As the Prime Minister of a long-established, if complacent, democracy, Stephen Harper is supposed to say that for him the will of the people is paramount. He is supposed to declare that whatever House of Commons Canadians establish through their votes, he will accept it and work with it. He is supposed to say that he is the servant of the people.
Remarkably, Harper says none of these things. He insists that the only House of Commons he can work with after the election is one in which his party has a majority of seats. Should his party end up with the largest number of seats in a minority Parliament, he has declared that he cannot work with the other parties.
He will not alter a single jot or tittle in the budget he presented in March in a bid to win the support of one or more of the opposition parties. Quite simply, he does not recognize the legitimacy of the members of the other parties in the House of Commons, even though their presence in the House is the result of the expression of the will of the people. He is not required, he is saying, to heed the voices, the wisdom or the ideas of other Parliamentarians.
As a politician in a democracy, even if you secretly have nothing but loathing for the views of others, you are not supposed to make that contempt obvious. You are supposed to claim that you recognize the legitimacy of others.
That is the conventional thing to do.
The conventional is often dull, pretentious and ceremonial. But it is also an essential form of shorthand. It lets us know whether we can trust someone at first glance. We recoil, for instance, when a man bites a dog.
Not only does Stephen Harper refuse to acknowledge the will of the people and the legitimacy of parties that are not his own, he calls into question the essential principle of the Westminster system of parliamentary government. The principle is that a ministry must enjoy the confidence of the majority of the members of the House of Commons. Furthermore, if one ministry does not enjoy the confidence of the House, it is appropriate for the Governor General to seek to form an alternative ministry that does enjoy the confidence of the House.
I can’t help wondering if Stephen Harper doesn’t know what happened to the Stuarts, missed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or spent so much time at Reform Party gatherings that he had no time to read Locke.
Canada is one of the few democracies in which there is no formal sharing of power among political parties in the governing of the country. Even in the United States, the country Harper wishes he led, the President of the United States has to share power with the Congress. Consider the plight of Barack Obama having to deal with John Boehner in the House of Representatives. No one imagines that he loves it. But it does it. He does not call into question the constitutional authority of the House to pass money bills.
When one party controls the Presidency while another party controls the legislature or national assembly, the French call it co-habitation, something with which they are familiar.
In the democratic world, Stephen Harper alone wraps himself in the cloak of: “Sans moi, le deluge.”
Friday, April 22, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
TEN COMPELLING REASONS TO VOTE FOR STEPHEN HARPER
(Let’s raise the tone of the debate. This is about values, and principles, not which level of government has jurisdiction. Vote for what you believe in.)
1. If you believe that the wealthy are the bastion of liberty in a world threatened by the torpor of equality and that the example of the poor is needed to prod the young on to enterprise, success and innovation.
2. If you believe that Stockwell Day played with dinosaurs when he was a child.
3. If you believe that tar sands oil is “ethical” and that it is our duty to ensure that American SUVs never do without.
4. If you believe that nurses, teachers, bus drivers, hospital workers, and garbage collection workers are overpaid while bankers and corporate executives have a tough time making ends meet.
5. If you believe that vehicle and gun owners are stigmatized, even criminalized, when they are required to register their accouterments.
6. If you believe that global warming provides a useful challenge to slothful species, and that only the fit deserve to survive.
7. If you believe that the wealthy should be allowed to buy the health care they need ahead of the less well-heeled.
8. If you believe that corporations and the animal spirits of those who run them are enervated by over-taxation.
9. If you believe that the price of freedom is whatever it costs to buy the very latest jet fighters off the shelf.
10. If you believe that aboriginal peoples have received all they deserve from the settler societies that have taken their land
THEN YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF AND YOUR DESCENDANTS TO VOTE FOR STEPHEN HARPER AND THE CONSERVATIVES.
1. If you believe that the wealthy are the bastion of liberty in a world threatened by the torpor of equality and that the example of the poor is needed to prod the young on to enterprise, success and innovation.
