Harperites back former police chief, who calls Liberals the "Hug-a-thug" party.
Dateline: Tuesday, November 30, 2010
StraightGoods.ca
by Geoffrey Stevens
"After serving for over 40 years as a police officer, I don't need any lectures on law and order from a novice member of the 'hug-a-thug' Ignatieff party."
Ah, come on, boys — grow up! "Hug-a-thug" party? Let's get real.
The words quoted may have been penned, I suspect, by some anonymous wordsmith in the back shop of the Prime Minister's office. However, they were delivered by Julian Fantino, the former top cop (London, York Region, Toronto and most recently OPP), now elected to Parliament for the Harper Anti-Crime Party in this week's by-election in the riding of Vaughan outside Toronto. He put the words in an email to The Globe and Mail on Friday.
The "novice member of the hug-a-thug Ignatieff party," as Fantino would have it, is Montrealer Justin Trudeau who, yes, was elected for the first time in the 2008 election. Mind you, he had the guts to run in the decidedly unsafe riding of Papineau, and he took out the sitting Bloc Quebecois member in the process. Neither Chief Fantino nor his flamboyant booster, Don Cherry, intimidates him.
Trudeau drew Fantino's ire when he criticized the Harper candidate's strategy in Vaughan, where he was running a classic campaign for a controversial but vulnerable front-runner — duck the media and avoid self-exposure by skipping all-candidates' meetings. Trudeau is particularly anxious to have Fantino to expose himself on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a document to which Trudeau has a filial bond.
Fantino, it can be safely said, is not a big fan of the Charter. He doesn't see it, as Pierre Trudeau saw it when Parliament enacted it three decades ago, as a constitutional guarantee of the fundamental freedoms and equal rights of all Canadians. To Fantino, the Charter is a nuisance because, he believes, it sanctions bad behaviour from the sort of thugs whom Liberals love to hug.
As he put in his autobiography. "Who has reaped the greatest benefit from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? I would argue that, if it isn't common criminals, then it must be the Hells Angels."
To which younger Trudeau, quoting those words back at him, responded: "We need people in Ottawa who want to protect the Charter of Rights, not tear it down. That's what's at stake in this election in Vaughan."
To be fair to Fantino, he is a policeman not a politician. He sees the world through a policeman's eyes. The world is a dangerous place, full of bad guys who are not at all deterred by inadequate laws, weak-kneed politicians, venal defence lawyers and compliant judges.
His views on the Charter are nonsense, but they have currency in Ottawa these days. The members of the Harper government may not be as extreme as Fantino. Their anti-crime agenda, however, is long on punishment and retribution and short on justice and rehabilitation. They think crime will be solved if they build more prisons and put more people in jail for longer periods of crime.
Chief Fantino will fit right in. There's already talk of a cabinet post. It's one of those situations, however, where Harper and his people might want to be careful what they wish for.
Fantino is hard to control, as successive Ontario provincial governments, Tory and Liberal alike, could attest. He speaks his mind, right or wrong, without regard for the offence he may give. He is not known as a champion of minority rights.
Having Fantino in the fold would reinforce the Harper government's law-and-order image, but they already have all the votes they are going it to get from that direction. With an election slowly approaching, they need to soften their hard edges and to move to the centre in search of the votes to turn a perpetual minority into a potential majority.
Meanwhile, to accuse their opponents of being a "hug-a-thug" party is both puerile and self-defeating. Are there no adults in Ottawa anymore?
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. He welcomes comments at the eddress below.