socialism | Behind the Yellow Tape

This probably is a bit of a heavy and somewhat dry topic, when most of us are trying to enjoy these care free summer vacation months. However, politics is very much in the air right now. In my particular part of the world there is a Provincial election, and an upcoming Federal election; neither of which am I confident I am going to like the end results. In the rest of the world, there have been swings in the electorate in the United Kingdom, which has moved to the left with the Labour Party; and in France, as of today, it is a country stuck in the middle. The French government is neither right or left and nobody wants to coalesce with the other.

I will admit that over the years, the longer I pay attention, the more I lean to some level of a libertarian philosophy in my outlook, a growing belief that less government is more the ideal. My wishes are clearly out of step, as the governments in this country are already controlling almost every facet of our daily lives through rules, taxation and regulations. Their belief is grounded on the firm commitment to the fact that they know what is good for us, and that they need to protect us from our own self-interest. The Federal government, and a variety of NDP Provinces in the passing in their legislative initiatives seem hell bent on bringing their brand of socialism to the country. Interestingly, in portraying what they believe are just causes, completely turn away from the term “socialist”. Which can only be interpreted to mean that they can fool most of the people most of the time.

During the Russian Revolution in 1917 we came to distinguish between “revolutionary socialism”, or Communism and “evolutionary socialism”. In the latter category, the proponents sometimes refer to themselves as “social democrats”. Socialism as a movement in Canada is not new, history shows us that there have been many times that we Canadians have entertained and sought a socialist political remedy: the Socialist Party of Canada was in 1904, the Social Democratic Party in 1911, the Communist Party of Canada in 1921, the CCF IN 1932 and the NDP in 1961. It started with Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan in ____ but since then there have been NDP governments in BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and the Yukon.

Socialism’s corollary is that socialism by its nature necessitates a growth of government in all its forms. More rules and regulations are to be developed in an effort to help the “working class”. It is a political doctrine that at its base feels the need to criticize the existence of social, economic, and political inequality in society. Hinged to this theory is that only government of the people can effect the necessary changes to the social order. They believe that there is a need to limit the excesses of private ownership and a wish to expand public ownership. Therefore the state is responsible for planning– to eliminate those cycles of un-controlled capitalism.

Which brings me finally as to what is the role of the police in a socialist state? Are the police a reflection of the state? Should we care? Revolutionary socialists are for the most part against the police, because in their definition they are an arm of the proletariat and therefore there only to oppress the working class. Paradoxically, most revolutionary socialists agree however that no enforcement often leads to outright chaos. Just ask the people of Portland Oregon how their experiment with no policing worked out. At the other end of this continuum, on the far right, is a state run by a despot or dictator, where the police are there to serve only the needs of the people in power. The examples for both of these extremes is an extensive list.

In Canada, we are somewhere in the middle of that bell curve, but there have been times that the pendulum has swung the police dangerously close to the narrow ends of that graph. The Convoy protest in Ottawa and the imposition of the Emergency Measures Act, clearly moved the police to the despotic end; while the protests and de-funding of the police initiatives clearly moved the police to the left end.

In an interesting article about “professionalism” in policing, the authors argue that when people make “careers” out of policing, it creates an environment of police officers there to simply “carry out orders”; that they become part of the ruling class and just “reflective of the state”. But I digress.

I believe like most police officers that policing must be; professionally effective, accountable and legitimate. This serves to consolidate a democracy. The police should be there to serve society rather than the state. They have to be legitimized by the public and to be legitimate: they must adhere to the law and due process, need to be subject to controls, need to be accountable and transparent, and they must be politically neutral. It is a fine but distinct line and to walk it requires a degree of political sophistication and insight that often seems lacking in our current police leadership. Today for example, it would be hard to argue that police management is either transparent or politically neutral, which again reflects on any claims of legitimacy.

So even though political philosophy is often a topic that causes many to roll their eyes and take a nap, police organizations and their leaders need to be wholly cognizant and continually thinking about the role of government versus the role of the police. As the government encroaches on the rights of the private individual in order to give over to the general good, we need to be paying attention as an enforcer of laws as to whether you are acting for society or the state.

