While Conrad Black, that non-Canadian, prison-savvy ex-tycoon and lineal descendant of Polonius, thinks Canada is in the poll position in the wreck ‘em race of global politics, we actually went off the track several laps ago. On the roof, tires spinning, obscured in a cloud of dust.
There is no surprise in Lord Black’s blitheness about the government’s shortcomings. There are many Bilderberg Brethren, current and former, who would like to see Canada become the odalisque of the biz gods.
You know, the ones that triggered the global financial meltdown in 2008 with their cosmic greed and then rifled the public treasury to bail out their Las Vegas banking practices.
These snakes in suits (a doff of the hat to Dr. Robert Hare) make Bernie Madoff look like a philanthropist. What a strange country America has become — a fine for crashing the world’s financial system for personal gain, and the spectre of life imprisonment for unselfishly alerting citizens to the fact they now live in a police state. If someone knows anyone who Barack Obama or Stephen Harper are not spying on, please forward the name.
Then came the edifying lectures to the little people from the likes of Goldman Sachs on the need to expect less from government. No, really.
And now the Bank of International Settlements, the central banker of central banks, this past week gave the green light to start making people pay for borrowing money again.
The new mantra is that the central banks have laboured like champions to fix the system and all the money spent on stimulus packages has been wasted. It is now time for governments to start “labour” reforms to “rebalance” the system. You know what that means — Guccis for the masters of the universe, plastic shoes for the rest of us.
But others are catching on to the true nature of the World According to Steve, even if Lord Black is not one of them. Truth has a way of coming in under the door like rising water.
The PM and his government are not good managers. The nauseating repetition of the claim that the Tories know what they’re doing with the country’s finances will not make it so.
They’ve pissed away more money than Madonna on a shopping spree — a billion on the G 8-20 meetings that put a dent in the world’s Perrier supply and little else.
They just plain lost $3.2 billion and the guy in charge over at Treasury Board is still there, rumoured to be on his way to Finance.
They are such good fiscal managers that we now have the highest deficit in our history. I know, I know, it’s the fault of those damn Europeans who didn’t listen to Steve about austerity.
Nor has the man who came to Ottawa to trim big government delivered on that commitment. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, the Conservative government has added 34,000 jobs to the public service between 2006 and 2012, raising the federal payroll by 14 per cent.
A lot of the increase has been in the ‘sneak and punish’ departments. We can’t fund our scientists but we’ve got lots of cash for spooks and prison guards. The Canadian Press reported security and spy bureaucracies, and Corrections Canada, all got “dramatic” staff increases.
The Harper government continues to lie to Canadians about the ruinously expensive F-35 program. That will be a little harder to do after last week’s report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office stating that this flying money pit is not affordable. America, the place where everything is new and nothing is paid for — even they get it.
No, Steve and the Impersonators are not about hockey, Tim Horton’s, and purring more innocuously than Paul Wolfowitz while taking a crowbar to the country’s institutions.
It’s all about deconstructing democracy, channelling public money to a venal corporate sector, and kneecapping anyone who gets in the way. It’s about turning Canada into a militarized petro-state with Beatle music playing in the background.
The way this electoral monstrosity has worked up until now is through secrecy and a poisonous communications model. It’s the school of thought in which there is only one voice and the truth never figures in. Smother all opposition. All that matters is optics.
Some in the media have been silly enough to describe this as “discipline” or “effective messaging.” But then, I suppose one could call lying an exercise in information management.
Secrecy over budget numbers, secrecy over the sticker price for new jets, secrecy over where cabinet meets — all secrecy, all the time. As Jim Bronskill recently reported, the PM is now trying to enforce blanket secrecy over eleven federal agencies — retroactively and for all time.
So let me ask a question of all those people who think that it’s okay for government to surreptitiously snoop on the lives of citizens. (If you haven’t got anything to hide, why would you care?)
If the PM’s national security advisor, or federal lawyers, or intelligence analysts in the Privy Council Office have nothing to hide, why on earth make their dealings on our behalf secret — forever? Isn’t that a little like erasing history?
The Harper government can’t even be open about how millions of documents belonging to the people of Canada will be put in a digital format by a private company.
Thanks to Chris Cobb and the Ottawa Citizen, we found out about a deal which will allow a private high-tech consortium to do the “sophisticated” formatting of those public documents in return for a 10-year exclusive license to sell the Cadillac version of their product. Get it? You get to buy what you already own.
It should be noted that when Cobb tried to interview the officials who did this secret deal, they clammed up — only to try to discredit his story later. Non-disclosure agreements were the order of the day. Government officials blamed canadiana.com for the wall of silence, and the consortium said they had been told by government to keep quiet until after an unrelated announcement.
As for the Canadian Council of Archivists, none of whose 800 members was consulted about this secret deal, its chairman was put off by the wall of silence — but more distressed about the paywall.
But you can only go so far on optics and hiding stuff. With the RCMP all over Senator Mike Duffy like a rash, Nigel Wright shot off his horse, Senator Pamela Wallin floundering, and some Tory financial supporters and appointees either charged or on their way to jail, it is now only a matter of time before the control freak freaks out.
Sending PMO interns out to heckle Justin Trudeau was puerile. Thinking Ray Novak can replace Nigel Wright is absurd. Even contemplating bringing Jenni Byrne into the PMO is pure desperation. And as for thinking that a cabinet shuffle would put everything right, that’s the beating heart of delusional thinking. Then again, when the latest Nanos poll shows that 50 per cent of respondents wouldn’t “consider” voting for the Conservative party, I guess you have to try something.
Stephen Harper has tried to turn us all into wards of an orphanage in which we have no say about vital decisions being made on our behalf. That’s how it works at an orphanage. People in charge run your life without consultation and you are supposed to feel powerless to do anything about it. All the Big Keeper requires is gratitude and obedience, disengagement and apathy.
Not my strong suit. You?
No comments:
Post a Comment