Brian Abrams is a former Conservative candidate for Kingston and the Islands. He had a pretty good showing in 2008, but lost to incumbent Peter Milliken.
After his defeat, the Conservatives launched an all out attack on this riding. They saturated it with taxpayer funded ten percenters, warning Kingstonians that if we voted for Michael Ignatieff, he would leave us and join the Samurais.
Yes, apparently Michael Ignatieff had once jokingly claimed that he was a Samurai Warrior and it was of vital importance to our national security, for us to know that.
Abrams took a beating in the local press for this waste of our money and also for not supporting the Prison Farm protests. Local candidates for the Liberal, Green and NDP parties were at every meeting and most rallies.
When it became clear that he would not be able to win an election, the Conservatives bought him off with an appointment to Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, to make way for their star candidate, local businesswoman Alicia Gordon. She lost.
I was concerned with Abram's appointment, not only because he was one of the most partisan creatures on the planet, but because he had been the attorney for the local police department. I believe that the judiciary and law enforcement should be separate. He was also a former RCMP officer. Could he rule against the police if there was wrongdoing? Or against Conservative ideology? I don't think so.
I remember during the 2008 campaign, on his blog he claimed that he was sitting around worrying about the hardships that the Green Shift/carbon tax plan of Stéphane Dion's would impose on people in this riding. He knew that the plan was revenue neutral, but if he had to lie to get ahead, he could lie with the best of them. He should have been sitting around worrying about the devastating affects of Climate Change.
However, this isn't really about Abrams, but rather how Stephen Harper chooses his appointments.
Bruce Ryder had an excellent column in the Star yesterday: Are we appointing the best judges? While most of the media and some MPs are chasing shiny things, aka: the announcement that one candidate was not bi-lingual, they are missing the obvious.
The views and qualifications of the appointees.
A former selection, Justice Marshall Rothstein, has already taken a stand against collective bargaining, despite the fact that he promised not to let his personal views affect his decisions.
Ryder raises another issue. Of the four Harper selections to date, NONE are committed to upholding our Charter rights and freedoms. This is not an accident.
In 2004 Harper actually ran against the charter, promising to use the Notwithstanding Clause to overturn things like abortion laws, gay rights, women's rights and hate speech laws, (which he likened to totalitarianism).
To the Conservatives, the charter is social engineering, elevating individual rights over personal responsibility and undeserving minorities over the taxpaying majority .... Constitutional experts have warned that the Conservative platform is so anti-charter it is a legal minefield. "A lot of this stuff raises serious constitutional issues." the University of Ottawa's Ed Ratushny told CanWest Global News Service. The experts have identified at least 12 positions that either, violate the charter, are ripe for serious court challenges or would require amendments to the Constitution. (Winnipeg Free Press, June 25, 2004)
In the 2005-6 campaign, some in the Canadian media became alarmed with Harper's ties to the American Religious Right and their Conservative Movement, prompting one of their leaders, Paul Weyrich (above right), to send an email to his flock, warning them not to talk to the Canadian press. At first he denied that the email was his, but later confirmed that he had indeed attempted to hide Harper's close relationship with members of his team. (Harper's U.S. neocon booster changes his story, By Beth Gorham, Canadian Press, January 27, 2006)
When Harper failed to get a majority, Weyrich told his followers not to worry. Said he:
"It is not widely known in this country that a Canadian prime minister has more power than a United States president. Harper could appoint 5,000 new officials. (No confirmation is required by the Canadian Parliament.) The prime minister also could appoint every judge from the trial courts, to the courts of appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court, as vacancies occur.
"Harper's partisans believe he could maintain power for four years, during which time Conservatives hopefully would witness many vacancies created by Liberals leaving the courts. (ibid)
In his new book Rogue in Power, Christian Nadeau reminds us that Harper has indeed been doing just that.
