Thursday, February 16, 2012

The unbearable heaviness of being a Con

It sometimes ain't easy trying to install authoritarian rule in Canada. If you're Harper or a minion, you open yourself up to all sorts of problems.

Propose a sweeping electronic snooping bill, and people don't cower in fear but tell you where you can stick that bill. Comparing innocent citizens who mightn't want their emails read by creepy old men or the murderously incompetent RCMP to child molesters doesn't actually help your cause. I mean, I understand that it might be hard for you guys to swallow the idea that Canadians thought Trudeau had the right idea here.

Get photographed in a bitumen daisy-chain with the Chinese government, Sinopec, and Enbridge, and again, you're just making life harder for yourselves.

Suggest that you might make Canadians work to senility and you've threatened just about every Canadian old enough to understand the concept of retirement. Kicking the can eight years down the road still sticks right it in the middle of boomer retirements.

Try to straightjacket judges and they'll not go quietly.

And as I learned through the grapevine the other day, making your senior civil servants submit any presentation or speech they intend give to your political officers for ideological vetting is one thing. But there's really no guarantee that what's been submitted and approved bears any relation to what gets said.

You see, in a place like Canada with a long history of tolerance and the freedom to live happy and safe lives, without too much government interference, your behaviour comes across as increasingly bizarre. You're not the Soviet Union or China, so you can't send your political adversaries to gulags or simply have them purged, but more of us are starting to think you might want to. You also have, at least for now, a secure population that isn't staggering about looking for certainty under punitive war reparations or the like. We won't so easily acquiesce to the sort of autocratic and brutal rule others have.

We'll create problems. Lots of them. As you're finding out.

It's funny how that last points works. You see, the more you find you can't just have your wicked way with 35 million people, the crazier the ideas you'll try to impose in the effort. And of course, the more entrenched the resistance becomes. We could have a lot of fun with this.

At heart, you're starting to look to more and more people like a small group of people, mostly men, gone funny in the head. Plumbism maybe.




3 comments:

Steve said...

The two faces of Vic

I sure hope the Canadians who did not vote, or split the vote are paying attention. What I fear is when the polls slide it will be scorched earth policy.

Unknown said...

Where is the jurisprudence to support disobedience to unjust laws? Maybe we need to broadly publish the criteria for such so that we can confidently know, as a community and as individuals, when to disobey certain laws. South Africans did it under apartheid. A few under Hitler. Women in the RC church do it all the time. We also need to put together the support groups for those who do.

kootcoot said...

"At heart, you're starting to look to more and more people like a small group of people, mostly men, gone funny in the head. Plumbism maybe."

Maybe all dem PseudoCons were raised on water from lead pipes, I hear it affects the brain........