15 hours Ago By Brian Lilley
Article content Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, is the biggest threat to our democracy. While Trudeau crosses the country, the world even, talking about the need to uphold our democratic institutions, the truth is he is running roughshod all over them. Between allowing Parliament to come to a standstill for nearly three months, passing major changes via executive orders or putting through tax changes without the consent of Parliament — Trudeau’s actions show that he doesn’t cherish democracy.
Between Oct. 2 and the middle of December, Trudeau allowed government business in the House of Commons to grind to a halt rather than follow a vote of the majority of MPs and an order of the Speaker of the House. MPs voted last spring on a motion ordering the government to turn over all documents related to the Green Slush Fund to the Commons Law Clerk who would then share those documents with the RCMP.
The right of MPs assembled in the Commons to demand the production of papers, which is what they had done in this case, is an ancient right of Parliamentarians. Rather than follow the order, the government released some documents, withheld others and those they did release were heavily censored. The Speaker of the House, Liberal MP Greg Fergus, then ordered the government to follow the vote of MPs and the government refused to follow the order of the Speaker, the man elected by all MPs to enforce the rules of the House.
The Speaker then declared that the privileges of MPs had been breached by the government and so from early October until mid-December the House of Commons dealt with nothing but this question of privilege. No government bills or ways and means motions could move through the House. Think about this for a minute.
The Trudeau government would rather let the business of government grind to a halt than follow the rules of Parliament and release the documents. It makes you wonder how bad the documents were in exposing corruption that they would rather let Parliament sit idle than let the RCMP see what was in them. Here is what we know about that issue based on a federal audit.
More than 186 conflicts of interest were identified, more than $400 million in questionable spending, perhaps corrupt spending, was highlighted. That’s only part of the story because the audit only looked at select files, the Office of the Auditor General didn’t look at the whole program and there is no doubt more wrongdoing to be discovered. MPs have a right to obtain these documents.
The government refuses. The Trudeau Liberals, though, don’t see themselves bound by silly things like rules and precedent that have been hard fought and won over centuries. They see themselves as above that and able to set their own course.
So much for standing up for democratic institutions, upholding our democratic systems. Meanwhile, because the government has not been able to move government business through the House, the legal requirements to officially change the Capital Gains Tax Inclusion Rate have not been passed. According to a story first broken by Blacklock’s Reporter , the Canada Revenue Agency is going ahead as if the change has met the legal threshold when it clearly hasn’t.
Having the Commons vote on tax changes is fundamental to our democratic system, something that goes back centuries to the Magna Carta. “No ‘scutage’ or ‘aid’ may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent,” the Magna Carta stated. That’s a principle of Canada’s democratic system going back to 1215.
The Magna Carta remains one of our foundational constitutional documents and here, the Trudeau government is completely ignoring this principle. With his latest moves to expand his gun control efforts, Trudeau is once again completely bypassing the legislature. On Dec.
5, Trudeau announced that his government was expanding the number of guns and the type of guns being banned. He didn’t introduce legislation, he used an Order in Council, effectively a decree of cabinet that bypasses Parliament to greatly expand the scope of what were once legal guns but are now banned. This is the second time he’s bypassed Parliament on this very issue.
His May 1, 2020, ban was put through in the same way, not by a vote of MPs but by a simple decree of cabinet. To make matters worse, while he has simply decreed these guns illegal, he has also decreed an amnesty for anyone ordering these guns from being prosecuted. Why would he do that? Because the Trudeau Liberals don’t know how to execute the second part of their promise the so-called gun “buyback” program.
So, the Liberals have offered an amnesty from prosecution up until the end of October 2025, or just days after the next election. They are bypassing Parliament on this very important issue and then playing partisan politics with the issue. They hope to campaign on their less than democratic gun ban against the Conservatives in an attempt to scare voters.
Meanwhile, Trudeau hasn’t done anything to deal with gun crime, which is up 116% since he took office because as usual, he attacks licensed, law-abiding gun owners while leaving gang members and criminals alone. Finally, as we sit here in these days after Christmas, Trudeau is desperately trying to find a way to stay in power even as polls show the public is done with him and every opposition party says they are ready to vote him out of power. The only saving grace for Canadians is that the government is only funded through the end of March and will need to come back to the House at some point to look for more money.
At that point, let’s hope our democratic institutions are strong enough to vote him out. RECOMMENDED VIDEO.
