Expect Poilievre to Attack Judicial Independence
Poilievre studied carefully at the knee of his political master, Stephen Harper, and he is determined to be even more extreme in his assault on Canada’s civic institutions.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted June 24, 2022 in Blog (Last Updated June 24, 2022)
When Stephen Harper was Prime Minister, he tried to politicize the Supreme Court of Canada by passing blatantly unconstitutional laws designed to inflame the CPC base, then accusing the Court of being “activist” when it inevitably struck his unconstitutional laws down.
It worked as a fundraising appeal, but it also nudged the base toward more extremism and nihilism about the basic legitimacy of our civic institutions.
Pierre Poilievre studied at his mentor Stephen Harper’s knee, and you know he was busy taking notes.
The man whose campaign rhetoric consists mainly of a repeated promise to fire any civil servant who doesn’t advance his political agenda is certain to try to undermine the independent process used to appoint Supreme Court justices in Canada and turn it into another partisan club to beat civic institutions with.
‘It can’t happen here?’
Yes it bloody well can, and powerful forces are massing to degrade, erode and undermine public trust in our civic institutions so that they can be captured and turned into ideological apparatus for right-wing extremism.
There are a lot of real, structural problems with Canadian civic institutions and civil services, including systemic racism and chauvinism and economic inequity, but those aren’t the kinds of challenges the right-wing ascendancy wants to address.
While moderates and liberals look smugly across the border, the increasingly radical movement that has infiltrated and hijacked the conservative mainstream is fervently gearing up to crush the minuscule progress that has been made toward equity and social justice.