Pubdate: Sat, 18 Jun 2016
Source: Ottawa Sun (CN ON)
Copyright: 2016 Canoe Limited Partnership
Contact: http://www.ottawasun.com/letter-to-editor
Website: http://www.ottawasun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/329
Author: David Krayden
Page: 10

TRUDEAU'S REFORM WILL TRANSFORM CANADA

PM Rushing to Force His Vision on Country

In the eight months that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has ruled 
Canada, he has already left an indelible imprint upon this land.

With so-called "democratic reform" he aims to make that impression 
even more evident.

Despite all the ballyhoo, I wonder if an uninterested public is even 
aware that Trudeau is pushing a proportional representation electoral 
system in this package, whereby parties are represented in the House 
of Commons as a percentage of the vote they receive during an election.

Aside from meaning that you will no longer vote for a representative 
but be given whomever the victorious party chooses, proportional 
representation has potentially dire consequences for Canadian 
democracy and potentially far-reaching ramifications for Canadian society.

But that is precisely what Trudeau is up to.

He's the ultimate social re-engineering prime minister.

Despite running, as all good progressives do, on the economy and how 
all the social issues are settled and beyond the grasp of debate, 
Trudeau has persistently pursued a social agenda like a dog burying a bone.

Did I forget to mention marijuana? Well, Justin has, by his own 
admission, been illegally smoking pot for years so he will soon take 
care of that inconvenience and legalize weed - without any 
prerequisite study of the current experiments in North American pot 
legalization that could wield a wealth of information. Colorado, for 
instance, legalized marijuana two years ago and has found their 
impaired driving statistics going through the ceiling. Is their some 
strange correlation here?

It is astounding that it took a royal commission under Liberal PM 
Mackenzie King three years to analyze the Great Depression 
(Rowell-Sirois Report) but Trudeau can't even be bothered to consult 
the existing evidence on marijuana legalization because it might 
interfere with normalizing his drug of choice.

So is "democratic reform" a political or a social transformation? 
Potentially, it is both.

First, let me say that none of this has been adequately explained to 
Canadians. Talk about "democratic reform" and just about anybody will 
think you're doing a good thing.

Weimar Germany experimented with democratic reform. Proportional 
representation, in that brief democracy between the Kaiser and Adolf 
Hitler, allowed the Nazi Party to go from five per cent to 15 per 
cent to 33 per cent to 44 per cent of the vote before being invited 
to form a government.

Though it is true that the Nazi Party might have formed a government 
under "first past the post," it is unlikely that a fringe party, 
which National Socialists were, would ever have positioned itself as 
a potential government without the assiduous aid of proportional 
representation.

Fair enough, there are "functioning" democracies with proportional 
representation - like Israel and Italy - but they aren't functioning 
like we're accustomed to in Canada. Are we prepared to tolerate 
fragile, pusillanimous governments in a country that is delicately 
fused along geographic and linguistic lines and defined by an 
urban-rural cleavage?

So what is Trudeau up to? First, he is playing with fire. Canada has 
been and will be quite a fine democracy without proportional democracy.

Proportional representation is nothing but an electoral fetish. When 
are the democratic roues and raconteurs going to realize that 
democracy is not entirely defined nor completely fashioned by 
perfectly equitable elections? In fact, democracy is rooted in far 
more than merely having an election every four years: It is based in 
societal demand for liberty, a tradition of freedom, a free press, an 
unfettered opposition a police and military subject to the government 
and a judiciary responsible to the rule of law.

Trudeau should not forget that in his calamitous quest to further 
rend the fabric of this nation.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom