Right to Community - The Humiliation Factor

I passed Vic Toews in Centre Block early in my parliamentary tenure, said “hi,” and received a nasty scowl in return. I tried again a year later, at Christmas, and got the same response. These were the only two times I attempted to converse with the minister before I gave up. I didn’t desist because of how he treated me, but how he belittled others in the Chamber, especially women MPs. He was a brute, and when I left Parliament I never thought of him again. Until last week, when there he was again, saying you were either for the government or for child pornography. Nothing had changed. It was no wonder he was so disliked. It doesn’t really matter what bill he is championing; the world of hurt he is going through at the moment is largely the result of the humiliating pain he inflicted on others.This week in our City Council Chamber I watched as some council members took to scolding those observing from the gallery. Here were politicians not just lording it over others of their kind, but actually lecturing voters on their simplified outlook. Today I spoke with some who had been there and it was revealing. The issue they had gone to support had been voted down, but that wasn’t their difficulty. Instead, it was the demeanour of some politicians who once claimed to be representatives of the people but who had transformed into princely pretenders. “That’s it for me,” one observer said. “If that’s what politics does to you, I’m out.” There have been countless votes in parliaments and city halls over the years that never created this kind of response. People haven’t become sickened by any particular legislation that has been passed; it’s the immaturity of the legislators that broke the collective spirit.This wasn’t what government was selected to do, but it has now become commonplace. It might help us to understand why the early colonialists in America eventually turned against their political masters in Britain. It wasn’t just the rejection of their petitions that irked them; rather, it was the tone, the denigration, the air of superiority that had turned a representative system into a sham. They were the country bumpkins, the “colonials,” the irresponsible ones, and it all just became too much.That attitude was best exemplified by King George III himself. History was to show that he was slowly going mad, but years before it was confirmed he was already taking his altered character out on those on the perimeters of the empire. Every entreaty from the colonialists was rebuffed. Although many in Britain felt their American cousins has reasonable arguments, the king wouldn’t hear of it and only pressed harder. His rule became so debauched that Parliament began the process of ensuring that no king ever enjoyed that much power again.Not enough has been written about the humiliation endured by the American colonies, but enough has endured to reveal a decent people with a capability of working out their own problems that were treated like schoolchildren. Something about being denigrated in public fashion does something to soul, and left to fester it will eventually result in push back. It could lead to outright rebellion unless effort is made by those in power to treat their opponents with respect and as equals.You can see this transpiring across our entire nation these days. Regardless of which side you are on about Bill C-30 and the intrusion into citizen’s privacy, is it not really the handling of the entire thing that turns your stomach? We are not a stupid people, though we are often distracted. We see the duplicity of such things as saying the government is against the prying nature of the long gun registry or the long-form census and yet pushes for sweeping reforms as to how deep into our lives the government can probe. Click here to catch Rick Mercer’s take on it – it’s not so much brilliant as it is just plain common sense.The sheer act of exercising greater powers to delve into our personal lives while at the same time ignoring the plight of our communities isn’t just ironic, it’s degrading. We turn away in anger as we’ve done so many times before in recent years, but slowly, inevitably, there is building inside of us a smoldering resentment at being treated in such a fashion when people in our communities can’t find jobs or far too many citizens are losing them. We aren’t being pandered to; we are being pushed around, belittled, and denigrated in our cities at our time of greatest need.Our small towns and municipalities continually lie at the receiving end of government neglect and we’re beginning to fight back. But our real anger is based upon the way we are treated in the process. We are communities that built solid lives for our citizens, produced great products, harvested fields, sent our kids off to post-secondary, fought in wars, struggled for peace, celebrated and grieved together. We have proven track records. But we have one critical flaw. We keep electing people who bleed themselves into the political system instead of championing those communities that elect them.This week citizens in London, Ontario who have demonstrated care and commitment to this community sat in the public gallery during the budget debate and endured the humiliation of having the very people they elected berate their reasonings. It’s democracy turned upside down. The power is meant to be ours. Our communities deserve better, but we’ll have to start making better choices.