Should anyone doubt Canada’s creep into socialism, one only needs to look into the statements of Justin Trudeau or Chrystia Freeland. Both have made pronouncements and proposals clearly aimed at re-ordering the social order in Canada. National Day Care and National Dental care, are in the end, examples of those governments beliefs. They have recently introduced Bill 63, the Online Harms Act which some argue will give the government the ability to censor speech. They have recently imposed an increase in the capital gains tax, to have the rich pay more for the poor, as they paint themselves in the media as Robin Hood. They have brought in Bill C-!8, the Online News Act forcing Google and Meta to pay $100 million to news organizations and they determine the distribution of those monies. They subsidize the national CBC to carry their message forward. In the government of Quebec they even regulate the language that can be used in business. In BC the government has closed Provincial parks to the public, allowing access to the Indigenous only as part of their solution to injustice. Governments regulate how we eat, how we live, and where we live and we pay them exorbitant amounts of money in the form of taxes to do that for us. The private individual is always subsumed for the good of the greater good.

So as the country moves to a full socialist imperative how are the police forces going to react? Will they become agents of the state, or will they be agents of society? Since the RCMP can not fulfill their current Federal mandates, how is it possible to take on all these other enforcement issues? Are they to become Big Brother? The Federal government continues to expand, so do we continue to grow the police state? Those decisions are important and will determine the role of the police in the future, and just as importantly, how the police are perceived and accepted by the rest of society.

Photo courtesy of Flickr Commons – Some Rights Reserved by the U.S. Library of Congress

I will state from the outset, that when it comes to the political spectrum, I am boringly straight down the middle. I have never considered myself on the fringe of any pendulum, never wholly to the right, never wholly to the left. Many decades ago when I studied political philosophy and was exposed to the root beliefs of Marx and Mao, Hobbes and Rousseau, I walked away probably just as personally confused as when I started, at least in terms of having formed any hardened views. After gaining many years of wisdom, or at least I think that is what life experience gives you, I seem to have only settled on the fact that I still believe in some core values: personal responsibility and accountability, privacy, and the right to free speech. Does this mean that I may be now in the wrong country?

The current Liberal government in Ottawa and the Provincial NDP in British Columbia where I live, have for the last number of years driven us towards a system that would be defined as “socialism”. Socialism is defined as “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole”. All of our politicians, for fear of being labelled, would deny following the principles of socialism, at least in any public forum, but it is clear that they are admirers of some imagined Scandinavian styled nirvana. As they see it everyone will be protected and regulated by some form of a big, comforting, arm of government.

The current crop of Canadian politicians are going to fix housing, immigration, education, and healthcare, and while they are at it, eliminate discrimination, systemic racism, and the overall general unfairness of life. They will advocate free “safer” drugs, but insist that a single individual cigarette be labelled with the dangers of smoking in case some of missed the messaging for the last 40 years. The policing world has been led for the last number of years by sycophants who have willingly absorbed this mindset of correctness to become true champions against the horrors of inequality and the lack of inclusiveness. In order to be sanctioned by the ruling liberal elites and moved up the operational chain, they have abandoned their principles and left traditional policing values behind. They are now fully tuned to the internal goals of eliminating the enemies of the new age liberalism and willing to echo the “truth” as dictated to them.

But get outside the Canadian environ and you will find that there are developing trends in other parts of the world which are beginning to question this left liberal bias, and are now considering that maybe it has gone all gone a little too far, that maybe its time to let the pendulum swing back into some middle more normal ground. This is possibly reflecting a realization that the ridiculous aspects of the “wokeness” fringe may be driving them to political extinction.

The Canadian left power constituency want no part of any reversal of the current trend. Even with the Conservatives trouncing them in the polls, the Liberal stalwarts are doubling down on their social activism. It somewhat makes sense, all their policies are aimed at the political and demographic future voter wheelhouse. Here are a couple of recent examples.

