A Nation Afraid Of Its People

Speaking to a luncheon of legislators from around the world, John Kennedy attempted to hold out what he thought was the greatness of America:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in the open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

Which leads some of us to wonder: Whatever happened to that lofty concept? Good legislators are people confined by their conscience and liberated by their sense of accountability. Regardless of their race, religion or party loyalty, those who struggle to make equitable laws are meant to be guided by two irrefutable realities - the light of credibility and honesty in their minds, and the responsibility to place the realities of government before the people who elected them. Somewhere along the line we have placed ourselves in the awkward predicament where citizens only want politicians to tell them what they want to hear, and their elected representatives are inclined to oblige, leaving the more messy aspects of democracy somewhere on the periphery.Examples of this are beginning to abound in this country. If citizens really wish to deal effectively with the environment, then it is going to cost cash. Afraid to tell Canadians of the real costs, the government instead kills a bill in the Senate (C-311) that had been passed in the House of Commons and was designed to deal seriously with climate change. Rather than placing these hard realities up for debate and research, Conservative senators killed it before that point. As Rick Mercer mocked in his recent rant, this was the first time this had happened since the 1930s. And again, when the Senate considered assisting the Nortel pensioners on long-term disability pensions who are about to lose it all and fall into destitution, a Senate committee killed it, even though these pensioners had paid into the plan for their entire working lives - their trust in government accountability is shatteredBy a kind of stealth that would do an F-35 proud, the Harper Conservatives quietly cut most of its funding to the Forum of Federations - a world-renowned institution that helps promote federalism across the globe and which once touted Canada as one of its chief contributors. There is hope the public won't notice or care, any more than it has for the Rights and Democracy debacle that already cost the life of a dedicated Canadian and the reputation of one of this country's elite agencies of democracy in a troubled world.There were the eight African countries cut by CIDA who had to discover it through the media rather than an open sense of honesty. And then we wake up to discover, thanks to WikiLeaks, that a former CSIS director thinks Canadians live in an "Alice in Wonderland" world of make-believe - something he clearly assumed but would never tell the public, who he was supposed to be defending, lest they turn on him.Elected representatives now think that they are good people in their consciences but that it is permissible to forgo those leanings for the sake of partisan advantage, making themselves not only unaccountable to the public but to themselves in the process. The public deserves to know just how bad our fiscal situation is. They have every right to receive clear and transparent answers as to what happened to all the matched dollars sent to Haiti. Why not do the accountable thing and hold an open and equitable competition to actually see if the F-35 is truly the best of its generation? What is the reason for the rapidly growing gap between the rich and the poor? Is there a reason we aren't being told just how bad the unemployment numbers are, especially as they relate to the disappearance of good full-time jobs? Why did the PM prorogue instead of face the people? Why keep pretending we aren't climate change deniers?This answer is simple and is found in the earlier words of John Kennedy: "a nation that is afraid of its people." That's what we have - collusion to keep the messy and hard realities of democracy away from citizens lest the bubble of illusion be broken and the people turn on us for our secrecy. All governments have done it to one degree or another, but it is now epidemic. When politics becomes driven by a fear of the very people who elected us in the first place, then it can no longer be called a democracy but rather a house of mirrors.