Thank goodness Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has solved the problems of Canada’s senate. Surely you have been waiting breathlessly for further disclosure of his plans for a non-partisan, merit-based process to choose our senators. He tells us it starts with the appointment of a non-partisan, merit-based body to advise the prime minister on who should be appointed to the Senate of Canada. Presumably this meritorious group will be appointed by the prime minister.
Since the group is appointed because they have merit themselves, it would seem that they might know other people of merit worthy of a role in ruling our nation. And that sounds to us like a fairly simple description of a meritocracy.
This would make sense if the Prime Minister does not retain a final vote in the process. If the prime minister does maintain a veto over who is appointed to the meritorious committee and the senate then we would remain in more of an autocracy than a meritocracy.
And it has been our experience with Justin Trudeau that he promises democracy and then reverts to autocracy as soon as the situation permits. For example, he promised the Liberal Party of Canada that we would have democracy in the party if he became our leader. After we chose him leader, he and his underlings opted to interfere in the choice of candidates by the ridings. For example, he stated that anyone who had qualms about abortion could not be selected as a Liberal candidate. And then he started choosing candidates for us. He seems to prefer being autocratic to democratic.
Maybe that comes from being a school teacher. It is likely that most of us noticed in our younger years that school teachers can sometimes be quite autocratic. Maybe this is because grade school does not offer much of an opportunity to experience democracy.
What is really worrisome in all of this is that Justin Trudeau also wants to change how we vote. He has decided to buy into the glib assessment that our first-past-the-post system is out of date and not democratic. He seems to want proportional representation where the party (read ‘leader’) picks all the party candidates and then appoints them to parliament according to the share of votes. Maybe he can have his meritocracy committee choose them also.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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