And for Harper, the appointment of judges is ... part of a strategy whose objective is to profoundly change the relationship between government and other institutions to one of master and servant. Placing judges who hold and will support the neoconservative agenda .... at least three judicial appointments to higher courts were motivated by religious [Right]reasons—Dallas K. Miller in Alberta, Lawrence O'Neil in Nova Scotia, and David Moseley Brown in Ontario. Miller is the founder of an association that advocates home-schooling. O'Neil has told the Commons that pregnant women have no right to control their own bodies. Brown is known for his battles against gay rights. (Rogue in Power: Why Stephen Harper is remaking Canada by Stealth, By Christian Nadeau, Lorimer Press, ISBN: 978-1-55277-730-5, p. 53-54)
Paul Weyrich is also a founding member of the Council for National Policy, the pro-military, religious organization where Stephen Harper gave his "yes I really hate Canadians this much" speech in 1997. Said Harper:
"The establishment came down with a constitutional package which they put to a national referendum. The package included distinct society status for Quebec and some other changes, including some that would just horrify you, putting universal Medicare in our constitution, and feminist rights, and a whole bunch of other things."
Funny. None of those things horrified me, but the thought of losing them scares me to death.
I've been writing a series of blog postings that speak to the fundamental changes that have already taken place in Canada over the past five years, and will continue to take place, if we allow Stephen Harper to win this election.
These are not minor shifts but speak to an attempt to completely transform the Canadian identity, moving us from a Just Society to a nation where intolerance prevails and is indeed promoted.
When elected in 2006, with a minority, he found that rather than challenge the Charter, which would cause an uproar, he could simply work behind the scenes, removing funding from groups put in place to uphold it and taking over arms length institutions and stacking them with right-wing activists.
If there is one area where the media has failed in its duties, it is this. The warning signs were there, but few chose to issue warnings. I know they were silenced, but even when allowed to speak freely, spoke only in whispers.
They chose to view Stephen Harper through a Progressive Conservative lens, ignoring the things that gave them a knot in their tummies.
Harper, Paul Weyrich and the Judiciary
During the 2006 election campaign, an old speech of Stephen Harper's surfaced, in which he shows disdain for Canada. It was dissected and put into sound bites, but what went largely unnoticed, was where he gave this speech. It was at a convention of the Council for National Policy, an integral arm of the American Religious Right.
They wield a great deal of power in the Republican Party, and no one gets to run for leadership, unless they first get the nod from the CNP. And they approved of Stephen Harper even before genuflecting to the talents of G.W.
Another revelation during the 2006 campaign was that Paul Weyrich, one of the leaders of the American Religious Right, who had first coined the term 'Moral Majority, had instructed his disciples to not speak with Canadian journalists, not wanting Canadians to know how deeply Harper was involved in their movement.
He first denied it, but later confirmed that he had been behind the emailed instructions (1).
Weyrich is also known as the man who developed the strategy of turning your political opponent's supporters away from the polls. When handling the campaign for Ronald Reagan he denounced the Civil Rights Movement, knowing that it would upset Black voters.
And while 90% of them voted Democrat, only 30% voted at all. When asked about this Weyrich told the press "I don't want everyone to vote ... our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. We have no moral responsibility to turn out our opposition." (2)
So if the story in 2006, was Harper's connection to Weyrich, his five years in power reveal something much more alarming than a guilt by association. He supports his "Culture Wars", something the late Paul Weyrich felt necessary to combat "Cultural Marxism".
When Harper was elected with only a minority in 2006, Weyrich's American followers were distressed, but he reminded them that this was not necessarily a bad thing.
"It is not widely known in this country that a Canadian prime minister has more power than a United States president. Harper could appoint 5,000 new officials. (No confirmation is required by the Canadian Parliament.) The prime minister also could appoint every judge from the trial courts, to the courts of appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court, as vacancies occur. 'The prime minister also could appoint every judge from the trial courts, to the courts of appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court, as vacancies occur'
"Harper's partisans believe he could maintain power for four years, during which time Conservatives hopefully would witness many vacancies created by Liberals leaving the courts.
In his new book Rogue in Power, Christian Nadeau reminds us that Harper has indeed been doing just that. And for Harper, "the appointment of judges is ... part of a strategy whose objective is to profoundly change the relationship between government and other institutions to one of master and servant." (3) Placing judges who hold and will support the neoconservative agenda.
And according to Nadeau: "at least three judicial appointments to higher courts were motivated by religious [Right]reasons—Dallas K. Miller in Alberta, Lawrence O'Neil in Nova Scotia, and David Moseley Brown in Ontario. Miller is the founder of an association that advocates home-schooling. O'Neil has told the Commons that pregnant women have no right to control their own bodies. Brown is known for his battles against gay rights. (3)
Is this really your Canada? Are we really prepared for this?
