Sometime between now and the autumn of 2015, Canadians must decide whether their march into the post-democratic age under Harper will continue.
The prime minister’s latest foray into one-man government was his recent end-run around a special House of Commons committee reviewing his nominations to the Supreme Court of Canada. This was his answer to ending up with the fuzzy end of the lollypop in his dust-up with Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin over the unconstitutional appointment of Marc Nadon to the high court. This guy never forgets.
In the meantime, the political leader who endorses disrupting opponents’ political meetings but shuns reasoned debate, who won’t talk to the premiers but loved barbecues in Rob Ford’s backyard, and who puts out his own newscast but treats real journalists like Ebola carriers, is embarked on a course to make people forget the basic fact of every election — that it’s always about the government’s record.
That is a conversation Harper isn’t anxious to have, for any one of a number of reasons. The mismanagement and bottomless dishonesty on display during the F-35 acquisition process, for instance.
Then there’s the PM’s performance during the Wright/Duffy Affair. You remember how he treated the the truth on that occasion as a kind of multiple choice exercise in storytelling. Should the PM be subpoenaed to Mike Duffy’s criminal trial, he won’t have recourse to the ‘creative option’ — not without consequences.
Or recall the belly-flop of judgment that resulted in the appointments of Bruce Carson, Arthur Porter and several other weak links to powerful and sensitive positions.
Maybe some Canadians didn’t see the value of shelling out $10 million to rent panda bears from a country that was hacking our government’s computers.
Certainly Harper’s not keen to talk about his calamitous record with the Senate — promising not to appoint any senators and then stacking the place with every idle Tory hack with a heartbeat. And then came the unconstitutional legislation to reform the Red Chamber, followed by the drive-by smear of Chief Justice McLachlin.
Or maybe Steve doesn’t want to talk about why he has spied on Canadians since coming to office in 2006, sticking the long nose of government deeper and deeper into its citizens’ privacy. In a police state, you might put union rallies, or a vigil for murdered native women, under surveillance — as they have been in Harper’s Canada. In a petro-state you might spy on a public discussion about the oilsands — but in a democracy? In Canada?
No, there are a lot of taboo topics the PM would just as soon we forget about. Stephen Harper would rather talk about beheadings than the dead room he has made of public discourse in Canada — and his dismal record after eight years in power.
Decapitations are, of course, a dubious basis for politics or foreign policy. Since 1985, the government of Saudi Arabia, to whom Canada sells military equipment, has executed 2,000 people — most by beheading. Many of those executed were women — and lot of those women were beheaded for witchcraft or adultery, according to The Guardian.
Yet you will not find a single rant about the House of Saud’s barbaric record from the prime minister or his sock puppet foreign minister, John Baird. They save their moral outrage for the depravities of Islamic State. You might think a Canadian government would regard beheadings as deplorable, wherever they take place. But Stephen Harper’s morality is purely strategic.
Along with beheadings, Steve would like to talk about how corporations are the fountainhead of all good things in the economy — which is why he never misses a chance to lower their taxes or raise their hopes.
But as the Harper government keeps enriching tax breaks for corporations, the G20 is busy cobbling together international tax rules to stop corporations like Google, Apple, Vodafone and GlaxoSmithKline from turning minimal compliance into out and out piracy.
The situation has become dire: Some of the richest corporations in the world pay no tax at all. Accordingly, 44 OECD countries are working out new tax treaties that will force corporations to dismantle their cross-border corporate structures. That way, they can’t tell the tax man that “offshore sales hubs” are generating billions of dollars in sales, leaving the corporations with no taxable presence where the sales were actually generated.
And remember former bank of Canada governor Mark Carney’s warning: Corporations were not re-investing money they got through windfall tax breaks from the Harper government — they were hoarding it.
But what does Steve want to talk about most? Why, the other guys, of course, and why they’re not fit to run the country. Brian Mulroney called Tom Mulcair the best leader of the Opposition since Diefenbaker. Harper says he’s not fit to run the country because … well, because he doesn’t excel in the corporate ass-kissing department. No lip-liner for Tom.
And Justin? Justin is a callow little defiler of young brides and his father was a slut — or at least that was the gist of Ezra Levant’s recent unhinged rant on the person the polls keep saying will be Canada’s next prime minister. As Scott Feschuk cleverly put it on Twitter, this was Ezra’s “magnus Trudeau-pus … the masterpiece Ezra has been working toward all his life: Trudeau steals a kiss.”
You will notice that the prime minister did not appeal for a higher tone in the commentary from pundits at Sun News. That’s because Ezra struck exactly the tone Stephen Harper the marketer wants for the next election: six weeks in the life of Lindsay Lohan. This is a leader who doesn’t believe in substance — just perception.
If the PM gets his way, there won’t be room in the gutter by the time a titillated, misinformed and seething country makes its way to the polls like a British soccer mob after the home side loses and the pubs are closed.
It’s how you make elephants disappear, don’t you know?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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