2. If you believe that Stockwell Day played with dinosaurs when he was a child.
3. If you believe that tar sands oil is “ethical” and that it is our duty to ensure that American SUVs never do without.
4. If you believe that nurses, teachers, bus drivers, hospital workers, and garbage collection workers are overpaid while bankers and corporate executives have a tough time making ends meet.
5. If you believe that vehicle and gun owners are stigmatized, even criminalized, when they are required to register their accouterments.
6. If you believe that global warming provides a useful challenge to slothful species, and that only the fit deserve to survive.
7. If you believe that the wealthy should be allowed to buy the health care they need ahead of the less well-heeled.
8. If you believe that corporations and the animal spirits of those who run them are enervated by over-taxation.
9. If you believe that the price of freedom is whatever it costs to buy the very latest jet fighters off the shelf.
10. If you believe that aboriginal peoples have received all they deserve from the settler societies that have taken their land
THEN YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF AND YOUR DESCENDANTS TO VOTE FOR STEPHEN HARPER AND THE CONSERVATIVES.
Friday, April 15, 2011
The Great Disconnect: Stephen Harper’s Platform and What Canadians Really Want
There is a yawning gap between the platform Stephen Harper is presenting to the Canadian people and what Canadians tell pollsters are their major concerns. The dangerous disconnect between what the people want and the plans of those who control the state is all too clear in our fraying democracy.
Canadians list health care and jobs as their top priorities. Harper’s leading issues are: corporate tax cuts, crime, jet fighters, deficit reduction, and income splitting. A Fortress North America security deal with the United States is very much on his to-do list. Further down the list is the privatization of CBC television and a much expanded role for religious organizations in the delivery of social policy.
It’s not that Harper will do nothing on the questions of health care and jobs, the top concerns of Canadians.
On health care, Harper will readily go along with provincial initiatives to increase the private delivery of services. He will not defend the Canada Health Act, which embodies principles he has always detested. Yes, he’ll act on health care, but in ways that are exactly contrary to what Canadians want.
On jobs, Harper will freeze the size of the federal public service, along with freezing the salaries of those who work for the federal government. Harper and his ministers will contribute to the culture of loathing for public sector employees which is now sharply on the rise in Britain, where employees who have been laid off as a consequence of government cutbacks can’t get jobs in the private sector because their work in the public sector shows up on their CVs.
Harper’s advice to young people looking for jobs will be to act eager, be polite, wish your customers a nice day, smile and don’t worry too much about the pay. (The Harper government actually has no job creation strategy, apart from lower corporate taxes. Their stimulus program----forced on them by the opposition----has expired. Now their strategy is to sell oil sands oil to the Americans and pray for economic recovery south of the border. Prayer is undoubtedly good for the soul, but only in business schools is it regarded as an economic policy.)
The above scenario depends, of course, on Harper’s Conservatives winning a majority of seats in the House of Commons on May 2. That is not bound to happen. Canadians hold the power to prevent it.
On the other hand, Harper only needs about forty per cent of the votes, distributed effectively, to achieve his goal. To stop Harper, about sixty-two per cent of voters will have to cast their ballots for parties other than the Conservatives.
A substantial majority of voters will definitely reject Harper---nobody disputes that. Will that majority be substantial enough? We’ll only know on the evening of May 2.
Meanwhile if Harper gets his forty per cent of the vote and a majority of seats, he will insist that Canadians have given him a mandate to govern and to implement his policies.
And on Thursday evenings on soon-to-be-privatized CBC television, the panelists will tell Peter Mansbridge that during his watch Stephen Harper has transformed Canada into a more “conservative” country. In reality, the basic values and priorities of Canadians have changed very little over the Harper years. Neo-cons, including Harper, have always regarded Canadians as a stubbornly intractable lot.
A few pearls from the compiled wisdom of Stephen Harper before he became Prime Minister convey the contempt: “Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it…..Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country…..The rest of the country has responded in no uncertain terms that we [Albertans] do not share their Canadian values….Let us build a society on Alberta values.”
Dealing with a beast---the Canadian people---for whom one has such little respect requires a sharp stick to keep the dullard moving in the right direction.
