The Great Strategist has dithered that option off the table. We are only three months away from the rumble for democracy in this country, and not even Stephen Harper can scarper now — unless he postpones the election and violates his own fixed election date — again.
There are many reasons why a hasty exit for this shopworn PM makes sense. Take his two preferred issues for the October 19 election: the economy and national security. Both are as phoney as that Clarabell smile (remember Howdy Doody) the PM pastes on these days at the drop of a photo-op. Someone should tell Captain Eyeliner that a smile that does not include the eyes is not a smile at all. It is a ghastly and transparent tactic.
It is not just that Harper’s petro-state has bellyflopped in a giant tailings pond because the Saudis refuse to stop pumping cheap oil. Or that on his watch, Alberta has fallen to the NDP. Or that energy costs in Ontario may drive five percent of businesses in the province under. Or that his party is at historic lows in the polls. Or that the former engine of the economy, Ontario, has just had its credit rating downgraded. Or even that Canada is in a recession, which it is.
It is that Canada’s finance minister, Joe Oliver, appears to have stayed out in the sun too long. It is not a recession, Oliver said, but an opportunity for the government’s Economic Action Plan, the undead of Harper policy, to come to the rescue. The Flat Earth Society are rationalists from the Enlightenment compared to the voodoo coming out of Ottawa these days on the economy. The masters of the economic universe sound more like ex-Pravda editors trying to bury the truth in low-grade propaganda — just like they did when they taxed income trusts into oblivion and denied the 2008 recession. As the chief economist of the Conference Board of Canada observed as he lowered the expected growth rate of the economy from 2.2 to 1.5 percent, it will be “another weak growth year for Canada.”
And then there is the national security issue — or to put it more accurately, the notion that the Conservatives can frighten people into doing something they otherwise wouldn’t — re-elect Harper — by using the prospect of terrorist violence to overshadow the government’s atrocious record. Like the government line on the economy, Harper’s pitch on national security is pure Hans Christian Andersen.
No, Johnny and Jane Canuck; neither Canada, the United States, nor the world for that matter are awash in terrorists. Forget the chorus of terror stories on the tube, ranging from raging beheaders to sewing needles in PEI potatoes. And disregard Harper’s claim that there have already been ISIL attacks in Canada.
Evidence has yet to be produced to confirm Harper’s unsubstantiated claim, assuming you don’t count hysterical commentary at the time of the attacks by the likes of Peter Mansbridge. What we have is a video of a deranged man with no demonstrated connections to ISIL. And another man who told his father that he wanted to join ISIL. His father, by the way, reported him to the police.
Meanwhile, the misreporting goes on. Global terrorism isn’t ‘particularly global’ as Philip Giraldi put it in the American Conservative. According to the State Department’s annual “Country Reports on Terrorism 2014″, 80 percent of all fatal terrorist attacks were restricted to five countries: Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Syria. War zones all, or places where large parts of the country are not under government control.
As for North America, the threat is “miniscule.” The 389-page document reports that although twenty-four Americans died in terrorist incidents in 2014, seventeen of those deaths occurred in war zones abroad, none in the United States. As for the terrorist threat to North America, since 9/11, there have only been seven incidents laid at the feet of jihadi-style terrorists, resulting in 26 deaths.
To be sure, tragedies all. But an existential crisis to be billboarded as a top issue in any North American election? Only by guys who push snake oil. After all, when you cry “terrorist”, as Harper always does, you also justify massive spending on military, security, and police — and suspend the normal operation of the law and constitution. Exaggerating the terror threat is the elixir of tyrants.
Here is the truly sobering number that Stephen Harper never mentions when he is inflating that terror threat, but which is revealed in the State Department’s report. In the first ten years of the “War on Terror,” a minimum of 1.3 million people were killed in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. That doesn’t even count those who have died since in Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. The real number could easily be two million dead, especially when you consider that the State Department report itself says the 1.3 million figure is “conservative.”
It bears remembering, if only because Steve will never say it: Syria is the fourteenth country in the Islamic world invaded, occupied, or bombed by the United States since 1980. The result? The Islamic State. Regime change by force has not led to nation building. It has led directly to the foundations of the Caliphate dreamed of by Osama bin Laden. As Andrew Bacevich of Columbia University put it in the Washington Post, “Yet even as the United States persists in its determination to pacify the Greater Middle East, the final verdict is already in. U.S. military power has never offered an appropriate response to whatever ails the Islamic world. We’ve committed our troops to a fool’s errand….Instead of curbing bad behaviour, spanking induced all sorts of pathologies.”
Bacevich, by the way, isn’t the only person who thinks so. President Obama himself told VICE news that ISIL was created by the the ill-considered U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein. But what does the White House know?
Now that Harper can’t back out without delaying the election, the hardest job will not be practising recession-denial or promoting terror-hysteria. It will be dealing with all the other things that he doesn’t want this election to be about.
If the people at the State Department have it right, the Harper government brought in the democracy-killing Bill C-51 at a time when the international terror threat to North America barely exists. That means the assault on civil and privacy rights brought about by this unnecessary and abusive legislation was just more wedge politics — pandering to Harper’s increasingly restless base.
How will he respond to his ethics spokesman in shackles when he once told the House of Commons that Dean del Mastro had reported all his electoral expenses according to the rules?
How will Harper reply to criticism of his raft of partisan patronage appointments — 98 in all — made just before an election that may well oust him? The base must wonder if he’s channelling his inner Pierre Trudeau. Is this the promised new way of doing things in Ottawa? Wasn’t Harper the guy who was going to end all patronage appointments by setting up an independent office to take the pork out of partisan hands? Will he fill the Senate with 22 new “merit” appointments?
How much lower can the prime minister drag our international reputation? Lectures from the governor of California about Canada’s doltish policy on climate change; lectures from the UN on permitting potential human rights violations by Canadian mining companies operating abroad; and serious scrutiny by the UN over the allegation that Harper has used the Canada Revenue Agency to attack charitable organizations that aren’t into partisan butt-kissing.
And now we have more questions raised about the credibility of a prime minister who likes to make up reality as he goes along. Did the PMO stage-manage the news surrounding last year’s discovery of the Erebus, one of the ship’s from the Franklin Expedition? Was the CBC’s slavish, non-stop drivel about the discovery all part of the government’s PR offensive — as false as the cheque they received from Parks Canada for the coverage was real, just as Blacklock’s Reporter wrote at the time?
Among a number of allegations, Pulitzer-Prize winning photo-journalist Paul Watson says the way the PMO handled the media surrounding the event led to distorting, and perhaps, even falsifying the historical truth of how the discovery was really made.
In particular, philanthropist Jim Balsillie said the CBC documentary of the event tilted the news for the exclusive benefit of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society and its boss, John Geiger. Journalist Watson says he quit his job at the Star over being “banned” from writing that story, an allegation the paper has categorically denied, describing the affair as strictly a “personnel” matter.
I’m just surprised that underwater video hasn’t emerged showing Steve in full scuba gear making the discovery himself.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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