Marc Miller, the former portfolio holder for the Indigenous, now the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship now wants to allow people who have been “illegally working and living in Canada”, and who have no documentation, that they be allowed to automatically become Canadian citizens. This would permit anywhere from 300,000 to 600,000 additional “new” Canadians. In addition, it is he and his department that will also will be overseeing the goal of 500,000 new immigrants this year (legal immigrants). Exhibiting extreme political arrogance, Mr. Miller tells his followers that he doesn’t want Canada to become “like the countries such as France, Hungary and Germany” who are reflecting the dangerous “hard far right” and are evil in their cutting back on immigration levels. He does not want to see this type of thinking “repeated in Canada”.

In the same vein, Seamus O’Regan, Justin’s long-time cohort, now sitting as the Minister of Labour, wants to make some changes to the Employment Equity Act which already sets out a “mandated diversity scheme”. The Act currently requires that the Federal government and its contractors set hiring targets for “women, visible minorities, Indigenous, and disabled”. Mr. O’Regan now plans to add LBGT and Black people to the list of those with special “hiring privileges”. The charge is being led by McGill University law professor Adelle Blackett, who is a “critical race scholar”. They steadfastly defend this policy by saying that this is not advocating a “quota system”. They try to legally get around the obvious conclusive cries of “reverse discrimination” by saying that it is fortunate because our courts, following the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, equate “equality” to mean “substantive equality”– a matter of “equal outcome” over “equal treatment.” Only academia and bureaucrats and Federal lawyers could draw this distinction.

Meanwhile, in the United States the legal stance on DEI programs is going the other direction. The big turning point was in June of this year when the Supreme Court of the United States rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities around the country, Harvard and North Carolina specifically, declaring that the “race conscious admissions programs” at those two schools were “unlawful and sharply curtailing a policy that had long been a pillar of higher education.” The Chief Justice wrote that “both programs…unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points”.

This U.S. Supreme Court ruling is now rippling downwards and resulting in the DEI programs throughout the U.S. now being put to the test. Several groups are now instituting civil action against seven different law firms for their DEI hiring practises. Why law firms? Well, they are the most risk adverse of the businesses in the U.S. If they are found to be in counter step to the current U.S. Supreme Court ruling, it is bad for business, and in turn they make their living advising the Fortune 500 companies. The plaintiff groups want to “shatter diversity fellowship programs” in these firms, which they maintain “exclude qualified white and asian students”. They are also including in those claims not just “fellowships, but hiring and recruiting retreats”.

Three of the law firms have already reversed their positions rather than duke it out in court. The plaintiffs have also demonstrated that the efforts of the last number of years with these programs has not resulted in greater black and minority representation, it still lags behind. They are also civilly pursuing particular firms where executive compensation is tied to diversity goals. So far, NASCAR, MLB, Nordstrom, and Activision Blizzard have all come under scrutiny because of their “workplace affinity groups and grants to black owned businesses”. Microsoft is now “re-examining their DEI policies” and the “explicit racist quotas and preferences in hiring, recruiting, retention, and promotion and advancement”.

Now, to be sure, we are not the United States. I am coming around to the belief that Canadians are maybe wanting a form of socialism, tax the rich, give to the poor, tell the grocery stores what they can charge, disallow AirBnb, regulate what you can say, what you can see. Maybe Canadians believe the allegations of systemic discrimination and racism. Maybe we all believe, that colour of skin or one’s gender is a greater determinant of job worthiness, and that “representation” is a better goal than academic or experience based qualifications. The strange part is that so far these enlightened programs don’t seem to help, but we Canadians are steadfast, we stay the course, disregarding the hard evidence. I guess it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Personally, I am hoping that we also begin a swing back to the middle, where rational thought and common sense seems to reside– and I am also hoping for a lot of snow in Ottawa this year– and Justin feels like going for a long walk.

Merry Xmas to you all and thanks again for reading. We will see you in the New Year.

Photo courtesy of June Marie via Flickr Commons – Some Rights reserved.