If the Conservatives get their majority, the first two years of untrammeled Harper power, will be very sharp indeed. The Conservatives will act on the theory that you front-load the nastiness so that a semblance of calm can be restored during the run-up to the subsequent election.
“You voted for this,” Canadians will be told, by those in the pay of our right-wing Main Stream Media, by the cynical members of the punditry (pretty much the same group), and by those who profit from a society with an ever-wider gap between the rich and the rest.
The fact that most Canadians will actually have voted against this will receive short shrift. In 1988, 53 per cent of Canadians voted for parties that opposed the free trade deal with the U.S., but the deal was implemented because the Conservatives won a majority of seats with 43 per cent of the votes.
A Harper majority need not befall us. We have the time and the means to stop the Sheriff of Nottingham from gaining control of the castle.
Canadians list health care and jobs as their top priorities. Harper’s leading issues are: corporate tax cuts, crime, jet fighters, deficit reduction, and income splitting. A Fortress North America security deal with the United States is very much on his to-do list. Further down the list is the privatization of CBC television and a much expanded role for religious organizations in the delivery of social policy.
It’s not that Harper will do nothing on the questions of health care and jobs, the top concerns of Canadians.
On health care, Harper will readily go along with provincial initiatives to increase the private delivery of services. He will not defend the Canada Health Act, which embodies principles he has always detested. Yes, he’ll act on health care, but in ways that are exactly contrary to what Canadians want.
On jobs, Harper will freeze the size of the federal public service, along with freezing the salaries of those who work for the federal government. Harper and his ministers will contribute to the culture of loathing for public sector employees which is now sharply on the rise in Britain, where employees who have been laid off as a consequence of government cutbacks can’t get jobs in the private sector because their work in the public sector shows up on their CVs.
Harper’s advice to young people looking for jobs will be to act eager, be polite, wish your customers a nice day, smile and don’t worry too much about the pay. (The Harper government actually has no job creation strategy, apart from lower corporate taxes. Their stimulus program----forced on them by the opposition----has expired. Now their strategy is to sell oil sands oil to the Americans and pray for economic recovery south of the border. Prayer is undoubtedly good for the soul, but only in business schools is it regarded as an economic policy.)
The above scenario depends, of course, on Harper’s Conservatives winning a majority of seats in the House of Commons on May 2. That is not bound to happen. Canadians hold the power to prevent it.
On the other hand, Harper only needs about forty per cent of the votes, distributed effectively, to achieve his goal. To stop Harper, about sixty-two per cent of voters will have to cast their ballots for parties other than the Conservatives.
A substantial majority of voters will definitely reject Harper---nobody disputes that. Will that majority be substantial enough? We’ll only know on the evening of May 2.
Meanwhile if Harper gets his forty per cent of the vote and a majority of seats, he will insist that Canadians have given him a mandate to govern and to implement his policies.
And on Thursday evenings on soon-to-be-privatized CBC television, the panelists will tell Peter Mansbridge that during his watch Stephen Harper has transformed Canada into a more “conservative” country. In reality, the basic values and priorities of Canadians have changed very little over the Harper years. Neo-cons, including Harper, have always regarded Canadians as a stubbornly intractable lot.
A few pearls from the compiled wisdom of Stephen Harper before he became Prime Minister convey the contempt: “Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it…..Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country…..The rest of the country has responded in no uncertain terms that we [Albertans] do not share their Canadian values….Let us build a society on Alberta values.”
Dealing with a beast---the Canadian people---for whom one has such little respect requires a sharp stick to keep the dullard moving in the right direction.
If the Conservatives get their majority, the first two years of untrammeled Harper power, will be very sharp indeed. The Conservatives will act on the theory that you front-load the nastiness so that a semblance of calm can be restored during the run-up to the subsequent election.
“You voted for this,” Canadians will be told, by those in the pay of our right-wing Main Stream Media, by the cynical members of the punditry (pretty much the same group), and by those who profit from a society with an ever-wider gap between the rich and the rest.
