The Three Eras of Canada's Democracy or How We Got to Where We Are Today.

I first voted in the 1968 elections when Pierre Trudeau and Trudeaumania led the liberals to a massive majority and I've watched Canadian democracy evolve, not always in a good way, ever since.

I've witnessed three political eras in my lifetime.

There was an Era of Rights and Freedoms, the years of Diefenbaker, Pearson and Trudeau.  Some might not realize it but Diefenbaker was a true champion of human rights.  Pearson brought Canada to the world stage as honest broker and peacekeeper.  Trudeau, of course, patriated the constitution and left us with perhaps the most important legislative enactment in our country's history, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  That was the zenith of liberal democracy in Canada.  It truly was our Golden Age.

Although few of us grasped it at the time, Mulroney ushered in the Era of Neoliberalism in the guise of free trade and the incremental surrender of national sovereignty to the forces of market fundamentalism.  The era of neoliberalism represented the years of Mulroney, Chretien and Martin.  Neoliberalism became our orthodoxy until it was even embraced by the New Democrats.

The third era is upon us.  It is the Era of Illiberal Democracy marked by the rise of the authoritarian state and the ascendancy of the state over the individual.  This is Canada under Stephen Harper.

I don't single out Canada for criticism.  Illiberal democracy is spreading fast throughout the world.  We are just following suit.  It's marked by a general shift to the Right, a skewing of the democratic restraints on government, and the emergence of new power structures.

Ignatieff recast the Liberals as Conservative Lite with his endorsement of a "muscular foreign policy", petro-statehood, and his unbalanced support for Israel.  Layton and Mulcair likewise embraced neoliberalism as they abandoned the Left and Blairified the NDP.

Harper has left no shred of doubt that he holds liberal democracy and especially the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in contempt.  He has sought to flout the Charter over and again, only to run afoul of the constitutional guardians, the Supreme Court.  They alone, not our opposition leaders, have ensured we have something left to fight for.

Illiberal democracy is evident in the workings of the authoritarian state.  It is manifest in voter manipulation and fraudulent elections.  It is the vehicle for rising inequality.  It is masked in secrecy and deceit.  It is the modern surveillance state.  It is the advancement of corporate interests (i.e. pipelines) over the public interest (i.e. action to thwart global warming).  We're even seeing the early onset symptoms of a permanent warfare state, outsourcing much of our foreign and military policy to another nation.

This is where we are today, the era of illiberal democracy.  Left unchecked it will worsen and our democracy will continue to be degraded.  We only have to look at America's "bought and paid for" Congress and its corporatist Supreme Court.

How to get back to real democracy is the puzzle.  It certainly cannot be achieved with Liberals as Conservatives and New Democrats as Liberals.  We cannot even the political keel under that reality and the country can only continue to list to the Right.

I fear the only antidote is progressivism, genuine bare-knuckle progressivism. Liberals need to restore their near-dead progressive wing.  New Democrats have to curb their centrism and return to their indispensable role of anchoring the Left and becoming the conscience of Parliament.  Who even speaks for labour any more?  Mulcair?  Spare me.

If we don't realize where we came from, everything great that we had accomplished, where we are today and just how we got here, we become party to ensuring the perpetuation and expansion of illiberal democracy in Canada.  We have a choice but we take it for granted at our and our children's peril.  Our freedom hangs in the balance.

How Did We Become a Land of Cowards?

Bill C-51 speaks to the cowardice that has taken hold of Canadian society at the instance of the fear-mongering federal government.  Conservatives and Liberals and, for that matter, a solid majority of the Canadian public support it.

What, some nutjob shoots somebody and so we need to turn the thumbscrews on the already dwindling rights and freedoms of all Canadians?  We're following in the jackboot steps of the United States.  We're becoming a land of cowards.

American pundit Ted Rall has a column in The Japan Times that should speak to all of us.

For a country that used to pride itself on a certain stoicism, the United States has become a land of whiny little boys and girls.

Oh, how we cried after 9/11. Three thousand dead! Those “Wounded Warrior” TV ads asking for donations to support Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans — excuse me, but why am I spending 54 percent of my federal tax dollars on defense if I also have to donate to a sketchy charity? — use the same melancholy tone and weepy delivery as Sally Struthers’ classic “save the children” messages. Obviously it sucks to lose your arms and legs, but let’s grow a pair. Fewer than 7,000 Americans got killed invading two countries where they had no business being in the first place.

Let’s put those numbers into proper perspective, shall we? The Soviet Union lost 20 million people fighting the Nazis (who invaded them, by the way). France lost 11 percent of its population during World War I — the equivalent for us would be 34 million Americans. But the Russians or French don’t bitch and moan as much as us.

Speaking of which, Americans have a lot of balls calling Frenchman “surrender monkeys” considering that nearly twice as many French soldiers were killed in the 1940 Battle of France over six weeks as the United States lost in Vietnam over the course of a decade. Meanwhile, we’re still whining about the 58,000 we lost in — no, invading — Vietnam.

Here at home, we’re infested with wimp cops.

In recent weeks, we have been treated to grand jury testimony in the shootings of two black men, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.