Susan Delacourt and Bruce Campion-Smith tell the story of two university profs who believe they are being targeted by the Harper government because they are often critical of their policies.
Two University of Ottawa professors, vocal critics of the federal Conservative government, say they have become targets of a new political intimidation tactic, aimed at using their private, personal information against them.
Professors Errol Mendes and Amir Attaran, frequently castigated as Liberal sympathizers by the Conservatives, were notified in recent weeks of two unusually massive freedom-of-information requests at the University of Ottawa, demanding details of the professors’ employment, expenses and teaching records.
Their stories are believable because I've heard them before. And Canadians should pay very close attention to this. I put together some information, working with an American free-lance journalist, and thought of pitching it to W-5. Our media has really missed the boat on this, so hopefully they will continue their investigation.
Without appearing to be an alarmist, one of the first actions of the Nazi government was to purge the universities of those who opposed their agenda.
Some Background
There has been a movement in universities across the United States that has found it's way to Canada, with the efforts of three organizations:
1. The Canadian Constitution Foundation, started by Harper MP John Weston and once run by a longtime Reform/Alliance insider and Stockwell Day supporter, John Carpay. (I received an email from CCF saying that Carpay had resigned). It is a legal group who take on constitutional challenges, especially against our public healthcare, Native land claims, and the right to attack Muslims and gays.
Their new executive director is Chris Schafer, formerly of the Fraser Institute. Karen Selick also on the exec was with Jason Kenney's Canadian Taxpayer Association, and she has worked closely with Garry Breitkreuz to scrap the gun registry. At a rally in response to former justice minister Alan Rock's statement "I came to Ottawa with the firm belief that the only people in this country who should have guns are police officers and soldiers." Selick said: "Sorry, Mr. Rock but if ever there were a good start towards a police state, that has to be it. We are being asked to give up our means of defence in return for a promise of protection from the very people most likely to become our oppressors."
This group is also involved with the Tea Party's Americans for Prosperity, and was behind attack ads against Obama's healthcare reform.
2. Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute. Budding journalist Jeff Horwitz went undercover, attending one of their seminars and wrote an article My Right-wing Degree: How I learned to convert liberal campuses into conservative havens at Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, Alma Mater of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Jeff Gannon and two Miss Americas. (1) Rob Anders is also a graduate of this school, and according to Marci McDonald in her book The Armageddon factor (2), about 700 other Canadians, including several of Harper's MPs, have passed through their halls.
Blackwell is also with the Council for National Policyand it was he who invited Stephen Harper to speak at one of their conventions. They needed to know whether or not Canada was ripe for the picking. Harper did not let them down. And in the run-up to the 2006 election, members of this Religious Right group put a lot of money into Harper's anti-gay campaign.
3. The Manning Centre for Building Democracy, started by Reform Party founder Preston Manning on a "secret" 10 million dollar donation from a corporate sponsor. It is fashioned after Morton Blackwell's School, employing the same tactics to shift education to the right.
When it Becomes Alarming
American David Horowitz wrote a book The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America which has served as a "list" of university professors who must be purged from Academia. His counterpart in Canada, The Society of Academic Freedom, loves the book and promotes it in their newsletter (scroll to page 13).
I posted about these groups and you can read how they all tie in with the Harper government here. The goal of these organizations, using Horowitz's book as a guideline, is to purge universities of critical thinkers. Caroline Higgins made the list for promoting peace.
And a few others:
Foul Play at Bard? [on Joel Kovel, incl. Middle East Studies Association] Controversy Ensues After College Terminates Kovel (student paper of the CUNY Graduate Center), by John Boy, The Graduate Center Advocate, May 2009
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built: The Cases of Margo Ramlal Nankoe, William Robinson, Nagesh Rao, and Loretta Capeheart, By Dana Cloud, April 29, 2009
And when they target someone they are relentless. As retired university professor Michael Yates said of this horrible activity: "At least I did not have to face the nasty right-wing students who spy on their professors and do the bidding of the professional witch hunters who spew hatred on radio talk shows, and television programs."
I've been investigating this for months and some of the stories will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Amir Attaran and Errol Mendes have good reason to be concerned, as should every person in Canada.
They are already trying to privatize public education, so they can set the curriculum. (Evolution is a hoax). If someone in the media doesn't expose this now, it could be too late, as academics in the U.S. are already discovering.