The fact that most Canadians will actually have voted against this will receive short shrift. In 1988, 53 per cent of Canadians voted for parties that opposed the free trade deal with the U.S., but the deal was implemented because the Conservatives won a majority of seats with 43 per cent of the votes.
A Harper majority need not befall us. We have the time and the means to stop the Sheriff of Nottingham from gaining control of the castle.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Over My shoulder: I see Stephen Harper
Crime fighter Stephen Harper says that Canadians deserve “to live in a country where they don’t have to look over their shoulders as they walk down the street.”
Throughout the ages, fear-mongering has always been a weapon of choice of those we need to fear.
The theory that Canadians are afraid when they walk down the street is nonsense, of course. Having walked down the streets of Canadian cities and towns at all hours of the day and night for more decades than I care to confess, I have had few moments of anxiety, unless you include fear of dogs, cyclists on sidewalks and pedestrian-hating motorists. I once went for an early morning run at Lake Louise and the garbage cans with pictures of grizzlies on the lids did scare me.
In the interest of full disclosure, I grew up at Dupont and Christie in downtown Toronto, a tougher neighbourhood that the one where Stephen Harper spent his childhood.
It’s not exactly a secret that the crime rate has been falling in Canada for several decades but that doesn’t stop Harper from promising to spend billions on more prisons, along with the billions he plans to spend on jet fighters, just in case the Americans, the Russians or the Danes (with whom we have borders) launch an air attack on us. I love the way so-called conservatives who claim to spend taxpayers’ dollars with great prudence are always ready to squander billions on tough-guy outlays, while resenting the expenditure of a nickel to improve the lives of people.
It’s not that hard to frighten people who watch a lot of TV and who seldom visit a city to imagine that downtown Toronto is a fearsome place. In fact, Toronto has a lower crime rate than the cities to the west of it, and they’re not exactly terrifying either.
Locking up more people for longer won’t drive down the crime rate---witness the results of such policies in the paradises of the U.S. and China. Greater social and economic equality would help, to some extent, but crime is not going away, it’s just not getting worse at the moment.
What I do fear is the fool’s gold pledges of those who promise us something approaching complete security. And just as absolute power corrupts absolutely, absolute security equals absolute tyranny.
When I look over my shoulders, what I see is Stephen Harper and his minions skulking through Facebook and the myriad other online activities of Canadians to find out what we’re up to. That’s how they draw up their enemies lists.
George Orwell understood all of this. Beware the half smile on the face of the man behind the glasses.
Throughout the ages, fear-mongering has always been a weapon of choice of those we need to fear.
The theory that Canadians are afraid when they walk down the street is nonsense, of course. Having walked down the streets of Canadian cities and towns at all hours of the day and night for more decades than I care to confess, I have had few moments of anxiety, unless you include fear of dogs, cyclists on sidewalks and pedestrian-hating motorists. I once went for an early morning run at Lake Louise and the garbage cans with pictures of grizzlies on the lids did scare me.
In the interest of full disclosure, I grew up at Dupont and Christie in downtown Toronto, a tougher neighbourhood that the one where Stephen Harper spent his childhood.
It’s not exactly a secret that the crime rate has been falling in Canada for several decades but that doesn’t stop Harper from promising to spend billions on more prisons, along with the billions he plans to spend on jet fighters, just in case the Americans, the Russians or the Danes (with whom we have borders) launch an air attack on us. I love the way so-called conservatives who claim to spend taxpayers’ dollars with great prudence are always ready to squander billions on tough-guy outlays, while resenting the expenditure of a nickel to improve the lives of people.
It’s not that hard to frighten people who watch a lot of TV and who seldom visit a city to imagine that downtown Toronto is a fearsome place. In fact, Toronto has a lower crime rate than the cities to the west of it, and they’re not exactly terrifying either.
Locking up more people for longer won’t drive down the crime rate---witness the results of such policies in the paradises of the U.S. and China. Greater social and economic equality would help, to some extent, but crime is not going away, it’s just not getting worse at the moment.
