Mark Bourrie - Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know

We campaigned on this new Canadian reality. Not on a dream or a fantasy or a slogan, but on the reality of this great country risinga country founded on great principlesa courageous warrior, a compassionate neighbour, a confident partnerand under a strong, stable, national, majority, Conservative governmentthe best country in the world.

S TEPHEN H ARPER , 2011

The King of England stood on a balcony in Westminster, just outside the city of London, and braced himself against the cold. It was a raw January day in 1649, the crowd was noisy, and only a few people could hear him. But there was a man near the king who was writing everything down. Within a few hours, the kings speech was on the streets in the primitive newspapers of the time.

It was not the sort of rant that Justin Trudeau or even Stephen Harper would come up with, and it certainly was not the work of a Barack Obama. King Charles I wasnt running for anything. In fact, his career was quickly winding down. The words he spoke were his own, not those of a speechwriter. Theyre sort of dense and Shakespearean, but after you read them once or twice, youll get the drift.

And truly I desire [the peoples] liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever, but I must tell you, that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government that is pertaining to them, the king said.

A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves. He finished up, turned, knelt down, prayed for a moment, and a chap named Brandon took one swing of an axe and chopped off his head.

Few politicians are as upfront in their contempt of democracy, and fewer still have the opportunity to speak with the honesty thats available to a sentient person who knows he wont have to worry about that evenings dinner because hell be shorter by a head. But Charles I was a man of his times, and of our times, too: trashing the press, proroguing Parliament, getting very heavy with people who disagreed. Few modern politicians will come out and say the people really have no business being involved in government. A few more will echo the kings assertion that governments exist only to protect peoples property and keep taxes down. But not that many are willing to stick their necks that far out to make a point.

Just over two hundred years later, the Americans fought their own Civil War. This one was about crushing secessionist states that had broken up the country because they believed their slave economy was in jeopardy. But this war was, in fact, about something else, about the thing that lies in the heart of Abraham Lincolns Gettysburg Address, the speech he made at the dedication of the cemetery for the men killed in the decisive battle of the Civil War. Everyones heard of that short speechit wasnt much longer than poor Charless last wordsbut few people have read it carefully. The address starts with a little history lesson and a very slight side-swipe at the slavery issue. Then it gets down to business: the blood of the Union troops at Gettysburg was spilled so that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from this earth.

People reading the speech always put the emphasis on the of, by, for words. But the real meat of the phrase is in the last six words. In 1863, the United States was the most revolutionary country on Earth. It was the only major power that was anything resembling a real democracy. And it seemed likely to be the last one, an experiment that failed. France had thrice tried to create a democracy between 1789 and 1863 and their revolutions went badly. One ended up bathed in blood. All were undermined by public revulsion and ended with a return to monarchy. Britain was emerging as a democratic state, but few men had the right to vote. Power lay in the hands of aristocrats and industrialists and, among them, democracy was a word that was spat out, a euphemism for mob rule. (Nineteenth-century British mobs were quite dangerous things indeed.)

Canada was a little further along, but most politicians gagged at the idea of true democracy. Antidemocratic feeling ran strong among members of Canadas elites, many of them descendants of monarchist refugees from the American Revolution. They feared the political power of French-Canadians and the Irish who were streaming into the country, and many remembered the Rebellions of 18371838. Canada had legislatures elected by male property owners, but the country was dominated by colonial officials, railway builders, bankers and lawyers who not only ran the country but also controlled its newspapers.

At the time of the Civil War, the great empires and small countries of Europe were all monarchies. Revolutionaries in Central and South America had overthrown their Spanish colonial masters and had tried to create democracies. All had failed. There were no democracies in Africa. Or Asia. Or, for that matter, in the Confederacy.

Democracy was an anomaly until the end of World War I. Going into it, the great powers consisted of four imperial monarchies (Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Japan), two democracies (France and the United States), a new junta trying to secularize an Islamic state (Turkey), and a parliamentary monarchy that was well on its way to being a democracy but that maintained the power of the landed wealthy (Britain). Most of the rest of the worlds countries were military dictatorships, ludicrously small monarchies (the Tsar of Bulgaria comes to mind), colonies or satellite nations of the larger powers. Canada was both a colony and an emerging democracy. By the end of the war, democracy or systems resembling it had been foisted on most of the new European countries created by the Treaty of Versailles and on the enemy Central Powers. The postwar deal of 1919 was a rush forward for democracy in Europe, though many of the people who lived in nations created at Versailles would not get much of a chance to live in a real multi-party, pluralistic state for another seventy years.

After World War II, democracy would get another boost, not just in Europe (outside the Soviet occupation zones) but also in the Third World, where Britain tried, with temporary and minimal success, to create Westminster systems in its old colonies.

No one could have known at the time of the Civil War that democracy would eventually take root in some of the worlds great countries. In many ways, Lincoln, when he stood on the platform at Gettysburg, was very much alone as the leader of what he feared was the worlds last democracy. Democracyreal involvement by the people in their government, which they, as citizens, rather than subjects, ownis not the default system of government, even in the West. Its something that takes great struggle to create and has to be nurtured, preserved, and, in dire times, fought for. As weve seen in the misfire of the Arab Spring of 2010, elections are, in and of themselves, not democracy. Faith in democracy needs to be deep and wide in society. It cannot survive without the rule of lawwhich, itself, requires honest courts, enforceable agreements, and fair treatment of accused criminalsalong with an inquisitive, independent press and a solid, accessible system of public education. State religions undermine democracy because they enforce intellectual and social conformity. So do tribalism and class warfare. People need the freedom to be able to do business together in corporations, but they also need the liberty to work together to form trade unions. Any country that has a huge gap between the wealthy and the poor is so wracked with systemic inequality that the political voice of the impoverished is too weak to be heard.