It's been a bit of a whirlwind lately, but there are some very disturbing patterns emerging in the politics of western democracy these days. At the top of the list, is what appears to be a steady effort on the part of conservative politicians to dismantle western democracies, and in particular the concept of individual rights.
This is happening on numerous levels, and because each country is slightly different, the specific attacks are distinct. The pattern, however, is what matters. In general, the attacks are either aimed at the judiciary, or at the rights of individuals, with a general approach of fomenting what will become constitutional crises.
Although not the first occurrence of this, the UK government's decision to exercise rarely used powers to deny royal assent to the Scottish Parliament's recently passed Gender Recognition Reform Act. My first thought on this was "that's an odd move - exercising those powers in the UK is going to provoke a constitutional crisis. Then I thought about it a bit further, and a few months ago, when Alberta's newly minted Premier Danielle Smith was musing about an "Alberta Sovereignty Act", the topic of whether the Federal Government could exercise an equally obscure power called "Refusal".
In both cases, the exercise of the power in question would trigger a political and constitutional crisis in both countries. Such a crisis would call into question both the division of powers, the role of the Federal level of government to intervene in the affairs of a lower level of government, and in fact with the judiciary had any power at all to mediate such a dispute. Such a crisis could in fact be serious enough to break the political consensus that had led to the constitutions of the respective nations being formed as they are.
Let's consider for a moment that the objective in both cases is not in fact to assert novel powers, nor to overrule the legislation of an errant lower level of government, but rather it is to provoke the crisis that would allow the conservatives to dismantle the much more liberal constitutions - especially the civil rights aspects of those documents - which conservatives have for some time seen as an obstacle to their legislative agendas.
Looking a little further, in Israel, a recently elected hard right government under Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to massively overhaul the role of the state's court system. Conservatives have long argued that courts had become "activist" - usually in the context of the fact that much of their legislative agenda runs at odds with the concepts of individual rights. Here in Canada, Harper feuded with the SCC over matters like mandatory minimum sentencing, and lost on fundamental matters associated with the court's interpretation of the Charter.
In the United States, the politicization of the courts by the GOP took hold under GWB, and during the Obama years, the GOP refused to allow any of Obama's nominees to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to be affirmed. This set the stage for a series of GOP candidates to be appointed under Trump, and then for the now-conservative aligned court to reverse course on abortion.
Both of these moves are designed to ultimately place the courts firmly under the yoke of political masters, and to roll back much of the legislative and case law decisions that conservatives don't like.
Then in both Canada and the US, we are seeing provinces and states teeing up legislation designed to create conflict with their respective Federal governments. This isn't merely a case of "the usual grievances", as demonstrated in both Alberta and Saskatchewan, the provinces are attempted to assert unique powers to ignore Federal laws - not a good thing. Ontario's conservative government has threatened to use the S33 "Notwithstanding" clause multiple times on matters where it seems capricious and unnecessary to do so.
In both Canada and the US following their 2020 and 2021 elections respectively, extreme elements fostered by increasingly radical conservative politicians attempted to overturn the results of elections - in both cases by launching attacks on the seat of government itself, claiming in one form or another that the government was unjustly elected, or that it was acting against the people. This is no coincidence - the specifics of talking points differ, but the tactics of both were strikingly similar, with the Canadian Convoy occupation clearly drawing from the organizing and funding efforts around the US Capitol riots of 2021, and the Convoy shifting towards almost a siege model, instead of direct attack - clearly based on "lessons learned". Mysteriously in both cases, the public backing of these events by conservative politicians is both prominent and not actively discussed in the news.
How does this all tie together, you might ask? The same way it always does of late. Conservatives have been increasingly organizing with each other internationally through organizations like the IDU. I do not think it is a coincidence that there are direct and indirect connections to the IDU where these various activities are taking place.
Any one of these could be viewed as nothing more than a spat between levels of government, it comes at a time when political divisions are running high, and the far right has become increasingly emboldened. However, it seems increasingly unlikely when conservative politicians around the world are expressing suspiciously similar sentiments, and are making disturbingly parallel moves to address long standing conservative grievances.
