Is Harper Crazy?

I've been prompted to write this blog by the latest of the Harper Government's lousy policy moves--cutting $45 million from arts funding and diverting most of it to the 2010 Olympic Games. This kind of ignorant action (Canadians spend more than twice the amount on culture as on live sports events) is typical of Harper, but I go beyond his arts policy to consider the failures of Harper and his Conservatives as a whole. They do not make a pretty picture.


Is Harper crazy? Not in a medical sense, but he is a megalomaniac who will say and do anything he thinks he can get away with, if he believes it will bring him closer to winning a majority. He is a man who operates on a single principle: To win, at all costs.

It will be Canadians who are crazy if they vote for him. Harper cannot be trusted with even minority power because he is dishonest, a coward, and a bully.

His latest dishonesty is to pretend that Parliament has been--or will be--obstructionist, in order to give himself an ostensibly valid reason to call an election. But this is the man who brought in fixed election dates because he believed in curbing the power of a Prime Minister to call an election purely for political purposes. But now that Harper wants an election purely for political purposes, fixed election dates no longer matter.

Harper claims the law doesn't pertain to a minority government--which is true, but (like so many of Harper's claims) only partially true. The law allows for the possibility of opposition parties bringing down a minority government--but that doesn't mean it allows the Prime Minister of a minority government to bring it down himself, when he finds it convenient to do so, and if he calls an election, it will be in contemptuous contravention of the spirit and intent of his own law.

This is only one example. Remember income trusts? Remember his campaign promise not to tax them? Remember how, once Harper decided this was a bad idea, without a word of warning or consultation, he betrayed his own followers? He's a man who will break his word the second he thinks it's expedient for him to do so.

And Harper encourages the same dishonesty in others. David Emerson, for example, the former Liberal candidate (and cabinet minister) who, the minute it benefitted him to do so, crossed the floor to obtain a Tory cabinet post. He was in such a hurry to scurry over to join the opponents he had been so roundly lambasting a few short days before, that he didn't even wait for Parliament to sit. And let us not forget Peter MacKay, the wimpish Minister of Defence who broke his promise to David Orchard not to merge the Reform and Conservative Parties, by doing so at the first opportunity.

Then there's that paragon of tyrannical virtue, Tony Clement, the ignorant Minister of Health with his ideologically-based denial of the scientific studies which show that harm reduction in general, and Insite, the safe injection site in Vancouver, in particular, not only save lives, but also serve as doorways to further treatment. But holier-than-thou Clement would rather waste hundreds of millions of tax dollars on the punitive and futile enforcement of bad laws than allow addicts access to the services they need. For Tony and the Tories, prison is their choice of treatment for addicts; they should be charged with practicing medicine without a licence, with its sickening results for society as a whole.

And how about that upstanding Christian, Stockwell Day, the pious Minister of Public Safety, who likes to play God, picking and choosing which Canadians on various death rows around the world he'll seek clemency for, and which he will not, ignoring the responsibility of the Canadian Government to all its citizens (including Omar Khadr). And Rob Nicholson, the incompetent Minister of Justice, who claims to be getting tough on crime while upholding the very laws which maintain and enrich criminal gangs; and John Baird, the embarrassing Minister of the Environment with his intensity-based emission targets, which do nothing to curb the destruction being wreaked on the environment by the tar sands oil industry.

These are the men (the very few women in cabinet make no difference) who, for the sake of their narrow-minded, big-business-orientated ideology, seek a majority government in order to impose their mean, sterile, pitiful vision of government on the country. These are men who believe in less government, except when it comes to our private lives, when they are only too eager to impose their own questionable morality on adult Canadians--promulgating the war on drugs, and (if they could get away with it), restricting women's choices re birth control and abortion, and abolishing same sex marriage. With respect to abortion and same sex marriage, regardless of Harper's current claims that these issues are closed, if he gets a majority, his followers will be empowered to cut Canadians' rights to fit the scanty cloth of their private religious views.

Harper is a coward. When the Tory Party is accused of wrong-doing--the 'in-and-out' election advertising financing allegation, for example, or the curious case of Chuck Cadman--instead of co-operating with the Commons Ethics Committee to bring everything into the open as quickly as possible, as an innocent person would do, Harper has sued, Harper has denied, Harper has obstructed the work of the Committee at every turn. These are not the actions of a man with nothing to hide.

Harper is a bully, witness the firing of Linda Keen, president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission because she put the safety of Canadians ahead of the wishes of the Tory Government.

Tory times are hard times, because Tories believe in a hard, mean, selfish, and greedy ideology in which making money, maximizing profits at the expense of all else, and growing the business ever larger are the only accepted goals. With an impending recession, the Harperites are itching to cut taxes, and consequently, spending (especially on social programs, which they have abandoned to the provinces). But it's the well-off who benefit most from tax cuts, and the less well-off who suffer most from the resulting lack of government services.

While it makes sense for a household to cut back on its spending during a recession; it makes no sense at all for the Federal Government to do so. Its job is to stabilize the economy by supporting the purchasing power of those who are the least able to weather a downturn. They should, for example, increase accessibility to Employment Insurance benefits (which so many pay for and so few receive), and offer refundable tax credits (a negative income tax) for those too poor to have a taxable income. (For a complete version of a progressive tax system, please refer to my book If Only Things Were Different (I): A Model for a Sustainable Society)

But the Tories don't believe in citizens looking after each other and ourselves through our taxes (the most effective way of keeping costs of essential services as low as possible for each of us); the Tories believe in a dog-eat-dog world in which each person or family fends for itself alone, in competition against every other person and family, isolated, and at the mercy of the organized power of transnational corporations.

The publication of a Tory handbook on how to cripple the workings of Parliamentary committees, and its application by Tory MPs--filibustering, throwing tantrums, and otherwise delaying the work of Commons committees investigating allegations of Tory misdeeds--shows Harper's contempt for Parliament. He is now showing his contempt for citizens by expecting us to swallow his codswallop that Parliament is obstructionist. Since his minority government has survived for over two years, this claim is obviously false. (Many would argue that Parliament hasn't been obstructionist enough; that it should have long since put Canadians out of the Harper Government's misery.)

But Harper doesn't care; he'll keep repeating the lie because it suits his purpose to do so; and because he thinks Canadians are so stupid, and that we care so little about honesty and honour in politics, that we will troop like sheep to the polls and give him a new mandate to wreak more harm.

If we do, we will truly be the crazy ones.

Next blog: Economic Heresy: An alternative to a constant-growth economy

I've been taking a lot of photographs instead of writing. This one is from a bird-watching excursion this morning down to Clover Point in Beacon Hill Park. The otters (there were two of them) were more fun than the birds.