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This opinion piece is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Ottawa Citizen:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Pierre+Trudeau+decaying+democracy/6902852/story.html
First: Trudeau. In my opinion there is nothing special about Trudeau's writings in the 1950s and 60s; he was against Maurice Duplessis, hell's bells, everyone with an IQ with more than one digit in it was against Duplessis; I have no doubt my late Aunt Florence's overweight pet cat was against Duplessis and she, the cat, could probably have penned a coherent anti-Dulessis diatribe, too. It is 'good' that Trudeau recognized that Duplessis was a real threat to liberty; he, Duplessis, created laws and rammed them through his legislature that aimed to discriminate against people for e.g. religious reasons, or, at least, which aimed to secure the primacy of the Roman Catholic church in Quebecers' daily lives; Duplessis needed to be stopped because he was corrupt (nepotism and patronage rather than personal enrichment) and stolid. He was stopped, by nature, not by the rantings and ravings of self styled liberals.
Second: "Stephen Harper is not Maurice Duplessis," Michael Den Tandt says, but he spends most of a column making the case that they are of the same, anti-democratic ilk.
Bullshit!
It is fair to oppose Prime Minister Harper's use and abuse of existing, legal and proper, parliamentary and constitutional procedures (prorogation) and political propaganda to achieve his ends; it is beyond fair,it stretches the truth it is dishonest to suggest that his practices and philosophy are akin to Duplessis'.
This bit of 'journalism' is, at best, a drive by smear.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Pierre+Trudeau+decaying+democracy/6902852/story.html
Pierre Trudeau and our decaying democracy
Canadians were once warned about the types of abuses of liberty that are currently taking place
By Michael Den Tandt, Ottawa Citizen
July 9, 2012
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, it has often been noted, was indifferent to economics. How did he manage to get away with this, let alone govern Canada for the better part of 16 years, becoming in the process a "modern father of Con-federation"? The pragmatic necessities of the marketplace, we take for granted now, rule our politic-al choices. Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks of economics incessantly. Have things changed so much?
It seems a worthwhile question to ask, with the elder Trudeau's legacy front and centre in the emerging Liberal leadership race. Is Justin Trudeau in any way his father's son, apart from their mutual charisma? Is anyone in the Liberal fold, constitutional lawyer Deborah Coyne per-haps, the intellectual heir of Trudeau the elder?
Before we can begin to answer these questions, we should examine P.E.T.'s thought, perhaps. The philosopher king, he was once nick-named. Was he even a philosopher? And, if he were alive today, what would he make of the state of our democracy, and of Canada?
No one can say for certain, obviously. But we can guess, and per-haps do better than that. A series of 20 short essays that Trudeau wrote for Jacques Hebert's journal Vrai, between Feb. 5 and July 5, 1958, at the onset of the Quiet Revolution, offer some tantalizing hints. Trudeau was 39 at the time - a year younger than Justin is today.
For one thing, it becomes immediately clear in reading these essays why Pierre Trudeau may have been more concerned with questions of liberty than of economics. To his eyes liberty was fundamental, and under immediate siege. Trudeau the journalist, a decade before he became prime minister, was indeed the real deal. He was an angry, icy, cutting writer, on the warpath against Maurice Duplessis' Union Nationale, which he believed was flirting with fascism.
Trudeau appears to have been both contemptuous, and deeply resentful, of politicians. "We absent-mindedly bestow these absolute powers over our lives and welfare on a handful of men," he wrote, "in elections dominated by fanaticism and gangsterism, generally without asking of them the smallest guarantee of intelligence or of elementary honesty. Should one of them hap-pen to overstep the bounds, we al-low him to be made a judge, or a legislator for life in one of our up-per houses."
So that much, at least, hasn't changed. But what would this outraged young analyst make of his party today? And what would he say about the federal government, the House of Commons, and the people who occupy it?
Three ideas emerge again and again in those early essays, collected in 1970 in a book entitled Pierre Trudeau, Approaches to Politics. The first is that the state and all its authorities have no right to exist, other than to create the conditions in which the greatest possible number of individuals can reach their fullest potential, as human beings. The second is that all human beings should be equal under the law. The third is that the core institutions of democracy - including the right to free speech, freedom of association, a fair and impartial judiciary, and a free, fair, representative parliament - are the very fabric of society, without which we lapse into tyranny.
Trudeau the elder, when he was younger, was no nanny-stater, in other words. The 21st Century Liberal party, which seems to want to smother every social ill in an eider-down quilt of government pro-grams, would have appeared deeply intrusive to him. "In fact," he wrote, "if we were to extend the powers of the state without having multiplied our means of controlling its policy and limiting its methods of acting, we would tend to increase our enslavement."
Repeatedly in these essays, also, Trudeau writes about the easy but corrosive compromises made for the sake of expediency - the toxic ease of playing along to get along, in a society governed by a regime contemptuous of democratic institutions. He was speaking of his foes in the Duplessis regime, and their hangers-on: "It is a serious matter when the government attacks our inalienable rights, whether by laws or by executive action," he wrote, "it is still more serious when citizens, through cowardice or stupidity, relinquish their rights even when not required by law to do so."
See where I'm headed, here? In 2009 in Canada, a prime minister prorogued Parliament to avoid a motion of non-confidence. In 2011, this same prime minister based an election campaign - successfully - on the notion that a coalition of "losing parties" holding a majority of seats in the House of Commons would lack the legitimacy to govern. This was, simply, a lie. In 2012 this prime minister, having once argued forcefully against the legitimacy of omnibus bills, forced one through himself, in the process changing more than 70 laws. This summer, Canadians are expected to forget all this, and more, because we live in uncertain economic times. Europe, you know. We go along, to get along.
Stephen Harper is not Maurice Duplessis. But the call to overlook abuses of democracy, for the sake of economic expediency - which is a never-ending murmur, beneath every move the Conservative government now makes - is insidious. It's not tyranny, nor should it be called that. But some days, you can see tyranny from here.
Twitter.com\mdentandt
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
First: Trudeau. In my opinion there is nothing special about Trudeau's writings in the 1950s and 60s; he was against Maurice Duplessis, hell's bells, everyone with an IQ with more than one digit in it was against Duplessis; I have no doubt my late Aunt Florence's overweight pet cat was against Duplessis and she, the cat, could probably have penned a coherent anti-Dulessis diatribe, too. It is 'good' that Trudeau recognized that Duplessis was a real threat to liberty; he, Duplessis, created laws and rammed them through his legislature that aimed to discriminate against people for e.g. religious reasons, or, at least, which aimed to secure the primacy of the Roman Catholic church in Quebecers' daily lives; Duplessis needed to be stopped because he was corrupt (nepotism and patronage rather than personal enrichment) and stolid. He was stopped, by nature, not by the rantings and ravings of self styled liberals.
Second: "Stephen Harper is not Maurice Duplessis," Michael Den Tandt says, but he spends most of a column making the case that they are of the same, anti-democratic ilk.
Bullshit!
It is fair to oppose Prime Minister Harper's use and abuse of existing, legal and proper, parliamentary and constitutional procedures (prorogation) and political propaganda to achieve his ends; it is beyond fair,
This bit of 'journalism' is, at best, a drive by smear.