CKNW Editorial
for August 8, 2001

A short note to start. I hear my former colleague, George Garrett thanking God that he, as a diabetic, has the Canadian Diabetes Association to advise and help him. George and all diabetics ought to get the facts straight. If you go to the Canadian Diabetes Association they will send you to the diabetes clinic in your hospital where you’ll be advised, by people passing themselves as experts, as to what foods you can eat. Amongst those foods are ones laced with the artificial sweetener, aspartame or Nutrasweet or whatever brand name it’s called. Asparatame is considered by more and more doctors as nothing less than a poison, especially for diabetics. I am a diabetic every bit as much as George is and my advice to any of you diagnosed as having diabetes is to give the Canadian Diabetes Association as wide a berth as you possibly can. For any organization that advises you to consume that which is, at the very best, of suspect safety, doesn’t deserve the attention of anyone.

If the Hughes Inquiry into Apec tells us anything it’s that we do not have a democracy in Canada. You cannot have a democracy where you have a leader who can do whatever he feels like and at the same time controls the national police force. You can have, under those conditions, a country with the trappings of democracy and one which, when it is convenient to the leader, tolerates freedom of speech and the right to freely assemble – but you cannot have a truly free country.

There is no question but that Jean Chretien’s henchman, Jean Carle, gave orders to the police during the Apec conference. That’s not so bad as the fact that the police were obliged to listen to Mr Carle. They must listen because the Commissioner of the RCMP is a deputy minister in the office of and answerable to the Solicitor-general who holds his post on the sufferance of the Prime Minister.

Canadians must start asking themselves some questions. Do we believe in the right of free assembly and the right to peaceful protest? Before you answer too quickly remember that this is a society where few protested and many applauded a Vancouver City policeman who admonished people not to go to downtown Vancouver on a New Years Eve unless they could show they had good reason. I think, frankly, that many Canadians approve of the right to freely assemble and protest in the abstract – as a principle they think it’s a good thing – but they don’t support it in practice. They support demonstrations unless they turn violent in which case they deplore all the demonstrators, even those who were peaceful and always intended to be.

Violence is intolerable to all – but the potential for violence has to be accepted because that risk always prevails. If one is to ban demonstrations that might get violent that’s the same as banning demonstrations, period. Picket lines are demonstrations – are we to say that because there is sometimes unpleasantness on picket lines that they be banned? Will we prevent people from going to Victoria and protesting on the lawns of the legislature because someone might get hurt?

The answer is, I suppose, a practical one. You cannot ban protests because they may turn violent because if you do, you’re certain to get a protest that is violent.

I see a far more sinister situation than violence in demonstrations here. I see a country that cares very little about basic rights and is unable to believe that a Canadian government could become a malevolent dictatorship. I don’t share that confidence.

Canada has become a one party state and looks to remain one for some time to come. The system of government has led to the point where the prime minister is an absolute dictator who controls virtually every federal appointment all the way from the Supreme Court of Canada to enumerators for the voter’s list. He controls the House of Commons through his control of his party and the machinery of parliament itself. Combining the stick and the carrot, the prime minister is beyond all control. The incumbent is one who has no hesitation in exercising his power – remember a couple of years ago he sent Canadian troops into the war in Kosovo and only consulted his tame parliament long after the event … he is a man who is impervious to the proven charge that members of parliament are mere lackeys that do what they’re told … he is a man who loans government money to pals and refuses to account to the Hughes Commission. In short, he is a dictator in every sense of the word – he just hasn’t started throwing people into jail without charges.

But don’t be comforted by that. His mentor, Pierre Trudeau, in 1971 placed the entire country under martial law for a killing and a kidnapping in Quebec and threw hundreds of people in jail without charge, without the ability to get counsel and without the right to communicate with their families. This, you will note, in peacetime.

No country is immune to dictatorship. At least in the United States they have a Supreme Court as the ultimate bulwark against dictatorship which, though appointed by the president, must be approved by the Senate and which is subject to impeachment and dismissal by Congress if they misbehave. Our Supreme Court is appointed, without any restraint whatsoever, by the Prime Minister.

It can happen here, as the Hughes Report demonstrates and we’re kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. What would it take?

What about a Liberal government in the fifth year of its mandate faced with a big separatism crisis in Quebec? Is it so hard to imagine a Jean Chretien, or any other Liberal Prime Minister, for that matter, telling the nation that he and the Liberals were the only national party capable of dealing with this crisis? After all, the Liberals have convinced themselves and much of the Ontario establishment that they are the national governing party and the only ones that reflect the views of "right thinking" Canadians? Is it too much of a stretch to see the Liberals moving from their ordinary day-to-day arrogance to believing that they and they alone can save the country and that, therefore, an election must be postponed? To a more convenient time? And they’ll let us know what that time comes?

And if that happened, what do you suppose Canadians would do about it?

It can’t happen here? That’s what they all have said until one day it did.