Email the media and demand that they take this seriously, and lend your full support to these two gentlemen who have become the targets of a witch hunt. Once we get our Fox News North, that Harper has mandated will be allowed to lie, this could become very dangerous for everyone.
A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada
Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother, William Herbert Hunt, are from a family of billionaires who have seen their fortunes rise and fall. In the 1980's they were charged with irregularities in trading, after cornering the market on silver, and were fined $10 million each and banned from trading in the American commodity markets. (1)
At the time they were forced into a chapter 11 and had to liquidate many of their assets. But once a billionaire, I guess always a billionaire and Nelson Bunker Hunt is once again riding high in the Republican/Neoconservative/Religious Right Movement.
But there are two other groups in particular, that he lends his name to, that are very important to the future of the Right-Wing Revolution: The John Birch Society and the Council for National Policy.
John Birch Society
The Reform Party of Canada adopted a motion at it's inception, to allow right-wing fringe groups to join them. "In short the party leadership was trying to broaden it's right-wing support while not entirely surrendering it's attraction to fringe elements, at least some of whom were present at the Winnipeg Convention." (2)
While the John Birch Society itself did not appear to be much of a major force in Canada, it was part of the "fringe elements" that became associated with Canada's neoconservative movement. Paul Fromm was there in the early days, selling memberships to his anti-immigration group: C-Far*, that is still going strong. He was allowed to set up shop after arranging to have Peter Brimelow speak. Brimelow, now calling himself a paleoconservatist (white supremacist), made such an impression on Stephen Harper that he went out and bought ten copies of his book, The Patriot Game, and gave them to friends. (3)
Fromm has been a lifelong neo-Nazi, fired from his job as a teacher after a video surfaced of him at a Hitler birthday party celebration, giving the Nazi salute to a Confederate flag. He also attended a "Revilo P. Oliver Memorial Symposium" in November of 1994, which was organized by the National Alliance, a large U.S. Nazi propaganda organization, whose leader William L. Pearce was the author of the horrible Turner Diaries, which are said to have inspired the Oklahoma bombing by Tim McVeigh. The ad for the symposium read:
Dr. Revilo P. Oliver was one of this centuries greatest thinkers and writers . . . he was one of the very few academicians to fully perceive the threats to America and to western man. He was one of the founders of the John Birch Society when he realized that conservatism was a lost cause in America, he appealed to Americans to make a final and uncompromising stand for survival of America's founding race, a cause he championed until his death ... These speakers are speaking from the heart and speaking of the greatest issue -the survival of the European race - of this or any other century. (4)
The John Birch Society (JBS) is a conservative U.S. organization that was founded in California in 1958 to fight the threat of Communism. It represents itself as "a membership-based organization dedicated to restoring and preserving freedom under the United States Constitution." It states that its members come from all walks of life and are active throughout the 50 states as part of local chapters. The Society invites all Americans to explore its website, learn more about the John Birch Society, and consider joining with in its mission to achieve "Less Government, More Responsibility, and - With God's Help - a Better World. JBS advocates the abolition of income tax, and the repeal of civil rights legislation.
And this differs from the Reform-Alliance-Conservative platform, how? Harper's National Citizens Coalition had the motto "More freedom, through less government", a motto shared with his Northern Foundation. Sounds a little Birch-ist to me.
And today that same John Birch Society is now headed by Nelson Bunker Hunt and they are a co-sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference. This doesn't mean that they are no longer considered to be far-right, but far-right groups have now found a home in the Republican and Conservative parties.
The group that called Eisenhower a communist (5) is now a financial backer of the Republican Party. How did this happen? Nelson Bunker Hunt and the Council for National Policy.
The Council for National Policy
In 1997 Stephen Harper, then President of the National Citizens Coalition, was asked to speak at the CNP Conference in Montreal. Most people at the time had never heard of this secretive group, and it was not without reason. The less that was known, the easier it was for them to operate. So who are they? The conduit between the Religious Right, the Republican Party and right-wing extremist groups. And they set their sights on Canada several years ago, finding allegiance with the Reform-Conservative-Alliance movement.
