They are conservative minions mostly, two journalists and a skier – loyalists, no threat to the party line, otherwise known as Harper hand-me-downs, too weak to win even their own elections.
Why not circumvent democracy once again and appoint the lot of them to the upper chamber? Why not stray from certain party platform, and continue to dispense with “parliamentary niceties”? Why do we not look to the Ottawa Senators (the hockey team) for constitutional guidance as Harper continues to skate all over Parliament Hill?
Charlemagne never knew the alphabet; similarly, Harper does not recognize the rules of the House.
Why does the media not call a spade a spade, or a fraud a fraud (à la Danny Williams)?
Because power, I am afraid, co-opts. Instead of staying sceptical of power, many now in the media seem to have a vested interest in defending authority, if we consider the plumb examples of our Governors-Generals past and present.
WANTED: democracy in Canadian government. Required: degrees in journalism, or public relations.
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Relish, as well, the delicious irony of Harper avoiding a parliamentary review process (once again) in appointing Judge Thomas Cromwell to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Was there not an Oliver Cromwell (and his son Tumbledown Dick) the Lord Protector of England (after King Charles I lost his head) in the period of the civil wars of the mid seventeenth century?
And treasure whose support for this, Harper’s latest Cromwellian appointment, by none other than the “green” Leader of the Opposition, Michael Ignatieff, so well untested by democracy within his own Liberal Party.
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A descendant of Tsarist Russian counts, Ignatieff is considered a “humanist” and a “human rights activist” – an unusual act of cognitive dissonance given his moral responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people.
The term “militant liberal” is more apt.
As a public intellectual (more headlining public than intellectual – and not known for his dissidence, or critical independence), Ignatieff seems entirely bereft of any previous understanding of the “unintended consequences” of war.
War should be waged – and the death of others can be freely advocated (mostly non-Westerners, conveniently) to no small propaganda machine, duping maybe even the President. This benign intellectual (recanting eventually in 2007) even graced the Bush Whitehouse, never risking his life over Iraq, or that of his family, or friends – all for a good cause, apparently.
WANTED: a federal leader who does not “borrow” American (or Australian) citizenship to wage war. Required: some residency in mainstream Canada.
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Harper and Ignatieff have both waged war over ideas, which is why the former wants to decimate the opposition in Parliament, and it is why they both wanted to impose “democracy” on Iraq.
Harper and Ignatieff are also both grey-faced icons of Canadians’ current recessionary fears vested in the ‘cult of personality’.
Canadians are more attached to the idea of a leader than they are to the idea of Parliament, a certain public relations coup, thanks to Harper’s spin machine, and to our own anxieties, but also to Ignatieff’s ambivalent distance from the “historic” coalition.
Once recognizable Canadian institutions are now risked to “leadership” costs and effects – anything goes in times of economic trouble.
We cannot teach ourselves better respect for the Canadian constitution while we genuflect before our political elite, now hiding behind acres of snow, a weakened Governor-General – and the recession.
We must instruct our “political class” to continue to speak in constitutional form and forums (for this is our democracy) and we can only begin by being their first critics and teachers: starting now.