Both killer cops are bruisers — big, muscular guys. Most of all, they are cops. Cops have partners. They have the backing of the state. They carry tasers. They have nightsticks. They go to the police academy, where they train long hours in the art of subduing human beings. And as we well know, they have access to military-style hardware and defensive gear.

It's said that some 80 percent of Canadians questioned support Bill C-51 although most of them have no real idea of what it does or what the existing laws allow our police and security agencies to do.  Harper says "terrorism" and they predictably clap their flippers like trained seals.  These are people who are now inherently fearful, skilfully groomed to cowardice by a fearmongering government and its allies in Parliament.

It's the equivalent of handing over your lunch money to the schoolyard bully only on a national scale.  To those who would consider attacking us - real terrorists - we've just shown them how enfeebled we've allowed ourselves to become. 

They, potential terrorists and our supposed leaders alike, now see us for what we are - easy meat.

  

We Need to Talk

In some ways my late dad was not a deep thinker.   Just crawling out from under the Great Depression and severe wounds from combat in WWII likely had more than a little to do with that.  Yet, to his eternal credit, he made the most of the object lessons he received from those experiences.

One thing he did pass along was that much of history was the struggle of some people for rights and freedoms and the struggle of others to take them away.  He told me that there wasn't a single right that hadn't been paid for, somewhere at some time, in blood and often more than once.   He also told me that we didn't have a single right that, if unexercised or taken for granted, couldn't, perhaps even wouldn't, be taken away.   For those rights, even if neglected by those who received them, all had real value especially to those who would take them away.

I sometimes wonder whether we haven't arrived at one of those eras of forfeiture of some, perhaps many of our hard won rights.   Try as I might I haven't persuaded my children of the critical importance of maintaining and defending their right of privacy which is ultimately what anchors the bulk of our other human and political rights.   To the contrary, they freely yield their privacy each and every day on Facebook and other social media sites.   They generously fill in the gaps that otherwise might remain from credit and bank card transactions, health records and the myriad other ways by which we are monitored and tracked.   I'm not even confident that either of them bothers to vote.  Both of them strike me as easy meat for someone determined to relieve them of their freedom.

An article in today's Guardian concerning US voter suppression efforts in the runup to the 2012 elections piqued my concern.   This sort of stuff used to be the preserve of progressive media outlets like HuffPost.   Now it's appearing with some regularity in European papers.   American parties that seek to win the right to govern their state are perverting their own democratic process.   So where is the mass uprising, the outpouring of anger, the fierce defence of American democracy?   Why aren't Americans of all political stripes taking to the streets to defend their constitution?

Worse yet, what does it say for the health of American democracy and American society that these outright attacks on the country and its people are met with such complacency, even outright indifference?  If nothing else it surely signifies a situation in which power will flow from the public to their masters in the public and private sectors.

A few moments ago I took a coffee break and flipped through the pages of the latest Vanity Fair.  There I came across an article, One Nation Under Arms, about the demise of American democracy and, in its place, the rise of today's "national security state."   The author, Todd S. Purdom, worked his way through the 350-boxes containing the private papers of the late US diplomat and Cold War architect George F. Keenan (1904-2005).

Keenan wrote of what he called the "extreme militarization not only of our thought but of our lives."

"We could not now break ourselves of this habit without the most serious of withdrawal symptoms.   Millions of people, in addition to those other millions that are in uniform, have become accustomed to deriving their livelihood from the military-industrial complex.  Thousands of firms have become dependent on it, not to mention labor unions and communities."

Purdom observes:

"...it is the twisting of national priorities that is the most pernicious ripple effect of this military spending.  It has become all but impossible to close any military base ... and it is always a heavy lift to cancel any weapon system because some community (or memeber of Congress) depends on it, econo9mically or politically.   ...Great corporate engines once worked to build the US civilian economy and the infrastructure that underlay it; now they are at the service of military power and its projection abroad."

And then, in his letters, Keenan wrote this prescient warning:

"We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society.   After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping."

More than 25-years ago, Keenan cautioned:

"There is much in our own life, here in this country, that needs containment.  It could in fact be said that the first thing we Americans need to learn to contain is, in some ways, ourselves:  our own environmental destructiveness, our tendency to live beyond our means and to borrow ourselves into disaster; our apparent inability to reduce a devastating budget deficit."

We are becoming what we once reviled just a few decades ago when we revered, venerated even our democratic society as "open" and free.   The very openness of our society was our bulwark against authoritarianism.  It was also our strength.   Today the malignancy of authoritarianism has triumphed and not merely in the US.   Our own ruler, for all his claims to the contrary, despises openness and champions one-man rule.   Well-placed Conservative insiders tell us that, to Harper, his caucus is little more than an assembly of obedient votes and his cabinet ministers exist solely to implement his dictates.   This is not a man unduly burdened by worries about protecting your or my rights and freedoms.

How are we to reverse this otherwise terminal disease?   How do we banish authoritarianism from our legislatures?  Perhaps it begins by openly acknowledging what has gone wrong.   It begins by talking about it and speaking out against it, loudly and clearly.  It begins by those we chose to lead from the opposition benches denouncing authoritarianism and showing us a path to return to normalcy.   It begins by revisiting our individual and collective rights and freedoms and taking stock of the extent to which they lie damaged and in disarray.   It begins by imagining a strong and open society, the one we let slip through our fingers.