Erin O’toole, where are you?

‘Car 54, where are you?” using that line as a starter will tell the very few who care how ancient I am. For the many who cannot be expected to recognize it, it was the title of an early ’60s sitcom about “two hilarious police officers.” The thread of an excuse for excavating it from the mines of memory is that I can’t seem to resist the urge to put “Erin O’toole” as a replacement for the numbered squad car in the original question.

Just where is the Leader of her Majesty’s Opposition? I might even expand the question to nearly the whole of the Conservative party. Now it is not being suggested by these inquiries that I am sneakily implying that, like so many health authorities, some cabinet ministers from various jurisdictions, and others involved in drawing up the new regimes of lockdown, that the federal party is off caucusing (is that a word?) in St. Barts. Or that the majority of them are lolling around on less expensive beaches, in more tawdry resort venues.

It’s just that, given the absence of their voices during this extremely fraught time, they may as well be. And that goes double for their leader.

Just take the most recent events down south. I am referring to the most extravagant example of what we have come to call “cancel culture.” Normally that’s the term to describe a Twitter gang-up on some person or news outlet that “offends” the prize sensibilities of woke puritanism, the storm of snarl and condemnation that falls on the unhappy head that violates the new politically correct scriptures.

They demand the head of the heretic — metaphorically one hopes — and whichever publishing house, university campus, or company houses the victim swiftly finds the need to blast him or her from their premises, apologize all over the place, and issue prayerful assurances that said campus, house or company prizes above all the holy trinity of inclusion, diversity and anti-bias. End result, expulsion and ostracism for the offender. Genuflection and penance for the weak-kneed institution.

Not that cancel culture. No, the larger one. Where the greatest companies the world has ever known, with an oligarchic power over the flow of information and communication in general, decide in concert to shut down a president; the same companies that then go on a full spree of overt and covert cancellation of all sorts of accounts and users, purging individuals and groups from their ranks.

The tech oligarchs — rich beyond dreams, powerful beyond measure, accountable to nothing but their own untrammelled whims — decide who may ride the information superhighway and who may not.

This is not, emphatically, an American issue. It would be nice to hear from Mr. O’toole, in the strongest voice he can bring to bear as Opposition leader, what he and his party feel about this — in my view — grand and frightening overreach. during his run for the leadership of the Conservative party he was fairly intense on the whole notion of cancel culture, quite declarative of his opposition to it. It’s fair then to ask, when we have an example of cancel culture leaping up the scale to what amounts to high censorship, exercised by simply fiat by a quartet of tycoons, why is he not out front condemning it?

Or proclaiming, Google forbid, he’s for it.

Mr. O’toole, here’s the question. What do you think of Apple and Google and Twitter and Amazon exercising such power? They operate in Canada, too, you know. On the whole broad phenomenon of cancel culture, large and small, are you as intensely opposed to it now, as when running for the position you now hold?

But that’s just the start. here, purely on our own ground in Canada, we enter the second year of the COVID lockdowns, the confusing, often contradictory and everchanging regulations and regimes coming down on the citizenry. One whole year during which — and we have no full measure of it — the economies of every province and territory, and the national economy have been battered non-stop as a consequence of the response to the pandemic.

We have a government in Ottawa shovelling money by the hundreds of billions of dollars out the door, the national debt morbidly swollen, Parliament a caricature of itself, and a minority government waltzing about as if it had the most secure majority in the entire history of the Confederation. And to put a little icing on this perfectly distasteful cake, we have Prime Minister Justin Trudeau implicitly suggesting a spring election is not, as the cliché has it, off the table. (Why he would want one, seeing how unfettered his government is, is a puzzle, but that’s a side thought.)

Put in a capsule phrase, the operation of our democracy has been immensely restricted and shrunk. The highest questions of civil liberties in a time of emergency — perhaps the most significant debate we could ever have — are not being debated. regimes imposed, information only reluctantly squeezed out of the authorities, people’s movements — sometimes it seems almost randomly — subject to unprecedented government and police control: these are areas of the most profound significance. But our opposition party, the constitutional instrument of challenge and debate, is off the field. The Leader of the Opposition is quiescent.

When Parliament was, in an impaired capacity, functioning for the few days it was allowed to function at all, at least then Conservative MPS Pierre Poilievre and Michelle rempel Garner, to name two of the party’s most energetic members, made a worthy attempt to open discussion, question spending, and try for some accountability. Now that Parliament’s shuttered once again, all is quiet.

I cannot recall a time in which the opposing party in Parliament has been so limp and feeble. And it’s not the damage it is doing to the Conservative party itself that worries me. On that who cares? The country has been, and will continue to be for a considerable time to come, in crisis mode, medically and financially. That is when opposition — questioning, debating, remorselessly testing the government — is most required, to maintain the proper exercise of our democracy.

Mr. O’toole, where are you?