How Does Democracy Die?
Canada's partisan Speaker was ready and waiting to remove Official Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre from the House of Commons Speaker Needs to RESIGN!
How does democracy die? Sometimes death occurs through an assiduous removal of basic liberties followed by a quick descent into dictatorship. But often it is through neglect, through the slow but consistent plodding of a regime that simply denies its citizens the fruits of democratic life one step at a time. Democracy dies because the leadership failed to nourish it, cultivate it, feed it — democracy dies just as a plant will die if it is not watered.
Democracy must include at least one viable opposition party and it most certainly must cherish and promote freedom of speech.
-David Krayden
In Trudeau’s Canada, democracy is dying right now through a process of direct attack and insidious abandonment. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has directly assaulted Canada’s freedom through mechanisms like the Emergencies Act and through a series of censorship bills that are a direct affront to free speech.
But there is also the drip, drip, drip of demonizing his political enemies as racists, misogynists and sometimes even Nazis. There is the constant repetition of talking points that suggest any news or information not sanctioned by the state or produced by the approved mainstream media is misinformation or disinformation or too toxic for consumption.
I have long said that a democracy is not defined just by allowing or even enshrining regular elections. No, you can expect to have a federal election in Canada every four years but what happens in that intervening period can change all the dynamics of freedom in the nation. Democracy must include at least one viable opposition party and it most certainly must cherish and promote freedom of speech.
Without freedom of speech, democracy is a joke or at least an unfulfilled promise. We are fast losing our freedom of speech in Canada but this week we learned just how precarious is this federal government’s commitment to real opposition in the House of Commons. So, we shall examine that phenomenon first.