David Krayden: The Politicization of Our Key Institutions Pushing Woke Ideology Is Unsettling

A sign for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service building in Ottawa, in a file photo. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Commentary

Think the only problem you have with the government interfering in your life is politicians constantly telling you what to believe and how to raise your children according to the woke talking points of the hour?

The rot runs deeper than that, into the institutions that are supposed to be apolitical and operate at what should at least be arm’s-length from their political masters.

As Canadians we have always assumed that the courts, the police, the military, and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) conduct their business in a non-partisan fashion—but now we see indications that these institutions can be weaponized against us, and can actively promote the policies and ideology of the current federal government.

Last December, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre won the hearts and minds of many Canadians by noting in a year-end interview that he wished to head a “mind your own business” party that would not tell Canadians how they should run their lives.

For a Conservative, it was a libertarian repudiation of the chronic and corrosive overreach of government. Poilievre’s opprobrium of government control was linked specifically to the way in which governments have insisted that parents should be shorn of their rights to raise their children in the way they see fit and that these responsibilities should be merrily relinquished to politicians, teachers, and school boards who know best whether your kids should be having sex changes, undergoing chemical castration, taking hormone blockers, or changing their pronouns without mom and dad even knowing about it.

Parental resistance to gender ideology and the state raising their children provoked the Million Person March last September. I was invited and gladly accepted an offer to moderate the speeches that accompanied that protest in Ottawa.

But the state and the institutions have been pushing back ever since, and the woke outrage has been kindled by the promulgation of a commonsense manifesto in Alberta. Premier Danielle Smith recently announced that children should not be getting sex changes before they’re even allowed to consume alcohol, that they should not be commencing a lifetime dependency on Big Pharma’s hormone blockers without properly considering how these drugs will impact their life and health, and that parents need to know what is going on behind the closed doors of the school and should be allowed some measure of participation in decisions that might quaintly be called “consequential” but are always potentially catastrophic.

But now it seems those who believe in the sensibility of such policies may be associated with extremism by our intelligence and security agencies.

“CSIS assesses that the violent threat posed by the anti-gender movement is almost certain to continue over the coming year and that violent actors may be inspired by the University of Waterloo attack to carry out their own extreme violence against the 2SLGBTQI+ community or against other targets they view as representing the gender ideology‘ agenda,’” said CSIS spokesperson Eric Balsam in an email to CBC News.

So all those parents who don’t think it’s necessarily very healthy for their children to be having sex changes at 12 are potential terrorists? No, CSIS didn’t say that but of course that is the implication. This is not about the state encouraging violence against children with mutilating operations that masquerade as “gender-affirming care,” it is about some parents and their sinister supporters wanting to take the law into their own hands and violently upend the system.

For the woke extremist, there is always a white supremacist under every bed; now he has been joined by a gender ideology terrorist.

In the United States, the state has also targeted parents who attend school board meetings to object to the prevalence of critical race theory in their children’s curriculum or the plethora of pornographic books available in elementary school libraries.

The Canadian Armed Forces has been both a captive nest of social experimentation and a showcase for woke, liberal policies for decades. Struggling to maintain combat capability, the Department of National Defence remains obsessed with putting tampons in men’s washrooms and redefining what prayer means in order not to disturb that irate atheist at Remembrance Day ceremonies.

In my day as a public affairs officer, I struggled with insane recruitment quotas born of identity politics. The politicians called these fantasies “targets.” I always reasoned that if I spent my time telling the truth about the heroism and efficacy of the military, I wouldn’t have time or opportunity to have to tell the lies. That proved true almost all of the time.

We know the RCMP has become politicized. Remember how Canada’s national force virtually campaigned for the federal government’s gun laws during the probe into the Nova Scotia mass shooting?

The politicization is widespread.

Why were Tamara Lich and Chris Barber charged with mischief for participating in the overtly peaceful Freedom Convoy protest? Why has a trial that began the week after Labour Day weekend last year still not concluded, with the defence summation only expected to begin in mid-March? Would this situation seem to be politicized?

Burn an LGBTQ flag in this country and you will have the cops at your doorstep, but block traffic on an overpass in Toronto and the police will ensure that your order of Tim Hortons coffee arrives unimpeded. The double-standard is so palatably obvious.

In the United States the CIA has posed a threat to American citizens for decades, operating domestically when it has no jurisdiction to do so. Will our own national intelligence agency now pose a similar threat to Canadians who just want the government to mind its own business? Will CSIS become another appendage of a federal government that wants you to get onside with its authoritarian policies of censorship, euthanasia, pandemic mandates, and carbon fantasies? Will CSIS be another means of forcing you to get in line?

This federal government is prepared to illegally use the Emergencies Act and to freeze your bank account if you get out of line, as it did during the Freedom Convoy protest.

Obviously, it is prepared to use all the arrows in its authoritarian quiver.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.