think that this was as bad as the Harper impact on Canada could get.
Boy, was I wrong. Now all I want is an opportunity to dedicate myself full time for a couple of months to trying to bring his regime to an end while there’s still bits of Canada I find recognizable. Can you spare a buck towards unleashing me on them?
I also hope to organize a bunch of people to politely reach across the political divide to speak words of reason to supporters of my political opponents. Join me/find out more here.
I’m also on Twitter: @SustainableSong
“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
― H.L. Mencken
