While The World Is Preoccupied

 

While the invasion of Ukraine is undoubtedly the world-shaking event that the media are reporting it as, it would be unwise as Canadians to feel blasé about our home-grown problems, problems made abundantly clear by the recent occupation of Ottawa by a domestic force known as the trucker convoy.

Peopled by idiots all too eager to subscribe to misinformation propagated both domestically and internationally, it was a worrying indictment of the the health of our own democracy. 

Writer Noelle Allen offers some examples and insights into this scourge.

There’s a tweet making the rounds right now about how if the Governor General receives 958,000 emails saying that the sender is casting a non-confidence vote against Justin Trudeau, she will remove him from office. Of course, it has been quickly debunked. 

 There appeared to have been an absurd belief at the occupation of Ottawa that police could not arrest you if you were singing “O Canada” and a much more dangerous belief that they could not arrest you if children were present. There has also been a lot of discussion about the participants’ First Amendment Rights at the various blockades. In the U.S., this is the protection of freedom of speech, the press and assembly. In Canada it doesn’t exist...

The sentiments behind these absurd contentions are worrying in that they betray a contempt for democracy:

It’s telling that the Ottawa anti-vax group started off stating in their “memorandum of understanding” posted on the Canada Unity website that they expected to “form a committee with the Senate and the Governor General to override all levels of Canadian government.” They wanted to wipe the slate clean of all elected politicians and install their own governing junta. The federal election we had less than six months ago simply wasn’t good enough for them, though instead of trying to pretend the election was stolen as Trump did in the U.S., they went straight to trying to overthrow the government.

Allen laments the fact that discussion and compromise are not in the makeup of these miscreants: 

The hard-right fringe keeps coming up against the uncomfortable truth that there are other people in the country and they get to vote, too. But instead of leaving their bubbles, asking what they need to do to meet the rest of Canada in the middle and doing the hard work of democracy, they’ve turned to looking for ways to make our elected officials vanish. They’re like peevish customers who don’t agree with the approach of the front counter staff and are constantly trying to find a way to get what they want by demanding to speak to the manager, only in this case, they seem to believe the manager is the Governor General of Canada. 

Rather than mock or ignore these people, Allen sees them as dangerous:

... the willingness to press for what they want at any cost, to call our elected politicians traitors and threaten them with violence, to hold a city hostage, to simply expect to override the entire system of democracy to get what they want, makes this group dangerous. That way leads to a dictatorship. We need to prosecute those who participated in the illegal blockades fully and make it clear the cost of trying to break our democracy is high. Too high for them to try this again.

And on that last note, allow me to express my satisfaction that, like Tamara Lich, Pat King has been denied bail, the JP ruling against it due to the seriousness of the charges that will likely entail imprisonment. 

It would seem that Noelle Allen's hopes are being realized.

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