OPERATION TRUTH

We saw it right before our eyes. It was in full colour on TV.  A surgeon sliced open the underbelly of a patient and gave us a glimpse of the grizzly tumour that lay within.

The surgeon was Canada’s recent Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Reybould, M.P.  The operating room was a committee room on Parliament Hill.  The patient was not the governing Liberal Party nor was it, as the Opposition parties vehemently declare, the Prime Minister. The patient was contemporary Democratic Government and the operation, although potentially bloody, was performed with calm skill and may very well turn out to have been a life saver.

The tumour that was selectively revealed was merely the SNC-Lavalin outcropping of a much larger one, lying deeply within, composed of other huge corporate entities – too big to fail, too big to punish – that in reality control the economy.

Parliament makes the laws and the bureaucrats make the regulations.  Recently, caught in the middle of a China/USA legal confrontation, we Canadians were assured and reassured that our country lives by “the rule of law”.  “The rule of law” became a mantra and was rightly endorsed and echoed by all parties.  But in Operation Truth we saw proof that government, seized by the corporate cancer in its bowels, is reluctant to apply the rule of law to the real shapers of the economy who, thanks to holding as hostages thousands of wage-earners in key areas, have become accustomed to side-stepping law.

We’ve watched it for years but, blinded by mythology, have failed to realize that what lies behind discriminatory tax exemptions, selective corporate subsidies, broken treaties, ignored mandatory consultations, depleted water tables, poisoned rivers, boreal forest wastelands, etcetera, is the fact that all parties, when in power, have gradually yielded to the selective bending of laws as a palliative pill to assuage the pain of the malignant growth in the body politic.

I greatly fear that the PM, in trying to justify the tumour that has become nationally embedded, will only further tarnish his own impressive credentials.  If he pushes onward and lets the new Attorney General suture the wound without remedy then the monstrous disease will only grow and fester.

Of course, any Opposition leader who calls for the PM’s resignation, imagining himself as the replacement PM, will simply inherit the disease that his own party in earlier phases has helped to metastasize.  All our leaders, and especially the PM, might do well to own up to the reality of what the truth-surgeon actually exposed in the committee OR.  They might vow to make a concerted co-operative effort to shrink the tumour and to return a healthy democracy to the people.

All of this, of course, is simply my own opinion and is merely based on years of observing the political scene, plus a tendency to read investigative journalism —  and to exploit a metaphor.  🙂