Sunday, December 6, 2009

An antecedent for unruly Conservative behaviour

Back when I first started thinking about beginning to blog, one of the first subjects I wanted to tackle was the Conservatives handbook on how to disrupt House of Commons committees. As a concrete example of this strategy, who could forget Art Hanger's manufactured tantrum to avoid a Justice Committee vote on the Cadman affair. It was so bad, even Don Martin couldn't help but notice. I wanted to bring up a historical precedent for this that I had not seen mentioned. There were so many toxic aspects to conservatism that this slipped off the agenda.

This topic bubbled to the surface over the past week after Impolitical and Warren Kinsella noted some similar behaviour in the Ontario legislature.

There is a precedent for a party that sought to collapse the authority of the government from within:
They did everything possible to discredit and paralyze the existing government and to undermine the republican legal and political system, while the tried to use the democratic constitution and electoral process to win control over that very same system of government.
...
Inside parliament, they used obstructionist tactics to hamper the governmental process. ...deputies disprupted parliamentary sessions with catcalls and unnecessary debates on points of order and they opposed every attempt at serious legislation. ... At one point, the .. entire delegation marched out ... and began a boycott against the parliament.

Full excerpt may be found here. Perhaps the disruption is innocent. The similarity is coincidental. Maybe codifying this behaviour is a subconscious mimicry. But the fact remains that Conservatives; whether in power or out, whether federal or provincial, are using the same tactics as Nazis.

I will stop compare Conservatives to Nazis when they stop behaving like Nazis.
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