Defeat, in politics, is almost always preceded by some sort of an overreaction.

You know: Paul Martin, desperate to avoid defeat in the 2006 federal election, declares that he will take away the federal government’s ability to use the notwithstanding clause.  Didn’t work. He lost.

The Grant Devine government in Saskatchewan used it in 1986, desperate to ensure some public sector workers were forced back to work.  His government was subsequently defeated, and a bunch of his MLAs and staffers later served time for expense account fraud, too. For good measure, the federal Conservatives wouldn’t even let Devine run for them.

Ralph Klein, desperate to keep social conservative knuckle-draggers happy, mused about using the notwithstanding clause back in 2005, to prevent same-sex couples from getting married.  A few years earlier, in 1998, he wheezed that he’d also use section 33 of the Constitution to prevent compensation for thousands of innocents who had been subjected to forced sterilization by Alberta’s government between 1927 and 1972.

He didn’t, though, in either case.  Klein’s willingness to use brute constitutional force against gay people who love each other – and against people who had been sterilized simply because they had disabilities – will follow his name throughout time, like a foul curse.

Quebec, however, wasn’t nearly as shy as Ralph Klein.  From 1982 to 1987, in fact, the separatist Parti Quebecois government actually inserted the wording of the notwithstanding clause into every single piece of legislation it passed – so desperate were they to prevent any of their laws from being challenged in court. That all was a bit too reminiscent of a certain European nation in the 1930s, so the PQ was sent packing in 1987, and the practice stopped by the Québec Liberals.

In 1988, however, the Quebec Liberals were eventually desperate, too. So they invoked the clause to prevent people from putting English words on signs.  They got condemned by the United Nations for that, so the Robert Bourassa Liberals rewrote their anti-English law to make it somehow conform with the Charter of Rights.  Bourassa went on to quit politics, and his successor got wiped out by the PQ after just a few months in power.

See the threads weaving through all of that?  See that? Desperation, and the notwithstanding clause.  In Canada, the two go hand-in-hand: desperate politicians use the notwithstanding clause – or say they’re going to, or simply start talking about it – and then they pay a steep, steep price.

The Ontario Progressive Conservative government didn’t end up using section 33. But, so desperate were they to winnow down a municipal council by a few puny seats, they said they would if they had to.

Asked for some justification, the Ontario PCs went on and on about how judges are appointed, and how politicians aren’t. (Forgetting, apparently, that it is the politicians who do the judicial appointing, up here in Canada.)

But logic is irrelevant, among the desperate. No one knew why they were so desperate, really – would it have killed them to wait a little bit, and pass their law when an election wasn’t already underway? – but desperate they were.

So: they were condemned by one of the authors of the Constitution, Jean Chretien. They were condemned by Brian Mulroney – a fellow Conservative who (like Kim Campbell, like Stephen Harper) never, ever used the notwithstanding clause. They were condemned by another Ontario Progressive Premier, the much-revered Bill Davis.

Most notably, they were condemned by the people. Across Toronto, across Ontario, across Canada: people were mad at the Ontario Tories. The polls showed it. Whatever honeymoon the weeks-old Ontario PC government was enjoying was effectively obliterated by the constitution desperation.

Does the same fate await them that befell the others? Will they carry the notwithstanding curse to the political graveyard?

Who knows. Time will tell.

But their stated willingness to use a constitutional nuclear bomb – and their sheer desperation – will not be forgotten anytime soon.

It shouldn’t be.

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Good question. I remember her.

She’s tallish, slouching near the doors at Sun News Network, chain-smoking.  Smirking

“Troll with a tan,” someone at the erstwhile network said about her. Uncharitably, but not inaccurately.  That indeed seemed to be the whole package: a suspiciously deep, orange-ish tan, and the sleeveless Fox News mien.  That’s it.

When she first appeared on Sun News, they’d hand her a microphone and tell her to go stand somewhere and pretend to be a reporter.  She’d slap on fake eyelashes the size of bats – and then she’d fire off words and sentences like a speed freak running an auction.  She was terrible.

In time, she’d slow down her delivery, reveal a bit more décolletage, and start sharing her views on-air.  Around the ill-fated right-wing network, it was pretty difficult to sound extreme: for many, fanaticism was the lingua franca.  But Faith Goldy – with figurative snakes slithering thorough her veins, and a clutch of metaphoric maggots in the spot where a heart should be – sounded extreme even to the extremists.

When Sun News slipped beneath the waves, however, no one was surprised to see her clutching at Ezra Levant’s dinghy, the S.S. Rebel.  The rightist trolls – living in their mom’s basement, pawing at their tiny gonads through their Avengers jammies as they eyeballed Faith’s clips on a continuous loop – loved her.  They positively ached for her. Faith was the one they wanted to marry, at a ceremony with lots of Wagner’s Rienzi, Die Meistersinger playing, and possibly an officiant from the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake.

But even as the rebels sought to curry favour with the so-called alt-Right, publishing columns titled “Ten Things I Hate About Jews” and doubting the Holocaust in commentaries, Faith Goldy went further.  She was more of a race-and-religion rebel than anyone at the Rebel.

The breaking point came in Charlottesville, which she was sent to cover for Ezra’s online lunatic asylum – where she’d be seen doing a stand-up not far from the woman who was mowed down by a white supremacist.  That terrible week, Faith appeared on the pro-Nazi Daily Stormer, opining that there was a need for a rise in “white racial consciousness.”  She also proclaimed that National Socialist types have “robust” and “well-thought-out” ideas on “the Jewish question.”  Levant, a Jew and no anti-Semite himself, finally fired her.

After that, Faith abandoned all pretense of restraint.  She was fully alone, piloting in dark, dark waters.

She started reciting The Fourteen Words, the credo of neo-Nazi terrorists in the Order – “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”  She went on someone’s show to promote a book about “the Jewish menace” – a book which calls for “putting an end to their unnatural, parasitic existence.”  She advocated for pedophile Milos Yiannopoulos, simply because she was encouraged by his brand of foul racism.  She tweeted “the future is Far Right.”  David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, took notice and commenced cheerily retweeting her stuff.  So did other lowlifes.

So, is Faith Goldy a neo-Nazi?  Who knows.  She certainly counts many Hitlerites among her friends and followers, doesn’t she?

Which naturally leads us to another question, one more relevant:  is Faith Goldy someone with whom Canadian political leaders should ever be seen?

No. No, they sure as shit shouldn’t.

UPDATE: I am reliably told the Premier was not aware of the sorts of things I outline above. I am also told this will never happen again.

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