Western Producer staff
If there is one thing other than deficit-fighting that has distinguished the Reform Party performance in Ottawa, it has been its law-and-order stance.
Rarely a day goes by in Parliament without some Reform MP raging against Canada’s criminal element.
Get tough on crime and criminals. Respect the law!
How amazing it is, then, to watch when the lawbreakers happen to be agreeing with Reform.
Take, for example, the well-orchestrated attempt by a small minority of farmers to break the Canadian Wheat Board Act by selling grain directly to American buyers.
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Reform believes this should be allowed, that the law should be changed.
But still, it is breaking the law.
So do Reform MPs rise in the House to denounce the law-breakers as self-serving contributors to the breakdown of law and order? Not on your life.
These farmers are freedom fighters, victims, almost heroes.
The villain is the government that tries to enforce an unjust law.
“We can only hope that this massive display of somewhat civil disobedience on the part of Canadian wheat farmers will convince the government that changes must be made to the practices of the Canadian Wheat Board,” Alberta Reformer Ray Speaker (Lethbridge), a veteran of Alberta Social Credit governments, said in the Commons Oct. 4.
A week earlier, Leon Benoit (Vegreville), offered a similar defence of the lawbreakers and a condemnation of the law-enforcers.
“Why does the government not change the law that applies to the Canadian Wheat Board which prohibits farmers from taking advantage of the free trade agreement?” he asked. “I think the crime is that the government refuses to act in spite of a groundswell of support among farmers for these changes.”
So at least for the Reform agriculture critics, all that is required to make a law irrelevant is that there be a popular “groundswell” against it.
Instead of fighting for a change in the law but counselling compliance in the meantime, they glorify those who defy the law of the land.
Would their tax critic agree that Canadians shouldn’t pay the GST? Would their legal critic agree that the millions of Canadians who disagree with the country’s drug laws, censorship laws, lax gun-control laws or deficit-cutting acts should be able to ignore the offending law with impunity?
I think not. These are not Reform positions and Reform would insist they be enforced with the rigor demanded of a law-abiding society.
Yet they seem to want the right for their supporters to defy the laws they think are wrong.
This is a curious, anarchistic view to be held by a party that aspires to be government and that generally spouts a law-and-order line.
Before Reformers can claim the right to be considered a government in waiting, Canadians have a right to know where the party stands on the issue of law-breakers.
Should everyone obey the law until it is changed? Yes or no?
