Justin Trudeau does not care about democracy

When Canadians go to the polls on October 21st, they must bear in mind that if Justin Trudeau had his way, there probably wouldn’t even be a vote. Now, I understand this sounds needlessly incendiary and partisan, but I will endeavour to prove to you that it’s neither.

Through attempts to stifle investigations into his own misdeeds, clamping down on free speech on social media platforms, and buying off the mainstream press, Trudeau is intentionally whittling away Canadian democracy.

First off, I’m a liberal, not a Liberal party member, but a liberal-minded person. I have only ever voted Liberal or NDP in my life. I’m old enough to remember when voting that way was a vote for social progress, responsibility, and individual freedom. But ever since Trudeau was elected, things have gradually gotten more and more authoritarian in Canada, with the Liberal party acting more like a Twitter mob than a government.

Let’s review some of Trudeau’s authoritarian gestures over the last couple of years:

The SNC-Lavalin scandal revealed to Canadians and people around the world just how power-drunk our current prime minister has become. After failing to convince Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to let his corporate buddies at SNC-Lavalin off the hook for corruption charges, he simply got rid of her.

Yesterday, Canadians discovered that on Tuesday Wilson-Raybould spoke to RCMP about Trudeau’s alleged political interference. Yet Trudeau has been doing his very best to block the RCMP’s ability to properly investigate the scandal.

Before all of this went down, Trudeau instructed his chief-of-staff, Katie Telford, to promise that Wilson-Raybould would be the subject of glowing op-eds in outlets around the country if she would comply with his wishes and let SNC-Lavalin off the hook. “If Jody is nervous, we would, of course, line up all kinds of people to write op-eds saying that what she is doing is proper,” Telford famously said.

This type of dealing is hard to process. The level of smugness required to attempt to mislead the public, by basically guaranteeing that the press would provide positive coverage for a corrupt act, is beyond the pale.

These real-world examples should be reason enough to choose another direction for our country. But Trudeau has not reserved his totalitarian gestures for the real world alone. The digital world is where the most troubling evidence lies, showing that Trudeau does not care about democracy.

Trudeau’s Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale straight-up declared that he wanted to monitor Canadian’s social media for problematic content in order to censor Canadians. He expressed his hope to “encourage the social media platforms to move quickly and efficiently to deal with toxic communications like this that incite violence and hatred and obviously do great damage to social cohesion.”

Of course, in our progressive era, where anyone who expresses a fondness for Stephen Harper is labelled a hate-monger, and where words equal “violence” and disagreement means “hatred,” all rational people know what Goodale is getting at and it’s straight-up censorship.

Shortly after the tragedy of the New Zealand mosque mass shooting, Trudeau jumped at the chance to sign on to the Christchurch Call and later established his own Digital Charter.

These far-reaching, over-correcting pledges endeavour to sanitize the internet of “extremist” views. Trudeau’s government has also been exploring reinstating Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, a clause that would effectively dictate what Canadians can and cannot say online. While it might be well-intentioned, these steps could be used to justify measures that will eliminate every day Canadians from expressing their views on social media.

As The Post Millennial columnist Lindsay Shepherd recently put it in front of the Parliamentary Justice Committee, “[Bringing back Section 13] would cast too wide of a net and extremists who are already intent on causing real-world violence will go to the deeper and darker web to communicate, whilst individuals who shouldn’t be caught up in online hate legislation will inevitably get caught up in it.”

Lindsay would know. She was booted off of Twitter by social justice crusaders for the perfectly reasonable and correct observation about a notorious alleged child sex predator. (Her account has since been restored.)

Twitter and Facebook have increasingly become the town square for modern political discourse, and if conservative or heterodox views are purged in the name of “internet safety” then our democratic process is being tampered with. It’s far too easy for concerns over extremism and safety to morph into silencing anyone who expresses alternate views.

Finally, there’s the media bailout. Trudeau has doled out 600 million dollars to the very same outlets that Katie Telford guaranteed would give Jody Wilson-Raybould positive op-eds for going along with Trudeau’s corrupt SNC-Lavalin scheme.

The bailout is particularly insulting and brazen. Marketed as an investment, a minor fortune went to struggling, establishment, over-bloated news corporations like The Globe and Mail and the CBC while independent, thriving outlets were left without a handout.

The end game for all of these measures is twofold: to retain and consolidate power and to silence ordinary, hard-working Canadians. Trudeau is interfering with the proper functional elements of democracy while attempting to ensure that fewer Canadians have the opportunity to talk about it. Trudeau’s disdain for democracy is made increasingly clear by his own craven actions and his willingness to suffocate speech at a time when we need it most.

On October 21st, the only reasonable thing Canadians can do is to use our democracy to get rid of him.