Their former leader was the most popular choice for worst prime minister in a recent poll conducted by Angus Reid. Even the pasta-consultant beat him, to say nothing of the throat-grabber and the middle-finger-flipper.
According to another poll from Abacus Data, 50 per cent of Canadians disapprove of Harper. Only NHL Comish Gary Bettman has worse stats.
And all of this confirmed the results of an informal poll conducted earlier in the year by the Huffington Post, which placed Harper “dead last” in its ranking of prime ministers.
The message? Never mind a pork chop — tie a beef tenderloin around this guy’s ankle, and dogs would still rather cross the 401 in rush hour than play with him. Some say history will be kind to Steve. Only if it’s written by Paul Godfrey and his cheerleading squad of wind-up petroleum pundits.
So the only full-time leader the party has ever had is now officially a dud. If that were all the CPC was facing, they might get up off the barroom floor after being knocked senseless by Justin Trudeau in the last election and have another go.
Every party can live down a dud — eventually. But there is so much more afflicting the CPC than Harper’s image. It’s the flock of chickens coming home to roost, the accumulating guano of Harper’s astonishing incompetence, and his disregard for the well-being of Canadians. His “worst PM” designation is well-earned.
No story exemplifies that better than that of Cindy Blackstock, the Canadian-born Gitxan and First Nations child welfare advocate. Despite warrantless government surveillance involving 189 federal officials “stalking” her, and more than $5 million in federal legal fees spent to derail the social worker’s case in front of the Human Rights Tribunal, this amazing citizen persevered.
In the end, the HRT ruled that the government’s provision of First Nations child welfare had indeed been systematically discriminating against native children — just as Blackstock had alleged in her 2007 action. The Conservatives tried to turn her activism into a crime, while talking about an historic reconciliation with native peoples out of the other side of their mouths. The only thing ‘historic’ was the size of the lie.
There’s more. My colleague at iPolitics, Amanda Connolly, reports that the Communications Security Establishment did not “protect” metadata filched from Canadians before sharing it with foreign governments and “allies”.
In his annual report to Parliament, CSE Commissioner Jean-Pierre Plouffe says the problem is a lack of specificity in the ministerial directive that lays out what CSE can and can’t do. That’s spook-spun gobbledygook with a dash of bureaucratese.
The real bottom line? It’s not a failure to communicate. It is a grotesque example of overreach by people permitted to operate in almost total secrecy. CSE is only supposed to monitor foreign communications for information of intelligence interest to the federal government. So under what authority had it been collecting the communications of Canadians to the tune of millions of downloads a day? We can thank Edward Snowden for even being able to ask that question.
So Canada’s privacy laws were being egregiously broken, Stephen Harper knew it — and yet never released the report documenting the illegality.
CSE’s watchdog reported these violations in his 2014-2015 annual report, when the Conservatives were still in power. So why was it only released this week? One reason — a change of government. Sneaky Steve loved the hush-hush crowd. The rest of us, who like to think the government has no business in the cellphones of the nation, not so much.
And then there’s the National Energy Board. Everyone knows that Harper turned the NEB into a mouthpiece for the oil industry. Hell, he even appointed a petroleum executive to the board who had been a consultant to the industry — the guy had actually written Kinder Morgan’s pipeline bumph for the Trans Mountain project. I guess the PM and then-energy minister Greg Rickford wanted to give Steven Kelly a chance to grade his own paper.
Even that wasn’t cynical enough. Just before his eviction from 24 Sussex, Harper re-appointed people whose terms weren’t even up yet. We know that thanks to the ingenious reporting of my colleague Elizabeth Thompson. The idea, of course, was to make sure Harper’s grip on the regulatory agency would survive his loss of political power. It was devious Steve at his deck-stacking, dice-loading best.
And now we find out, after an audit, that the NEB didn’t even bother to see if companies that had won regulatory approval were in compliance with the conditions placed on their projects. The federal commissioner of the environment found the NEB to have been negligent in 24 of the 49 cases he audited. In some cases, files had even gone missing. The only real question is why that isn’t grounds for cleaning house at the NEB now, not years from now.
Yet all week in the House of Commons, the Kool Aid crowd kept winking at each other after asking their questions of the government, giving thumbs up and smirks as they resumed their seats, playing to the cameras.
They didn’t seem to realize that the positions they were pressing amounted to the same litany of policy and moral failure that cost them the election, and made their former leader the worst PM in history: stone-age diplomacy, school-yard insults and silly demands that the government do in a hundred days what the Harperites couldn’t do in a decade.
On the other hand, the party is trying out the odd new wrinkle. Rona Ambrose showed up in the House in something that resembled leather. She looked like the girl who fell for the leader of the pack down at the laundromat. Scott Reid is sporting a hair-do so contrived, he’s either sitting too close to Rona or he must have received two curling irons for Christmas. Talk about the un-Steve coif.
It was once said of The Wizard of Oz that the straw man was stupid, the tin man was heartless, the lion was cowardly and the wizard was a liar. Not a bad description of the Conservative party.
It will be for the base to decide if what’s wrong with this burned-out shell of a one-man cult can be fixed with a wardrobe change and a hairdresser who should be designing floats for the Rose Bowl parade.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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