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“Any needless concentration of power is a menace to freedom,“ Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Something happened in Canada on Tuesday, March 24 that has never happened before and hopefully will never happen again.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his minority government tried to sneak a power grab never before seen in our history into its emergency spending bill that would have, in essence, ripped up the Canadian Constitution, trampled the Magna Carta, damaged the very raison d’etre of Parliament and the role of the opposition and spit on the war graves of those who have fought and died for Canada’s democratic way of life.

And yet, how many Canadians even know that this has happened as most of the country’s focus is on COVID-19 and its rapid spread around the world? The National broadcast on CBC barely mentioned this troubling attempt at an unprecedented power grab on Wednesday.

Yet, this is precisely how democracies die — when worried citizens don’t stand on guard for their democratic institutions during a time of crisis.

When it became obvious that the passage of the bill was stalled because of his government’s underhanded attempt to usurp the power of Parliament, Trudeau then sent out a tweet saying: “The legislation will be tabled without Clause 2.”

“Were Parliament to grant the government that power to tax and spend money without parliamentary oversight, they would have fundamentally changed the Canadian Constitution in a way that would be extremely deleterious to the operation of government in this country,” said Bercuson, who teaches history at the University of Calgary, and is an author and co-author of more than 30 books.

During the First World War, 60,661 Canadian soldiers died at a time when the entire population of Canada was barely eight million people. Almost 43,000 Canadians perished in the Second World War in a country of 11.5 million. That staggering number of deaths meant no Canadian family was untouched. Farms could barely function without their young men, and yet the government of the day never attempted this kind of a power grab.

Duff Conacher, the founder of Democracy Watch, a national non-profit, non-partisan organization, that advocates for democratic reform and government accountability, states things more forcefully than Bercuson.

“It’s not just troubling, it’s alarming,” said Conacher.

“It was a big mistake not only because it was undemocratic, but also because it shatters the trust that they were building with opposition parties in the hope that they could all co-operate to make decisions quickly together during this crisis,” he said on Wednesday.

Conacher rattles off an enormous list of broken Liberal “open government” promises and ethical breaches too numerous to list here, but they include:

• The secret trips to the Aga Khan’s private island in the Bahamas;

• Finance Minister Bill Morneau secretly owning $30 million in shares in his family’s company Morneau Shepell Inc. even as he worked to change regulations that would have benefited his family’s business;

In fact, Democracy Watch is suing the government in 26 separate cases.

Were it not for Ontario Conservative MP Scott Reid, it appears that Canada might have become the kind of  “basic dictatorship” for the next two years that Trudeau says he so admires about China.

Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill, observed in a telephone interview: “This is their modus operandi. They don’t believe that they need Parliament and that the rules — there to protect democracy — don’t apply to them.

“The NDP were saying this too. It’s not partisan to say that we mustn’t erode democratic institutions,” she added. “Supporting democratic institutions, due process and accountable government is not a partisan issue. It’s Canada.”

Were it not for the vigilance of Reid, a lone opposition MP who was vilified on social media for holding up the bill, a simple scratch of a pen would have eroded Canada — our freedoms, our constitution and our democracy. That’s much more frightening than this pandemic.

Licia Corbella is a Postmedia columnist in Calgary. lcorbella@postmedia.com