Categories for Musings

October 19: one year later (updated twice)

One year ago today, the Liberal Party won a big, big election victory.

One year later, what do we know?

We know that Justin Trudeau and his party are still popular – very popular. Polls say so. Against his opposition – both leaderless, both (seemingly) directionless – he seems unbeatable.

We know that, when compared to the ugly election taking place to the South, Trudeau’s “sunny ways” still works. When we are obliged to consider the relative merits of the likes of Donald Trump, Trudeau can’t help but look good.

We know that he has done many of the things he said he would do. He said he’d stop bombing ISIS, he said he’d admit thousands of Syrian refugees, he said he’d run deficits. Despite predictions of calamity – despite the numbers, as seen here and here and here – he did all those things, and his popularity soared.

We know that some of the things he said he’d do – like fixing C-51, or restoring home mail delivery, or keeping deficits modest and a middle class tax cut revenue-neutral – he just hasn’t. He has plenty of time left, of course, but some big promises haven’t been kept, and a few have been broken.

We know that he is not perfect, of course. He makes mistakes – sometimes big ones. He seems to have a tin ear about those unkillable Liberal twins, arrogance and entitlement.

We know that he brilliantly campaigned from the Left, as Liberals have been known to do – and he has mainly governed from the Right. As Liberals do. It has enraged his opponents, on Left and Right, but it sure hasn’t hurt him.

That’s what we know.  There’ll be lots of coverage today, as Justin Trudeau makes the rounds of the media, celebrating the first year.

But here’s what I know, this morning, one year later: I don’t give a damn about any of that stuff. I don’t care.

Here’s what I care about: a year ago, Justin Trudeau said that his biggest priority was improving the lives of First Nations in Canada. He said that, over and over. In his Throne Speech, that solemn vow was the centrepiece. He promised First Nations “recognition of rights, respect, co-operation and partnership.”

And, a year later, almost to the day of his big win, a ten-year-old indigenous child committed suicide in Northern Saskatchewan.

The media – preoccupied as we are with Donald Trump and marking anniversaries of elections – barely noticed. Try and find the story about that dead child in Google. It will take you a while. It did me.

Two things.

One, there is nothing Justin Trudeau is doing today – nothing – that should matter as much as a ten-year-old in Deschambault Lake committing suicide, because (to her) life isn’t worth living.  It should get his full attention.

Two, when a ten-year-old girl ends her life – because we haven’t fulfilled our collective promise to that girl – when that happens, there is no anniversary worth celebrating.  None.

Because, when something horrible like that still is happening in Canada, when the duty Justin Trudeau (and all of us) owe that child is unmet – well, it sure isn’t “2016,” is it?  It sure isn’t “sunny ways,” is it?  It’s the bloody dark ages.

And everyone who is decent knows that, too, one year later.

UPDATE: One of my favourite politicians agrees.

UPDATED: A powerful politician also seemingly agrees. Good.  Now do something about it.

 


Sometimes, you can’t win

The Opposition and the media (and me) hammer Trudeau’s government for the electoral reform stuff, and we demand he rethink it.

So Trudeau rethinks it, and the Opposition and the media (but not me) hammer him for breaking a promise.

Sometimes, in this business, you just can’t win.  But I give the guy credit for doing the right thing.


This week’s column: we know who you are 

Fascist.

To some of us, at least, calling someone a fascist is one of the worst things one can say. After that, what is left? How can one top that?

George Orwell, among others, struggled to define the word. He wrote that defining fascism was “important,” and even one of the “unanswered questions of our time.” That seems like overstatement, but perhaps not for the era in which the author of 1984 wrote it.

He went on: “One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from ‘pure democracy’ to ‘pure diabolism.’ In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define fascism, he usually answers by pointing to the German and Italian régimes. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major fascist states differ from one another a good deal.”

True enough. Now, as then, most would define fascism be citing examples of it, not by trying to explain it. In the main, however, it is simply the dogma of killers and thugs. Organizational and structural differences aside, fascist states are characterized by one thing above all: their willingness to use violence against the weak to achieve political ends. Their enthusiasm for state-sponsored brutality – against democratic opponents, against dissidents, against minorities.

The epithet has lost much of its power, however. The Soviet Bolsheviks, and later the Soviet state, used “fascist” all the time to describe people and opinions they didn’t like. Much later, in the Reagan era, the word was thrown around like confetti. Some progressives continued to use it as a conversational show-stopper, even against the likes of Barack Obama.

As such, “fascist” became inconsequential. It became “meaningless,” Orwell noted. Judges in libel actions shrugged at the word, calling it a value judgment – mere rhetoric.

Some of us continued to resist deploying it, however, for two reasons. To us, its meaning was quite specific: it is the ideology of murder. When you call someone a fascist, you are saying that they are capable of great violence to achieve some political (and usually politically-conservative) ends.

Most importantly, overuse of that word diminishes the suffering of the actual victims of fascism – the Jews in the Holocaust, for example. The Jewish people have experienced what fascism literally means. To them, fascism is not a mere debating term, one to be tossed around at the faculty club, say, over the salad bar. Their definition has six million very specific examples, suffused in blood.

Which brings us, in a circuitous fashion, to Donald Trump.

There he stood in that second presidential debate, his sweaty features twisted in a sneer, stalking Hillary Clinton around the stage. Looking like he was going to hit her. Looking like he wanted to. 

Watching him shadow his opponent in that way, many women knew exactly what he intended to convey. 

For those who didn’t get it – mainly men – Trump wasn’t done. He had words, too. Not once, but twice, he said that – as president – he wanted to see Hillary Clinton imprisoned. As president, he said, he would appoint a special prosecutor to go after her.

“You’d be in jail,” he hissed at her, and millions of us became witnesses.

Forget about the constitutional niceties, or what the law says. There was, and is, no doubt that Trump would certainly do what he threatened to do. In its dying days, as his feral campaign has slunk back into the swamp from which it came, all of us have seen how willing Trump has always been to use his power and money to abuse women.

But what he said? What he vowed to do, right to Hillary Clinton’s shocked face?

It is more that unconstitutional. It is more than against the law. It is more than all of that.

In a democracy, threatening to throw a political opponent into a cage – simply because they are an opponent – is fascism. It is what all of them did: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. It is the end of democracy, and the start of something terrible.

Donald Trump, in his words and deeds, has not hesitated to reveal who he is. He has not hidden any of it. And what he is, at the end of this too-long parade hatred and contempt, is just this:

A fascist.