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Astute observations about Harper and how he has complete domination over our laws and government.
Ralph Heintzman, a professor at the University of Ottawa and head of the federal Office of Public Service Values and Ethics, says Canada might just have the most centralized political system in the world.
“The Canadian prime minister is probably the most powerful political executive in the world because there is nothing, once he has a majority in Parliament, to restrain him or her,” he told the Winnipeg Free Press in a recent interview.
“In most other Westminster democracies, there are peculiarities of the system, which act as checks, formally or informally.” Heintzman cites parliamentary systems in the U.K. and Australia where the party leaders are chosen by MPs, as opposed to party members like in Canada. “
That turns the power relationship upside down,” he says. “The leader controls the caucus. The caucus does not control the leader.”
In other words, members of Parliament in Canada are inclined to vote the way the prime minister wants them to or risk losing opportunities to serve on cabinet or even in caucus. In the U.K. and Australia, MPs yield more power over their leader.
If you aren’t scared yet, you should be. The Canada that we knew and loved is eroding before our eyes. There is very little to protect us from the forces who want to take away the essence of who we are and replace it with something far more sinister – unrestrained fascism.
Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain.
This is a great point, however, with a caucus full of ultra right-wing theocrats controlling Harper, things might be even worse. The upside would be that Canadians would be much more likely to see the crazies for what they are.
Thing might certainly be worse and they will be. Power is a weird thing. It can carry its users into areas they dare not go but suddenly say to themselves, why the fuck not..let’s do it. That’s where the theocrats come in. They will have their day with Harper.
It’s pretty much known by other country’s, Canada is in a dictatorship regime. I am no longer proud to be a Canadian. This is not Canada, what-so-ever. Our country is more like, Columbia and Equador now. Harper even had a multi-criminal charged felon, Carson working for him. Carson and his ex prostitute girlfriend were guests, in the Harper’s home.
There are very few politicians from other country’s, that have any respect for Harper. They see how quickly our nations democracy is being eradicated. The horrific mess Harper has made of Canada. We are no longer a respected country, Canada’s name has been dirtied. Harper appointing rotten scum like Campbell as High Commissioner to England, has never made it more clear, how Canada has been degraded.
Harper is frantic to be an energy giant. He desperately wants that power and glory. If he needs to pollutes the entire planet, with the dirty tar sands oil, he will do so. Harper has no ethics nor morals. He has no loyalty to the Canadian citizens. We are only to thieve from…While Canada burns, Harper plays and sings his Beetles songs.
I always understood this, which was why I was so dedicated to trying to prevent this very scenario as the only legitimate position for everyone not supporting Harper and the CPC regardless of political affiliations. Although THANK GOD for PET, because there is ONE thing stopping Harper from doing anything he wants by pure legislative fiat, and that is the repatriated Constitution and especially the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I am old enough to remember that prior to that point any Canadian government could literally strip away any and all rights from the citizenry purely by legislative fiat (as the 1970 use of the War Measures Act illustrates), something Harper cannot do now. He still has an insane amount of power mind you, just that it still has a slight check on it in that respect instead of what it could have been without the Harper being there.
This is part of the problem with Canadian society in general, most of it really does not understand the basics about how our system of government actual works, or even how it is designed to work (as opposed to how it actually does) let alone care enough and are willing to take the time and effort to be active in actually participation in our political process (and yes I mean far more than just voting when I say this, I mean across the board from being aware of issues to being active in a party and everything in between). It in turn also allowed a “it can’t happen here” mentality to happen because we did have such a history of good government overall, and responsible government despite the limited checks on a sitting majority government, another piece of evidence BTW that the Libs and the old PCPC were far less abusive of power than many seem to have believed, especially now that we have the new Harper majority to show just how bad that abuse of majority power really can be.
This was why I was so infuriated with Dippers for not placing stopping Harper as the most important goal, why I was so infuriated with their obsession of taking down the Libs regardless of whether that gave Harper a majority. This was why I argued that Layton was not leading a party of principles first unlike his predecessors in the federal NDP. I found it impossible to accept the premise that Layton and senior NDP elements had such a poor understanding of how our system works to not see exactly this problem with a Harper majority, nor that once he does all this damage like dismantling the Wheat Board it cannot be repaired/replaced/renewed by a successor government because the tools to do so will no longer exist and/or are not longer possible because of treaties we are a part of like NAFTA and the GATT/WTO rules. If one really cared about protecting progressive programs and values in our system of government the only sane response was to stop Harper from EVER getting a majority, because he only needs one to do the damage.
Yes, I know I am using this to bash the NDP yet again, but you know what? What else can I do? It is what I spent years writing and warning about, and it has come to pass, and now we have someone with a real narrow far from anything remotely resembling not just Canadian mainstream thought but even American mainstream thought (which given how much more conservative politically and socially the American culture/society is from ours is a truly scary thought/point) with the powers a majority PM has in our system thanks in part to a now deceased NDP leader who placed his own political power and prestige ahead of the good of his nation AND the principles for which his party stood for and had built a decades long record of placing at the front in terms of priority at the time those principles came under their most dire threat. For me Layton’s epitaph politically is simple, he won the battle to lose the war. I said so before his death and I will continue to do so regardless of how this might make some that want to beatify him feel.
I cannot watch the next few years of politics in any detail because it literally hurts too much. I know WAY too much about the powers a majority PM has to work with, and I ALWAYS believed Harper never changed his beliefs from when he was willing to be openly vocal about them prior to 2004. I weep for what will be left, and I never thought I would be happy to have members of my family dead before this happened, but I truly am these days because this would have shattered their faith in their fellow citizens that this was ever allowed to happen, and you know what, it shattered mine. For all the fault of the Libs, they were never this dangerous to progressive principles and policies, and they helped create a wonderful nation to live in, and for their troubles they got branded yet again liberal Tory same old story by Dippers. Well, the next several years will show Dippers just how wrong they truly were, and I suspect that after the hell Harper puts Canada through most voters will want a party with a proven track record of stable sensible governance back in charge, and not to gamble on yet another new untried party where governing is concerned. I do not see an electorate that feels abused by one party with out of the mainstream approaches to governing making the generally small c conservative electorate of this nation suddenly willing to make a radical shift to the left for the solution/fix. Nope, I see that being more the Libs and they will have been seen as having been humbled and rehabilitated in many voters eyes from their prior governing period both in years and in terms of the last result and therefore will suddenly seem like the best choice again, which would make all the gains the Layton NDP made ultimately a mirage in the end, good only for Harper’s ambitions, not their own.
BTW, this is not what I want to see happening, it is what I think is most likely given the actual makeup of the electorate. I watched Dippers blame “blue Liberals” for the Harper majority instead of voting for them, what they never understood is that the bulk of those that actually vote are NOT lefties/progressives, they are soft right/left centrists with a strong social justice element married to a small “c” (Canadian traditional version) fiscal conservative perspective, which was why the two parties that governed were the PCPC and Libs, and why Harper had to appear to be in the PCPC mold more than not to be electorally viable.
I stopped by because while I am not going to spend a lot of time paying detailed/fine attention to what comes over the next few years I am planning on following at least in gross terms. I think this article is very important in what it shows we live with, and the consequences of the political strategies followed by the CPC and NDP leadership in their respective quests to kill the Liberals for their respective political advantage regardless of what it might mean for the welfare of the nation broadly speaking (mind you I would only expect that really to be of concern to the NDP given the Harper agenda which was why I used to focus it on them). I also thought it worth noting that the Charter PET put in is really the only true check on the power of our Executive and as bad as things are about to get it would be that much worse without it.