The lamently forgotten historian Lord Acton once said, referring to Oliver Cromwell, “There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.”
Such an occurrence has happened in Canada of late. Justin Trudeau, having gained power, has gained with it an ego. That ego has led him to violate the law of religious freedom encapsulated in the Charter which his father had entrenched in the Constitution in order to protect the rights of the individual against the claims of the state.
Alas, Justin has not followed the example of his father Pierre. The party that set up the Charter, and has exclaimed itself to be the inheritors and chief protectors of that supposedly sacred doctrine, has violated that Charter by infringing on people’s religious freedom. (For those who don’t know, the second point of the Charter states in plain english that the Charter protects, “(a) freedom of conscience and religion;” and, “(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.”)
This couldn’t come as a surprise. A political party that makes the laws can break and interpret such laws as they see fit. “The last thing,” said Alexis de Tocqueville,” abandoned by a party is its phraseology.” Words like freedom garner a whole new meaning.
Trudeau has stated that his government represented Canadian society as a whole, especially when it comes to those thoughts and beliefs that rely heavily on our sense of religion. He stated that, “…an organization that has the explicit purpose of restricting women’s rights by removing rights to abortion and the right for women to control their own bodies is not in line with where we are as a government, and quite frankly where we are as a society.” As such, for him, society is nothing but the reflection of the party with the most seats in the House of Commons.
Such an occurrence continues throughout countries wherein the governing party believes itself to be, due to some progressive scheme either or entitlement or ideology, to be the natural or God-given governors of that country. For instance, in Isaac Deutscher’s brilliantly written but nevertheless deluded hagiographical three volume biography of the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, the truth of any political situation is situated in the party. Not in a lab, not in the mind of a pursuer of the true and the good, but in a party that hijacked a truly democratic uprising and created the world’s first totalitarian state.
If the essence of a democracy, as Aristotle states, is liberty, then it can be safely supposed that Trudeau has deemed Canadians too democratic and, as a result, believes it his job to dictate the religious opinions of those who he supposedly rules.
