Conservatives Just Don’t Get It – They Won’t Be Allowed To Break The Law
By Mike Archer. Stephen Harper sounds an awful lot like Simon Gibson these days. Like Gibson, Harper seems to have a hard time staying within the lines when it comes to making the law. His reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision that he can’t change the constitution unilaterally, because the constitution won’t allow it, is frighteningly petty and ignorant for such an educated man.
Simon may yet misunderstand his powers as a politician. Harper ought to know better.
From Sea to Shining Sea (Outside the law if necessary)
While Gibson helped Abbotsford develop a reputation for passing illegal bylaws, signing illegal contracts, or being unable to stay within its own legal jurisdiction, setting the stage for the first round of what may develop into a large and damaging series of legal actions against the City, Harper seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Canada works.
In Canada the government is not allowed to break the law.
Simple. Straightforward. Uncomplicated. Easy to understand. (Simon excluded of course)
Yet Harper (and his strange brew of left-over conservatives after Brian Mulroney’s destruction of the party in 1993) seems compelled to define anything other than blind adherence to his sometimes bizarre orthodoxy as part of a clever but nefarious plot by evil left wing forces to destroy community standards/family values.
He must,he seems to be saying, be allowed to go outside the law in order to protect community standards/family values.
According to John Ivison of the National Post, “… senior Conservatives are privately incensed and feel the court has blocked Parliament’s ability to make laws.”
According to Ivison, one MO was quoted as saying, ““It’s clear that Canadians don’t make laws through their governments any more. Instead, they watch while unelected courts override important community standards.”
Well, actually, no. The Supreme Court doesn’t make laws. It simply rules on whether or not the laws the government tries to pass are actually legal in Canada.
Harper seems to have an affinity for trying to pass laws which aren’t allowed here. It’s as if his government never took a high school civics course. One of the purposes of the constitution is to set out what government’s can and cannot do in Canada.
If he were to try to pass a law making it illegal to be rich, white, old, or stupid the Supreme Court would actually defend most of his party members and tell him he isn’t allowed to that under Canadian law.
While Harper and his paranoid ultra-right wing brand of conservatives seem prepared to describe the Court’s striking down their attempts to break the law as an attack of community standards/family values (they never tell us which community or whose family their strange and illegal values represent) he and his party are simply demonstrating their lack of understanding of the country they are attempting to change.
At the recent conservative intellectual conference (there’s an oxymoron) hosted by Preston Manning one of the main topics of the conference was the failure of Stephen Harper’s extremists to change Canada into a conservative country.
Like the small clique which has governed Abbotsford Council for over a decade, Harper’s ‘law and order’ government demonstrates a disturbing propensity to disregard the law.