What I do fear is the fool’s gold pledges of those who promise us something approaching complete security. And just as absolute power corrupts absolutely, absolute security equals absolute tyranny.
When I look over my shoulders, what I see is Stephen Harper and his minions skulking through Facebook and the myriad other online activities of Canadians to find out what we’re up to. That’s how they draw up their enemies lists.
George Orwell understood all of this. Beware the half smile on the face of the man behind the glasses.
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Stephen Harper Does Not Want YOU To Vote
Stephen Harper and his operatives in the Conservative War Room have determined exactly who they want to show up at the polls on May 2. They don’t want YOU.
In 2008, only 59 per cent of those eligible to vote did so. The Conservatives hope the turnout will fall further still. And they are doing everything they can to get 40 per cent of those who do vote to vote Conservative. That 40 per cent needs to be carefully spread out across the country, with particular attention to several dozen ridings that are up for grabs in the lower mainland of B.C. and on Vancouver Island, in suburban Manitoba, on the edges of the Greater Toronto Area donut, in southwestern Ontario, in the region around Quebec City, and in targeted locations in the Atlantic Provinces.
Here’s the profile of those they’d like to see at the polls: white men over fifty, especially those who don’t spend much time in city centres; Christian fundamentalists; those in “ethnic” communities who have been vetted by Jason Kenney (a leaked memo exposed the Conservative plan to harvest votes from those they depict as “ethnics”); gun owners; youngish neo-cons who want to grow up to be like David Frum (not a large demographic); and, of course the rich, as well as those who think they will be rich. Women are generally unreliable; and the young are a downright menace. If you’re under twenty-five, Harper almost certainly wants you to pass on voting. Look what happened to the nineteen year old woman who was muscled out of a Harper rally because Conservative spooks found a picture of her on Facebook side by side with Michael Ignatieff.
If all goes according to the War Room plan, the Conservatives should win a bare majority of seats in the House of Commons. With 59 per cent of Canadians voting and 40 per cent of those who do vote choosing Conservative candidates, the planners are counting on winning a majority of seats with the support on election day of 23.6 per cent of Canadians who are eligible to vote.
This is no old-time Canadian election in which party leaders use the biggest megaphone they can find to reach the largest number of Canadians through newspapers and the television networks. In those old-time elections, about 75 per cent of those eligible actually voted.
For Harper’s War Roomers, the idea is to keep the various bits of the message as narrowly focused as possible to hit those who are targeted without riling up those not intended to hear parts of the message that are not for them. Take the Conservative pledge----I don’t use the term Tory to depict these Reformers-Without-Stetsons---to kill the long-gun registry as an example. The Harperites have selected the ridings they believe Conservatives can pick up from other parties by focusing on the gun registry---the NDP-held seat in Welland in Southern Ontario is a case in point.
There, Harper hammers home the pledge to eliminate the gun registry. But it’s not a message he wants people in the GTA, not too far away from Welland, to hear. People in the GTA generally support the gun registry. In the GTA, Harper would rather talk about the benefits of “stability” that supposedly flow from majority government, as he recently did, to a selected group of influential representatives of those described by the Conservatives as “ethnic” media organizations, mostly newspaper publishers.
For every target audience, there is a message. For corporate Canada, the message is the lowest corporate taxes on offer. For high-income families, the message is tax cuts through income splitting, although not until the deficit has been eliminated (don’t hold your breath). For the oil patch, the message is full speed ahead with the oil sands, the environment be damned. For communities close to military bases, the message is that austerity applies to everybody but the military.
Lower voter turnout is not just a lucky break for the Conservatives. Right-wing political parties have been assiduously working to lower voter turnout in Canada, the U.S. and Europe for several decades. While running for office, the leaders of these parties denigrate government, those who work for governments and the benefits to society that flow from government programs. They promote the idea that politicians are cynics who are “all the same”, “in it for themselves” and “not to be trusted.” (The rich, who DO vote, know that whatever the ethical merits of those who hold leadership positions of right-wing parties, they can always be counted on to back business against labour and to spend billions bailing out the banks when that is required.)
