With this week’s announcement to wield the notwithstanding clause to ensure multiple murderers rot in jail, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre added yet another plank to his Trump 2.0 agenda.
On Monday, Poilievre said a Conservative government would use the Charter override provision to pass sentences with consecutive periods of parole ineligibility to ensure criminals who commit multiple murders “only come out in a box.” Add that to the recent revelation that the Conservatives want to “end the imposition of woke ideology” in the civil service and university research funding and it’s clear his campaign is cherry-picking aggressive policies from the Trump regime that undermine the law and free speech.
Poilievre won’t cast it that way, of course. Among most Canadians, there is little purchase to be gained from comparisons with a US president waging a trade war against our country and unleashing an untold level of social and political upheaval on his own. A poll by Leger in mid-March shows 79 per cent of Canadians have a negative opinion of the US president.
But when it comes to Canadians’ feelings about Trump’s policies, the picture shifts. The Leger poll shows significantly higher — upward of 40 per cent — support for Trump’s move to ban transgender people from women’s sports, his declaration of only two legal sexes and his push to deport undocumented migrants. And while the Leger poll didn’t ask about Canadian attitudes towards Trump’s crime policies, 26 per cent of BC voters and 17 per cent of Ontario voters rated crime as their top priority during recent provincial elections.
Poilievre deliberately aimed his latest Constitution-be-damned announcement at multiple murders, the most heinous of crimes, because he knows it will play to his base. Never mind that no federal government in the history of Canada has used the notwithstanding clause, which allows governments to override certain sections of the Charter when drafting new laws. Forget that the Supreme Court of Canada carefully considered the parole question and ruled that sentences carrying consecutive periods of parole ineligibility violate a person’s right to human dignity. And let’s not talk about the fact that just because a prisoner is allowed to ask for parole, certainly doesn’t mean it will be granted.
This is performative politicking at a base level. And it might not seem that disturbing — I mean literally no one wants to see mass murderers released — if it wasn’t so reminiscent of the disregard for the rule of law currently on display in the US. The most blatant example is the Trump administration’s failure to act on a Supreme Court ruling demanding the return of a man illegally deported to a prison in El Salvador on the thinnest of unfounded suspicions. Or the assault on US law firms involved in past prosecutions of Trump and representing people and causes that run counter to the views of the current administration.
Poilievre’s pitch to use the notwithstanding clause is not nearly as egregious; it is technically legal. But as we watch the American justice system unravel, just months after Trump’s reelection, any attempts to circumvent high court rulings are cause for alarm.
Similarly, Poilievre’s anti-woke musings about the civil service and university funding is another hugely disturbing proposal. It should go without saying that universities should be the ultimate refuge for free speech and research funding should be awarded on the basis of merit, free from bias of the day’s political ideology. Does this happen now? Depends on who you ask.
Right-wingers believe today’s civil service is partisan and universities have been co-opted by radical lefties, determined to cram far-left ideology and social mores like diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives down the throats of conservatives. The far left is also at times unhappy with our institutions, claiming promotions and protections for minority groups don’t go far enough and legitimate protests are being quashed.
Poilievre hasn’t spelled out details of his “anti-woke” agenda, but Canadian scientists looking at developments in the US are edgy as they watch Trump yank funding from some top Ivy League universities refusing to bow to his ideological demands. Sarah Laframboise, executive director of Evidence for Democracy, a science advocacy group, is part of a Vote Science campaign urging Canadians to vote for candidates who promise to protect the integrity of research.
“If we look south of the border, we can see examples of how the ideological perspectives can become really perverse in different ways,” Laframboise recently told Science magazine. Targeting of academics at the border is now so prevalent that on Tuesday the Canadian Association of University Teachers advised members who have criticized the US administration or its policies to exercise caution if traveling to the US.
