American chaos offers Canadians a chance to reflect on their own democracy | CBC News

Steny Hoyer invoked one of the fundamental truths about democracy that was exposed by recent events in the United States.

Shortly thereafter, Hoyer joined 231 other members of the United States House of Representatives in voting to impeach Trump.

Such a traumatic event has provoked another moment of reckoning in the United States.

Conservative strategist Ken Boessenkool, formerly an advisor to Stephen Harper, was among the first commentators in Canada to reflect in the wake of last week's violence, writing that he "won't tolerate casual Trumpism in my personal or political cohort anymore." Going forward, he said, Canadian conservatives must become harsher judges of character and more diligent about who they associate with.

To that end, he said that Conservative MP Derek Sloan — who has questioned the national loyalty of Theresa Tam and sponsored a petition that cast doubt on the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine — should no longer be allowed to sit with the Conservative caucus.

In an interview with CBC Radio's The Current this week, Boessenkool suggested he wouldn't want to work with a campaign that only wanted to stoke populist anger and said he's encouraged by the private reaction from Canadian conservatives to what he's had to say.

But Boessenkool also stopped short of condemning a recently deleted page from the Conservative party's website that accused the Liberal government of "rigging" the last election. .

"Since Liberals were trying to falsely insinuate it was something new and recent, we took it down to prevent that from happening any further," party spokesperson Cory Hann explained via email on Monday.

The Conservative claims of "rigging" were based on their objections to changes to the Elections Act proposed by the Liberal government — and both Boessenkool and Hann noted that MPs from other parties, including Liberals, used the term "rig" in 2014 while opposing changes made by the former Conservative government.

Under Scheer, the Conservative party joined several far-right parties in opposing the compact, claiming without any basis in reality that the Trudeau government's decision to sign the statement of principles would compromise Canada's ability to control its own borders.

But the other interesting question for Trudeau's Liberals is whether they will have left the major institutions of Canadian democracy better off than when they found them in 2015.

The Liberals made smaller moves to introduce new rules around omnibus legislation and prorogation, but in neither case did they go so far as to significantly curtail a government's ability to abuse such tools — and the Liberals themselves have now made questionable use of both.

Underlying everything that has befallen the United States though is a voluminous amount of lying and subterfuge.

As the United States has now amply demonstrated, defeating lies and untruths is frightfully difficult.