Harper’s Forty Per Cent Wager

The unveiling of the Conservative get-tough-on-drugs initiative is the first salvo in the Harper government’s fall offensive whose strategic goal is to secure an electoral majority by Christmas.

The law and order approach mostly directed at soft-drug users is red meat being heaped on a platter for Harper’s core constituency---older white men in suburbs and small towns who resent just about everybody else.

The reason the former head of the National Citizens’ Coalition is dancing a jig these days is that he thinks that in a quick election he can win the 40 per cent of votes he needs to cobble together a thin majority government. He doesn’t have the 40 per cent yet, but with his party’s coffers bursting and his opponents in disarray, he believes he can do it.

Meanwhile, each of Harper’s foes lives in his or her delusional nether-world:

• Worst off is Stephane Dion who party has fallen prey to struggles over who is to succeed the leader of the moment when he expires on the field of battle. Dion, a fundamentally decent man, who would be a moderately progressive prime minister, has been a dud as leader, a flop in English Canada and even worse in Quebec.
• Gilles Duceppe, who feels support for the Bloc ebbing away, wants an election as soon as possible so he can hang onto enough seats to retire with dignity.
• Jack Layton, fresh from the NDP’s stunning by-election victory in Outremont, and now with an impressive Francophone lieutenant in Thomas Mulcair at his side, thinks this is his chance to challenge the Liberals for the lion’s share of the centre-left vote.
• Elizabeth May is riding the Green Machine. The Greens are more a sentiment than a party.

Particularly in English Canada, Harper’s opponents are bent on slaying one another, leaving him free---he anticipates---to win the big prize. At the moment, well over 60 per cent of Canadian voters don’t want Stephen Harper. But that won’t stop the opposition leaders from acting out the last scene of Hamlet and inflicting grievous wounds on one another.

Only if the wider public takes ownership of the upcoming election, the most consequential since the free trade election of 1988, is there any hope of forcing the opposition parties to focus on stopping Harper. The need to stop Harper becomes glaringly apparent when we contemplate a few of the consequences of handing him complete power for five years:

• On Afghanistan, Harper has backed away from his previous pledge to base any post February 2009 role for Canada on a “consensus” among the federal parties. At his press conference in Ottawa this week, Harper said he will rely on the support of a parliamentary majority. After he wins his election, the “consensus” will be reduced to his party alone, and in this top-down government, that means Harper alone.
• Five years with Harper in control means that during the crucial struggle to grapple with greenhouse gas emissions, Canada will be on the side of the US in promoting so-called voluntary emission standards. Production in the oil sands will expand, and northern Alberta will spew ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The oil patch will make a ton of money and Calgary’s favourite son will preside over a nation with its dollar above par, and a shrinking manufacturing base in central Canada.
• With a majority under his belt, Harper can afford to pander to his growing Christian fundamentalist base. Unlike Mike Harris in Ontario who limited himself to helping the rich at the expense of the poor, Harper will not hesitate to saddle social policy with faith-based initiatives borrowed from south of the border.
• Half a decade of Harper in complete control will propel this country down the road to much deeper integration with the US. The plans are in place, the corporate sector is on board. Two decades ago, “free trade” robbed Canada of control of its petroleum industry, and ended the idea of a Canadian industrial strategy. The next step will reduce this country to a series of weakly linked resource producing regions on the northern edge of Manifest Destiny.
• The central goal of Harper’s social policy will be to cut taxes so as to limit Ottawa’s capacity to spend effectively on health care, childcare, higher education and the quest to raise the quality of life of aboriginal communities. The Canada that is spoken of as one of the last bastions of a civilization in which the rich have not run away with everything will be no more.
• And just for a chaser, Harper will privatize CBC television.

The majority of Canadians don’t want this agenda, and will not want it while it’s being inflicted on them. And the opposition politicians in Ottawa can be expected to rise in Question Period and denounce it all as it unfolds. They’ll have their seats. But what the Hell will the rest of us have?