Canadian bureaucrats must be similarly nervous watching as Trump’s henchman, billionaire Elon Musk and his wrecking crew at the Department of Government Efficiency lays waste to tens of thousands of US civil servants. If the firings weren’t enough, the Trump administration has ordered State Department employees to anonymously snitch on coworkers suspected of harbouring an “anti-Christian bias.”
The United States is lurching toward a dystopia of Orwellian proportions. And we have no idea how far down the same road Poilievre would try to push Canada. All we really know for sure is that in the US many, if not all, of the pillars of democracy are under attack and starting to crumble. The ease and speed at which this has happened is a big red flag for Canada.
Comments
How many multiple murderers do we have in Canada? We know there have been some but do we really have a big problem with them. We know there are mass murders in the U.S. every week or every few days but we don't have that problem here. We do have their guns seeping through unfortunately (that is something that can probably be stopped at the border, by them and us, but other than that we don't have a big problem. So that is where Poilievre is confused to say the least. We know he doesn't like our news media, journalists or papers so he must be soaking up U.S. news thus his confusion. We need a new, safe providers on the internet too because we saw the oligarchs standing with the U.S. Pres. and now we know why. We need to be independent of their reach, if possible.
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/03/20/google-imports-ex-israeli-spies-geno…
There's already plenty of danger for Canadian citizens ... and if anything, the Canadian government and security agencies have erred in the direction Poilievre seems to want to push us in his echoing of Project 2025-alike nonsense.
Don't forget what happened to Maher Arar. When he was scooped up (with CSIS agreement or acquiescence, and government silence), he was a Canadian citizen on layover at a US airport. And for anyone who might think it a good idea, don't forget how much it eventually cost to get and provide justice for him and his family. Or, for that matter, had his wife not been so intelligently persistent, he might still be rotting in a foreign country's prison.
There were several others, over time, who didn't get back home in a timely way.
I think the similarity of Poilievre's language to that of Trump is difficult to miss. The people who support him probably also think Poilievre's model is a hero.
As for "saving science" ... it might be useful to revisit the effect lobbying has on science funding, science, and maintenance of science records. Don't forget Harper's spree, in which research data was destroyed in truckloads. It could have been digitized, if storage was a problem, but it wasn't: that wasn't the issue.
And never forget that despite the recent note to his Wikipedia page, Mr. Harper hasn't left leadership of the right wing international organization as of 2023. In 2023, they just changed their name -- ever so slightly. They're still an organization of right-wing parties, but now they call themselves "democrats."
Just to be clear, while his speeches lately say "multiple murderers", the actual Conservative policy in their platform, that he's referring to, is a lot more ambiguous; it just talks about "serious crimes", which could be anything. And he also talks a lot about people with lots of convictions who are in and out of jail all the time--but those people are mostly in for stuff like shoplifting or drug use. So that's clearly not multiple murderers and it's generally not stuff most people would call "serious crimes". Meanwhile, Poilievre explicitly claims he won't be building any jails because his emphasis on more incarceration magically won't lead to more people being incarcerated. Presumably he knows he's lying.
Trump says anyone protesting or writing in favour of Palestinian rights is a terrorist--that's a serious crime. Maybe Poilievre wants to lock up indefinitely people with three instances of saying Palestinians shouldn't be mass murdered. Certainly I bet he'd do it if he could get away with it.
Meanwhile I think it needs to be mentioned that this sort of "tough on crime" approach has been tried many, many times and so we know exactly what the results are: It does not reduce crime, it if anything makes people more likely to reoffend, but it puts masses of people in jail, usually under horrible conditions as the prisons get more overcrowded and the punitive ethos insists their lives should be hell because it's "punishment".
More controversially, I really want to mention what "tough on crime" is actually about. "Tough on crime" approaches are what governments do when they want to dump social safety nets, crush unions and in general arrange for widespread poverty and insecurity (so the money they used to have can go to the wealthiest). Since they intend to increase the causes of crime, and create unrest, they need to increase emphasis on policing to keep the lower orders' heads down. Those two things go hand in hand; if you're going to make the public's lives good, you don't need to police the hell out of them.