As her brother wrote to me, he is amazed at the effect on others of his sisters sartorial statement: total silence.
But what does this silence betoken – disgust or quiet approbation? The base and Mr. Harper may be in for a big surprise.
In Steve We Trust is getting to be a shaky proposition, even for the neo-con hardcore who once believed he walked on tailings ponds. As someone observed of Steve’s latest concert to his fawning party faithful, “They could always pipe this performance into the cells at Guantanamo. I’m betting these guys would turn in their own family to avoid listening to this.”
This week the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador Paul Davis became the latest victim of the prime minister’s dealing from the bottom of the deck.
But unlike a lot of the people duped by Stephen Harper’s card-shark politics, Davis spoke up. It was a straight left to the PM’s jaw. The prime minister of Canada cannot be trusted, Davis said.
It’s damaging enough coming from a premier, but from a fellow conservative, it’s potentially devastating.
Why did the premier pipe up about the cheating side of a man who kneecaps his opponents for far less? In a word, aversion to those who bargain in bad faith. The prime minister had broken a deal he had reached with the province to get Newfoundland’s support for Canada’s free-trade deal with Europe.
Here are the bare bones. Before CETA, there were minimum processing rules, which meant that a certain percentage of the catch from Canadian waters had to be processed in Newfoundland fish-plants. In rural Newfoundland, up and down the northeast coast, there are scant employment alternatives, so the processing business is a big deal.
In return for access to their markets, the Europeans wanted those minimum processing rules removed. Newfoundland’s premier of the day, Kathy Dunderdale, agreed, triggering charges that she had sold out fish-plant workers in rural Newfoundland.
Dunderdale tried to blunt the criticism by touting a $400 million “fisheries transition” fund for the province’s struggling fishery – hand-out money to dry up the tears of those who might lose their jobs if CETA is ratified two years down the road. Ottawa was supposed to kick in $280 million, the balance was to come from provincial coffers.
Then Stephen Harper changed the rules. Now the province has to place a cash value on giving up those minimum processing requirements, instead of getting a straight-up cheque for $280 million. In other words, Premier Davis could end up with a lot less money than Ottawa promised Newfoundland would get to deal with the economic upheaval, made only more dire by the falling price of crude oil.
So here is his bottom line:
“It really solidifies that you can’t trust the federal government, you can’t trust Stephen Harper’s government…. We bargained in good faith. We believed that we had an agreement in place, that we had a deal set.”
If this assessment sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
Former premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Danny Williams, once believed he had a deal that would allow his province to keep its offshore oil revenues while still being eligible for full equalization payments from Ottawa. When Stephen Harper changed that arrangement, Williams went on the war path. With the full backing of the premier’s office, word spread across Newfoundland and Labrador — vote for anybody but Harper at the ballot box.
Here’s how Williams described Harper in an interview with the Globe and Mail:
“Williams publicly mocked Harper as a man who breaks his promise, a petty man who cannot be trusted, a buddy of the oil companies, a man who ‘just keeps on changing his colours in order to suit whatever the political need is at the time.’”
Back in 2007, then Conservative MP Bill Casey also learned that Harper could not be trusted. After agreeing to the Atlantic Accord, Harper changed the deal unilaterally to the disadvantage of oil and gas producing provinces like Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Casey visited the prime minister personally, armed with legal opinions from the justice department confirming that the deal had been changed and that it was illegal.
“Harper swept the opinions off his desk and said that the words meant what he said they meant. He said that I had never been with the program,” Casey told me.
Casey’s vote against the government’s budget bill cost him his place in the Conservative caucus. He was kicked out. After subsequently retiring from politics in 2009, Casey is making a comeback bid in his former riding of Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley — as a candidate for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.
When it comes to money and deal-making with Stephen Harper, the lesson is clear: get it in writing and remember to bring along your magnifying glass for the fine print — and oh yes, your Philadelphia lawyer.
Need more evidence? Harper unilaterally and without consultation added language to funding agreements with First Nations. The new national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Perry Bellegarde, found at the time that the agreements were “peppered” with alarming language that attempted to tie the bands not only to the documents they were signing, but to so-called relevant conditions laid out under future legislation.
In other words, as a condition of basic funding, the bands were being forced to comply with legislation not yet written or seen. Aboriginals were being invited to dance to the tune of their paymasters — a turn of events made more irksome by the fact that these paymasters are squatting on their land.
“Trust has diminished,” regional chief Morley Googoo told a Toronto newspaper. “People have grown more aware of what’s written.”
Does Harper’s word mean more on those matters that do not overtly deal with money? Apparently not, according to Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development.
Speaking for all Canadians, Harper made a commitment to the international community at Copenhagen to reduce this country’s emissions by 17 per cent by 2020. The reality? Not only is there no way that Harper’s “promise” will be kept, there is not even a plan in place to attempt it. Bottom line? In 2006, Stephen Harper promised to regulate the energy sector. Eight years later, he says such regulation would be “crazy.”
Harper continues to take credit for provincial efforts at reducing emissions and calls sucking up to industry behind the scenes “consultation.”
“What we found,” said Environment Commissioner Julie Gelford, “was that the consultation has occurred narrowly and privately…. Canadians want to know when the regulations are going to come in, what level of regulation it’s going to be, what level of greenhouse gas reduction we’re going to achieve, reporting back to parliament on a regular basis.”
Clearly, a bureaucrat who still believes in the tooth-fairy, bless her heart.
With network television, particularly the CBC, becoming campaign headquarters for the Harper government’s imminent re-election bid, a gaggle of experts, pollsters, snake oil salesmen, party hacks, and other riders on the merry-go-round of sophistry called the MSM — mainstream news media — will tell you this and that about what election 2015 will be about:
It will be all about Harper’s command of the economy.
It will be all about Justin Trudeau’s going around without socks on and not being ready.
It will be all about Thomas Mulcair’s prickly beard and the socialist menace.
In other words, it will be about the Conservative propaganda … er … marketing machine. The people who tell you those are the issues are part of the Tory team, bought and paid for with taxpayers money.
Don’t be fooled. The 2015 election is coming sooner than anyone expects, and this is what it will be about:
it will be about how Canadians feel about having a prime minister whose word means nothing.
It will be about the record of deceit and cynicism, failure of character, and breach of trust.
It will be about Sky’s jacket.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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