Dear Editor
Friday, the Harper government made a move to enhance its chances for the next election, while at the same time, once again, moving toward a less democratic society. It involved a well-orchestrated, fully news-media-covered address to the nation regarding its new proposed legislation to give all forms of police and intelligence agencies new powers to control us in the name of keeping us safe. Of course, we're all in favour of keeping us safe, so who in their right mind could oppose keeping us safe from fanatics?
After the well-televised presentation by Stephen Harper and some of his inner circle, some of the news channels went to the opposing parties to ask them their views on this new development. The oppositions’ remarks were both very careful and lacking any bite. After all, what political leader during an impending election could find fault with ideas meant to keep us all safe? As it turned out, however, the reason the opposition parties sounded so lackluster, was that they had no time to examine that new proposed legislation. They had not received any copies of it in time to even read it before the big news announcement by Harper.
Shades of Harper's use in the past of omnibus budget legislation with so much other legislation in it of various directions to make it almost — if not entirely — impossible to really effectively oppose any parts of it. Call that democracy? Unfortunately, our parliamentary system, though one of the best democratic systems in the world, does allow a majority government to do that if that government is not keen on observing the niceties of real democracy, and can keep the general public from knowing what's really going on.
So far, the Harper government is still polling somewhere in the low 30 per cent, so there is still a strong possibility they could win a majority Parliament in this year's election. (They won with only 39 per cent last time.) I hope more voters will begin to understand what that could mean to our form of government if we get another majority in Parliament that shows so little regard for real democracy.
Russell Lahti
Battleford
