Troster Missed The Lessons Of Trump: THE VOTER
Aside from just the elementary and theoretical knowledge many of us have, does she not get news of events in the U.S. on whatever media inputs she consults? If that doesn’t serve as a cautionary tale of the reasons for not handing over any of the keys of the kingdom to anyone, whether that be staff, elected people, developers or even oligarchs, I don’t know what will.
Her attitude of ‘Let’s just hand this over to staff. They know what they’re doing. After all, what could go wrong?’ is incredibly dangerous. Why bother to have an elected city council at all if staff is going to run the show?
You can never, ever say that X or Y will ‘never’ happen. Had I told you a few years ago that people in a democratic country would have been rounded up by their federal government, bundled into planes and flown off to a notorious prison in another country without due process, would you have believed me? What if I had also told you that the authorities carrying out that exercise were going to blatantly ignore a court order to stop the process, return those individuals to the country or, if the plane(s) hadn’t left the ground yet, keep them there? Had I said that one of the men removed had been proven to have been targetted in error and the government admitted their mistake but said it couldn’t be reversed because he was now out of the jurisdiction, what would you have said? After you stopped laughing at such preposterous ideas, you would have told me to ramp down my fantasies and re-enter the real world where such things never happen.
It might be a huge stretch to go from handing over to staff the ability to choose where, when and how to build shelters to the atrocities being carried out south of the border but it’s not an impossible journey. The breakdown of democracy starts with small and seemingly innocuous things that people might not even notice or react to. This is why, if we want to maintain our system of government, whether at the federal, provincial or municipal level, we have to stop the slipping when it starts and before we find ourselves at the bottom of that slope.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.
For You:
SHELTERS: A Little Knowledge Goes A Short Way
SHELTERS: What Was Troster Thinking?
Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery
Rats. Ottawa Has Rats – Lots Of Them
SHELTERS: Bureaucracy Wins, Democracy Loses
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
Voter: What if a provincial leader declared that 33% of the votes for Strong Mayors’ positions in municipal councils and gave Mayor’s the right to replace meritocracy with politicization of cith administration? What if that leader defied the Provincial Supreme Court by invoking the Charter’s Not Withstanding Clause for reducing 47 seats to 24 seats in an election disfranchising 22 wards in that city from equal representation. What if he took away school boards decisions to close a school and to handover the right the Minister of education to manage its sale? What if the right of citizens to be engaged in meetings between planners and developers was withdrawn or the right of citizens to appeal a development in their neighborhood to any say over buildings under 10 stories? What if planners were delegated authority to decide where a group home go – yes or no. Binary decision. No controls and no mechanism to bring neighbors together with sponsor to forge understanding and respect to as to noise, garbage, disorder. The point: we don’t need American examples. It is happening right here and we hear not a peep from our Mayor or councillors in fighting back on the erosion of democracy.
Situational morality. These actions are wrong … unless they support my cause, then they are okay – but just this time you understand. Just a variant of the ‘end justifies the means’ philosophical dilemma.