in Chatsworth, Grey Highlands, Southgate, West Grey
October 27, 2024
LETTER TO THE EDITOR — It's not often that Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound gets a spot on centre stage at the federal House of Commons. But on October 11, Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound MP Alex Ruff added his voice to a litany of others, on a Conservative complaint that the Liberal government had not fully complied with the House order to hand over documents related to alleged improprieties by Sustainable Development and Technologies Canada (SDTC).
MP Ruff stood in the House of Commons and quoted many respondents to an 'email-blast' his office sent out, asking for feedback on the Liberals' Breach of Privilege. In his email, Ruff cited many alleged irregularities in the awarding of government grants, including 186 cases of conflicts-of-interest and insufficient monitoring of contracts by Liberal Minister of Industry, Francois-Phillipe Champagne.
"Good for him, holding the Liberal government to account," you might say. And that might be a reasonable assumption on the surface of the matter. But since the original motion was tabled, the business of Parliament has stalled for over a month. In other words, nothing is getting done. During that time, Conservatives drove home their narrative that Liberals are corrupt and that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau needs to be removed from office.
On that latter point, 69% of Canadians have also said that Trudeau should resign, according to an Ipsos poll taken at the end of 2023. But I suspect that this is a statistic heavily influenced by Pierre Poilievre, who has championed this message since being elected as Party Leader in 2022.
What Ruff neglected to reveal during his House of Commons moment, was that the email list used to solicit his feedback was the same one used to send out his official MP newsletter — a partisan list of people who sing from the same partisan songbook — and according to the rules, this list is one of many House of Commons resources not meant to be used for partisan purposes. Naturally, the email and the responses it solicited, were exceptionally partisan, and not necessarily representative of his constituency.
But I don't want to single out Conservatives. Similar tactics have been used by the Liberals too.
I reference another poll, this one taken by Angus Reid more recently this September, that showed half of all Canadians believe no federal political party "really represents" their views and in fact, one-third of us consider ourselves "political orphans" — abandoned in the middle of the political spectrum.
We've been abandoned because polarization has become our political discourse. Each Party has moved either left or right and away from the middle where Liberals and Conservatives used to be less discernible. Now, each group seemingly wants you to line up behind them and hate the other side. But as long as Parties and their followers keep engaging in this kind of divisiveness, we descend on a path towards American-style politics and no one should want that kind of sh*t-show north of the border! I know I don't and likely, neither do the other one-third of all Canadians like me — approximately 9 million political orphans, to be more precise.
My point is that we need to stop letting our politicians take us down a path that a very large portion of us don't want to travel. I believe we are far better together than we ever will be apart. We need electoral reform and democratic solutions, the likes of which are found in Dave Meslin's book Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up — now a 6-episode TVO series.
The RCMP are continuing to investigate the SDTC scandal, just as they were, before our members of parliament decided to intervene in an ongoing investigation, thus blurring the necessary boundary between lawmakers and our law enforcement agencies.
Ron Barnett,
Grey Highlands
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