Negative advertising, it has long been known, has the effect of driving down voter turnout in the electorate at large.
No, Stephen Harper does not want YOU to vote. His plan is to tranquilize the majority of Canadians into a state of torpor while he takes complete control of the instruments of the Canadian state.
In 2008, only 59 per cent of those eligible to vote did so. The Conservatives hope the turnout will fall further still. And they are doing everything they can to get 40 per cent of those who do vote to vote Conservative. That 40 per cent needs to be carefully spread out across the country, with particular attention to several dozen ridings that are up for grabs in the lower mainland of B.C. and on Vancouver Island, in suburban Manitoba, on the edges of the Greater Toronto Area donut, in southwestern Ontario, in the region around Quebec City, and in targeted locations in the Atlantic Provinces.
Here’s the profile of those they’d like to see at the polls: white men over fifty, especially those who don’t spend much time in city centres; Christian fundamentalists; those in “ethnic” communities who have been vetted by Jason Kenney (a leaked memo exposed the Conservative plan to harvest votes from those they depict as “ethnics”); gun owners; youngish neo-cons who want to grow up to be like David Frum (not a large demographic); and, of course the rich, as well as those who think they will be rich. Women are generally unreliable; and the young are a downright menace. If you’re under twenty-five, Harper almost certainly wants you to pass on voting. Look what happened to the nineteen year old woman who was muscled out of a Harper rally because Conservative spooks found a picture of her on Facebook side by side with Michael Ignatieff.
If all goes according to the War Room plan, the Conservatives should win a bare majority of seats in the House of Commons. With 59 per cent of Canadians voting and 40 per cent of those who do vote choosing Conservative candidates, the planners are counting on winning a majority of seats with the support on election day of 23.6 per cent of Canadians who are eligible to vote.
This is no old-time Canadian election in which party leaders use the biggest megaphone they can find to reach the largest number of Canadians through newspapers and the television networks. In those old-time elections, about 75 per cent of those eligible actually voted.
For Harper’s War Roomers, the idea is to keep the various bits of the message as narrowly focused as possible to hit those who are targeted without riling up those not intended to hear parts of the message that are not for them. Take the Conservative pledge----I don’t use the term Tory to depict these Reformers-Without-Stetsons---to kill the long-gun registry as an example. The Harperites have selected the ridings they believe Conservatives can pick up from other parties by focusing on the gun registry---the NDP-held seat in Welland in Southern Ontario is a case in point.
There, Harper hammers home the pledge to eliminate the gun registry. But it’s not a message he wants people in the GTA, not too far away from Welland, to hear. People in the GTA generally support the gun registry. In the GTA, Harper would rather talk about the benefits of “stability” that supposedly flow from majority government, as he recently did, to a selected group of influential representatives of those described by the Conservatives as “ethnic” media organizations, mostly newspaper publishers.
For every target audience, there is a message. For corporate Canada, the message is the lowest corporate taxes on offer. For high-income families, the message is tax cuts through income splitting, although not until the deficit has been eliminated (don’t hold your breath). For the oil patch, the message is full speed ahead with the oil sands, the environment be damned. For communities close to military bases, the message is that austerity applies to everybody but the military.
Lower voter turnout is not just a lucky break for the Conservatives. Right-wing political parties have been assiduously working to lower voter turnout in Canada, the U.S. and Europe for several decades. While running for office, the leaders of these parties denigrate government, those who work for governments and the benefits to society that flow from government programs. They promote the idea that politicians are cynics who are “all the same”, “in it for themselves” and “not to be trusted.” (The rich, who DO vote, know that whatever the ethical merits of those who hold leadership positions of right-wing parties, they can always be counted on to back business against labour and to spend billions bailing out the banks when that is required.)
Negative advertising, it has long been known, has the effect of driving down voter turnout in the electorate at large.
No, Stephen Harper does not want YOU to vote. His plan is to tranquilize the majority of Canadians into a state of torpor while he takes complete control of the instruments of the Canadian state.
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