While they tell us to stay home, they travel overseas. While they tell us to avoid our families, they gather with their families.
As we have seen over and over again, the more the politicians fail, the more power they demand.
They impose lockdowns. Cases go up. They impose more lockdowns. Cases go up. They impose lockdowns, and add on curfews. They issue threats. Threats of jail time. Threats of fines. They lecture us. They’re arrogant. They act as if they have some sort of moral high-ground. And then, as we’ve seen, they ignore everything they tell us to do.
While they tell us to stay home, they travel overseas. While they tell us to avoid our families, they gather with their families.
They chastise us for "breaking the rules," while pretending on social media that they are here in Canada, attempting to not only contradict their own advice, but lie to us about it.
And then, after demanding punishments for us when we don’t listen to them, they think they should just be able to ‘apologize’ and move on.
They exempt their colleagues, letting them travel, accepting apologies, and then go back to demanding tough punishments for everyone outside their elitist circle.
Worst of all, at absolutely no point in all of this have they been humbled, nor have they questioned the immense power they are wielding over us.
So, we must question it.
It is outrageous that these politicians even have the power to shut down businesses or tell us to stop seeing our families.
In a truly free country, politicians should not have the power to dictate whether we can gather with our families, and they should not be able to crush local businesses while benefitting global megacorps.
Furthermore, they should not be so secure that they can feel free to ignore their own advice so brazenly. One of the reasons they can even afford to travel is that they have guaranteed taxpayer-funded salaries. We pay them, and they get paid no matter what happens, meaning they have a level of financial security that is denied to most Canadians.
While people lose their jobs and lose their businesses, the politicians have nothing to fear financial. They’ve got their fat pensions waiting for them—something else we paid for.
As a result, they are drunk with power and feel completely insulated from what the rest of us are going through.
So, what should we do about it?
First, we need to start pushing for some big changes to what the job of being a politician entails. Here are a few ideas:
They should be subject to recall. Their pay should be dramatically cut. They shouldn’t get those fat pensions.
The Ethics Commissioner should be given far more punitive power, including the ability to impose massive fines and even criminal charges.
Power should be dramatically decentralized, with money and influence draining from the federal government to the provinces, which should then be drained to cities and rural municipalities, where the government is much closer to the actual citizens who can influence it.
And to make this happen, we need people to get involved in their political parties and push for these ideas from within. Politicians have shown they only respond to public outrage and internal pressure from their supporters, so we need freedom-loving people to become influencers within Canada’s parties at all levels.
Otherwise, corruption and hypocrisy will continue to run rampant, and politicians will exploit every crisis to centralize more power and take away more of our freedom.
Libby’s Desk
Commentary and must-reads from Libby’s desk, straight to your inbox.
TPM Newsletter
The Post Millennial’s top stories, delivered to your inbox.
