Which of these countries appears to be on a slippery slope from democracy to dictatorship?

A) Russia
B) Turkey
C) Venezuela
D) Canada

Or to put it another way, which of these countries are very likely to be run by a dictator in the next six months?

A) China
B) Syria
C) North Korea
D) Canada

If you were among a surprisingly popular and vocal political constituency from far to centre left, you would not be at all surprised to see the teetering dominon of Canuckistan on these kinds of multiple choice lists.

Outsiders would probably consider such views preposterous. Canada, the rogue nation? The True North Uber Alles? Seriously?

Yet such views or not only commonplace -- they're practically taken for granted. Canadian conservative Fred Litwin explains this weird situation in How Imagined Scandals Threaten Our Democracy:

Time and time again, we’ve been warned that the scandal-ridden Conservatives are a threat to our democracy.
 

Have we lost all perspective in Canada? We spend months and months debating the treatment of Afghan detainees, but precious little time on the Afghan people. We spend weeks on the process of defunding an NGO like Kairos, but no time on why it was defunded. We turn the tragic death of former Rights and Democracy president Remy Beauregard into obscene attacks on some very fine people. We go ballistic when Harper doesn’t fire a cabinet minister and we go ballistic when he does. And we turn honest errors into wilful betrayal...
 

This week, I attended a candidates’ debate on the arts, and one question from the audience was more of a muted cry – “I am so sick, I am so tired, I can hardly get out of bed, but I am worried that if Stephen Harper gets re-elected he will end the CBC.”
 

And, this is the problem. Rather than a real question, we get an accusation.

And that, as Fred notes, is the real threat to our democracy.

Partisan point-scoring has taken the place of real opposition. Overblown rhetoric about democracy in peril substitutes for genuine policy alternatives laboriously developed and explained. Instead of taking on Conservatives with precise legislative proposals that might forward a supposedly progressive agenda, we get dumb conspiracy theories about a "hidden agenda".

Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The Propagandist