Politicians would forgo heaven for their friends, on the guarantee they could send their enemies to hell."
While this is a bit of a caricature, an atmosphere of total war can sometimes prevail among the political class. Even in Canada, where civility is a national trait, citizens have grown accustomed to seeing their representatives fling rhetorical feces at each other in the House of Commons.
The problem is, sometimes our leaders decide to take aim not just on each other, but at the rest of us.
Recently, it looks as if members of the federal Conservatives are extending the total war mentality beyond the official Opposition, to the citizens themselves. There is no other way to explain Public Safety Minister Vic Toews' statement that opponents of Bill C-30, which would allow the RCMP to snoop on Canadian Internet users without a warrant, "can either stand with us or with the child pornographers."
That sort of scorchedearth rhetoric rightfully caused the government much embarrassment, but it is hardly the only example of this particular dynamic at play. Just last week, CalgaryWest MP Rob Anders came under fire from two veterans advocates who said that Anders slept through their presentation about efforts to help homeless former soldiers get off the streets.
Jim Lowther, president of Veterans Emergency Transition Services, said that Anders came to the group's presentation at the Commons veterans affairs committee 10 minutes late and fell asleep shortly after: "He almost smashed his head on the table, he was that out of it."
Anders' response?
He accused Lowther and another V.E.T.S. official named David MacLeod of being "NDP hacks," despite the fact that both seem to be card-carrying Conservatives. He also accused them of supporting Russia's Vladimir Putin, because MacLeod mentioned in his presentation that the Russians had provided housing for their former soldiers and had set up a hospital to treat Afghan war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
MacLeod, a veteran, had the same reaction to Anders' smears that any normal person would have.
"I support Vladimir Putin?" he said, when told of Anders' remarks. "I was in the Canadian Forces for 27 years. I'm former military intelligence for God's sake.
Maybe he was coming out of his sleep when he heard that."
While it is easy to dismiss Anders as a bit of a buffoon (he remains best known as the sole MP to vote against awarding Nobel Peace Prizewinner Nelson Mandela honorary Canadian citizenship and calling the African leader a "communist and a terrorist"), the total war mentality displayed in his reflexive attack against the advocates should not be dismissed so quickly.
This is because this mentality also seems to lie at the heart of the robocalls scandal, where the Conservative party stands accused of misleading phone calls which tried to send ordinary Canadian citizens (identified by the Conservatives as opposition supporters) to bogus polling stations during the last federal election.
Elections Canada confirmed last Friday it had undertaken an investigation after it received more than 31,000 complaints from Canadians regarding calls placed during the election.
Perhaps the Conservative government's defence is correct - perhaps there is nothing more here than opposition posturing, honest mistakes about polling locations or isolated overzealous campaign staffers going a bit too far. But, given the details that have emerged so far, it is also possible that elements within the Conservative party applied that same total war mentality not just against their political opponents in the House of Commons, but against Canadians outside of the political class.
And that is something that all of us should be worried about, because there is a marked ethical and moral difference between total war on one's political opponents and total war against the electorate itself. If Rex Murphy is right, if politics is sometimes reduced to nothing more than causing pain to an opponent, then it is crucial that this opponent not be the citizenry itself.
Original Article
Source: calgary herald
Author: Kris Kotarski
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