My wife has a badge attached to her purse that reads, "If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention!"
Apparently too few Canadians are paying attention or else there would a massive outcry of outrage over Stephen Harper's government's latest move towards direct dictatorship, known as the "proroguing of government."
As it stands right now, Canada has no democratic government. By that I mean Canadians have no means, at this time, for opposition party members to counter, through their votes, any decision that Harper decides are to his advantage. Harper, ever in tight control of everything on his watch, has masterfully done an end-run around any form of accountability by removing any form of scrutiny from the table. Committees in progress are terminated and would need to be reformed when/if the government sits again in March, wasting not only the time and money spent on investigations and process thus far, but having to waste more time and money getting back to where the investigations were when he managed to grind the whole parliamentary process to a halt again. I mean, if it saved his political assets once, and no one complained enough, then why not do it again? After all, no one will complain, again.
What I want to know, aside from the fact that average Canadians are paying more attention to junior hockey than the fact that they no longer have a say in what happens in their country, is where are our political opposition leaders? Why are they not at home, screaming blue murder on the airwaves and in the print media? Has Team Harper managed to catch the Liberals and NDP so off-balance they can't even regroup from their snorkelling and skiing enough to notice that something is wrong here? Does that mean that Harper can totally disregard the will of Canadians altogether? Why not? We don't seem to care and apparently those we have elected to watch out for us don't either.
Harper doesn't need to resort to attack ads and backstabbing. He can just sit back and let apathy do the dirty work for him.
Fraezor Martell, St. Albert
