Hyperbole you say? No, I don't mean hyperbole. The hallmarks of extreme right wing political thought is down on public education and loss of freedoms. They try to control the populous like a strict parent controls its children. These are things that our government has been doing in recent years.
They ended climate research, because it contradicted their own ideas about what the science should say, but does not. They restricted the government scientists from speaking in public unless they first sought government approval, which was never given. They did the same to government librarians. Government libraries contain all the documents that the government produces including scientific research, especially climate research. Last year this government then closed these libraries and this year, they closed many of these libraries and destroyed "redundant" information. A lot of the "redundant" information was environmental research collected over decades. We know this because non government people liberated some of the materials. The Government said when questioned about it said that anyone could have requested any of the research to be digitalized, all the public had to do was ask. Ask if they knew about it from the scientists and librarians who were not allowed to talk to the public unless they were given permission by the Government.
They passed these measures in large bills called omnibus legislation, massive documents that contained close to a thousand individual laws tacked on to more innocent legislation. Bills that people were all in favour of. Nice laws that are designed to protect people, but have hundreds of unrelated subsections that should have been separate laws passed all at once with their majority on the House of Commons. A majority of 41% of voters.
The most recent Omnibus Bill that they are trying to pass has nice words written on the packaging, Fair Voting, meant to clean up the elections and reduce voter fraud. It is just a nice frilly package that cites a report that was made to show the problems with the voting system that we have, only last week the author of the report went to Parliament and publicly revealed that the government was making up portions of the report to suit its desires, that they were misrepresenting other passages so that they could change the system to suit themselves.
Presently, if someone moves prior to an election and is not registered to vote in their area, the can come to the polling booth with someone who is registered and they can vouch for them, they can bring in proof that they live in the area and they can vote. This new bill will scrap this practice. Typically this practice flavours young people and people who move frequently, people who typically don't vote Conservative.
Another aspect of the new legislation will mean that polling scrutineers, the people who police the polling stations and count the individual ballots will be chosen exclusively by the incumbent, meaning most of theses people will be Conservatives Party members. The funny thing of the entire bill, is that the report was commissioned because of the many voter irregularities caused by Conservative supporters. I say supporters because the identity of the people in question could not be established or who put all the data on a private laptop owned by a Conservative Party could not be precisely established.
Yet another change in the legislation was a measure that will definitely prevent fraud. In that last few elections people were charged with giving employees money to donate to the Conservative Party to skirt the maximum donation laws, the change will allow anyone to donate a lot more money in future elections, so that they can donate as much as they want and not have to break the law to do it. The maximum donation law was there so that all candidates would have approximately the same amount of money to put towards expenses so that a campaign would theoretically be about issues and not about glitzy television ads.
Another fix was to prevent the In-and-Out fraud. In the last few elections some campaigns by Conservative candidates were lower budget than others and the Conservative Party transferred money to those ridings to max out their budget which was then used to buy National ads. The budget of the national campaign is also regulated, so these In-and-Out frauds amounted to additional National funding that the other honest parties did not have. This bill will now increase the maximum that can be spent on the National campaign. Which works out, because after scrapping all the climate research and throwing out all the environmental data that has been collected, the Conservative Party can now legally accept millions from the Oils Sand extraction companies to spend on their future campaigns.
The writer of the report that the Conservatives are citing for every change that they are enacting, said that the legislation needs to be changed to reflect his true report, or scrap the Omnibus Legislation. But, why should they, 41% of Canadians voted for them, a clear majority, if it comes up for a vote, sorry, when it comes up for a vote, it will pass unchanged. Because as angry as I get writing this down and telling you, I won't arm myself and storm the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. I won't join a radical group and fire RPGs at the Prime Minister's motorcade, because this is Canada, and we won't risk breaking the law to save ourselves.
But the best part of this entire thing is how he, the Prime Minister is directing the public's eye away from the gradual dismantling of our democracy by pointing a finger at Russia and castigating them for doing the same thing.
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