The relationship between the Republican Party and the Religious Right started in earnest in 1981 with the creation of the powerful insider club known as the Council for National Policy (CNP). Excited by Reagan's election, Tim LaHaye of the Left Behind series, Paul Weyrich*** of the Free Congress Foundation, Richard Viguerie, a wealthy Republican fundraiser, and other far-right conservatives decided to bring together the religious right, the small government/anti-tax right, and several extremely wealthy, like-minded businessmen such as Joseph Coors (whose company recently bought Molson) and Herbert and Nelson Bunker Hunt, rabid anti-Communists affiliated with the John Birch Society.
Their mandate was to influence White House policy and elect far-right and social conservative candidates to office. They initiated the Moral Majority Coalition and recruited Jerry Falwell to run it (Tim LaHaye recently gave US$4-5 million to Falwell for his Liberty University) and later welcomed other religious leaders such as Focus on the Family's James Dobson**** and the current "small government" crowd like Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. (In later years, the CNP reached out to the foreign-policy neo-conservative crowd as well. The organization has hosted speeches recently by UN ambassador John Bolton, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and both Vice President Cheney and President Bush.)
The relationship between the evangelical right and the Republican Party started by the Council for National Policy has not wavered since it was established more than twenty-five years ago. Joan Bokaer, a professor at the Center for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy at Cornell University, has studied the fundamentalist movement in the United States. Working through fundamentalist Pentecostal and charismatic churches, she reports, the Christian Coalition has promoted right-wing Republican candidates by mailing voters' guides to their constituents — telling them how to vote. Seventy million guides were sent out in the 2000 election alone. Reverend Rick Scarborough, an evangelical Baptist from Texas, has used his pulpit and his organization, Vision America, to help elect conservative politicians and judges for more, than a decade. Vision America has recruited and trained close to four thousand "patriot pastors" ... (6)
And the Council for National Policy confirms Hunt's involvement with this bio:
CNP vice president, 1982-1983; President Executive Committee 1983-1984; CNP Executive Committee 1988, member 1998; Heir of the Hunt Oil Company fortune and financial backer of CNP, CBN, JBS & Promise Keepers** and many more. Chairman Executive Committee 1984 and 1986 World Board of Directors of Here's Life, Campus Crusade for Christ; board member of John Birch Society; Western Goals Foundation principal ... funded Bill Bright's Campus Crusade for Christ donating $15.5 million. In 1967, formed Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF) as a covert front for Campus Crusade, which split off and became a leading ministry in the Jesus People movement ... He once organized a paramilitary force called "Americans Volunteer Group" which he intended to use--death squad style-- against political opponents. Hunt, whose Birch Society background is documented by Conway and Siegelman in Holy Terror, also made a contribution of $1 million to the Moral Majority in 1981 ... Donated $10 million to Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasters Network in 1970.
Nelson Bunker Hunt is said to have partially underwritten the cost of an anti-Kennedy newspaper advertisement that appeared in the Dallas Morning News the day of the assassination. Hunt's oil profits were said to be threatened by Kennedy's announced plans to end the oil depletion allowance. A note written by Lee Harvey Oswald addressed to "Mr. Hunt" has raised speculation as to whether it was intended for the oil tycoon ... (7)
Hunt has not only been legitimized, but is a key player in both the Republican Party and the Religious Right. And the same group are now entrenched in our government.
Footnotes:
*If you scroll down on this C-Far page, about half way is a photo of professor Kenneth Hillborn. He was also an early Reform Party influence and is now one of the financial backers of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, who take on constitutional challenges, mostly against Canada's Health Care.
**Harper backbencher, David Sweet, was the Canadian founder of the male dominated Promise Keepers. They have been described as a cult.
***Paul Weyrich is a godfather of the Religious Right movement. Before the 2006 Canadian election he agreed to tell his people not to speak to Canadian journalists for fear that it might spook the Canadian public if they knew how connected Stephen Harper was with his movement.
****Harper's assistant chief of Staff, Darrel Reid, is the Canadian founder of Focus on the Family. Several of Harper's MPs belong, including Rob Anders and Maurice Vellacott. In 2005 Dobson ran ads on 130 Canadian radio stations against same-sex marriage to help Harper get elected. He was going to run on a traditional marriage platform.
2. Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada. Author: Trevor Harrison Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-8020-7204-6, Pg. 116
3. Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada, by William Johnson, 2005, ISBN 0-7710 4350-3, Pg. 52
4. FROM MARCHES TO MODEMS: A REPORT ON ORGANIZED HATE IN METRO TORONTO, By Bernie M. Farber, Canadian Jewish Congress, January 1997
6. Too Close for Comfort: Canada's Future Within Fortress North America, By Maude Barlow, McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2005, ISBN: 0-7710-1088-5, Pg. 48-49
7. The Council for National Policy: Selected Member Biographies, Nelson Bunker Hunt
In October of 2009, Reform-Conservative Member of Parliament, Kelly Block, sent out a tax-payer funded flyer to her constituents that asked the question, "Are Parents Criminals?” The intent of this was to drum up support for her opposition to a senate bill that would see parents charged for inflicting corporal punishment on their children.
According to the Star Pheonix:
“The Liberal dominated Senate already voted to approve this terrible idea last year,” the mailout says. “(The bill) is designed to make moms and dads into criminals for using the traditional punishment of spanking to teach their kids right from wrong.”
Block did not return multiple interview requests seeking comment.
What Block was referring to was Liberal senator Céline Hervieux-Payette's, Bill S-209. Believing as many do that spanking or any form of corporal punishment can encourage violent behaviour, the senator felt a need to introduce consequences.
She includes the following video on her site:
While section 43 of the criminal code, prohibited spanking, it did not allow for criminal charges to be laid against the person inflicting the harm.
Kelly Block was not the only member of the Religious Right to be upset.
Charles' McVety's Family Action Coalition, suggested that "... section 43 of the criminal code [is] to be rescinded. That section allows parents to use "reasonable force" to correct behaviors of their (not the state's) children. If that allowance for spanking was rescinded then any parent who reasonably spanks a child could face criminal charges of assault."
REAL Women of Canada had already presented their views on their website:
The arrogant political left, which looks contemptuously down on those who disagree with its supposedly enlightened views, is attempting to revive the spanking issue. Apparently the opinion of the Supreme Court of Canada on the subject, handed down a year ago, was only a stopgap in the onward journey to ban the spanking of children in Canada. (2)
I'm not sure what 'arrogance' has to do with wanting to protect children, but spanking has come to mean something more to the Christian nationalist movement.
James Dobson, Dominionism or Destruction
James Dobson is the Founder of Focus on the Family and a leading member of the American Religious Right movement. He provided 1.6 million dollars to help set up the Canadian Focus on the Family group, founded by Stephen Harper's deputy chief of staff, Darrel Reid.
He has written extensively on the issue of spanking, and though he is a child psychologist, it's never from a scientific argument, only Biblical.
In his book, The Strong Willed Child he makes an extraordinary case to justify harsh discipline. In it he speaks of his small dog Siggie, who he claims to love very much, but when he was away for awhile, the dog had picked up some bad habits. And when he disobeyed him, Dobson retaliated. He describes the scene:
“At eleven o’clock that night, I told Siggie to go get into his bed, which is a permanent enclosure in the family room. For six years I had given him that order at the end of each day, and for six years Siggie had obeyed.
“On this occasion, however, he refused to budge. ...“I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud.”
“What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!” (3)
What the good Mr. Dobson describes is animal cruelty and the fact the he outweighed him 200 to 12, makes the whole scene even more horrific. That man clearly should not own a pet.
He goes on from "destruction" being the only thing the dog understood, to the need to discipline children, and even uses capital letters:
"JUST AS SURELY AS A DOG WILL OCCASIONALLY CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITY OF HIS LEADERS, SO WILL A LITTLE CHILD — ONLY MORE SO.” (3)
And he doesn't just say a child but "a little child ", like the little 12 pound dog. And after describing ways that children will challenge their parent's authority, he states:
“Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of ‘original sin’ which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster.” (3)
Nothing clinical befitting his profession, but children and "original sin".
You do get some insight into the reasons for his disturbing behaviour from this bio:
Dobson's own family was a bit out of the ordinary. His father was a preacher who often told the story that he had tried to pray before he could even talk. His mother routinely beat their son with her shoes, her belt, and once, a 16-pound girdle. His parents somehow instilled so much guilt in young Dobson that he answered his father's fervent altar-call, weeping at the front of a crowded church service and crying out for God's forgiveness for all his sins, when he was three years old. "It makes no sense, but I know it happened," Dobson still says of being born again as a toddler.
This would certainly prove senator Céline Hervieux-Payette's belief that children learn what they see. However, the spanking issue may be more complex.
For those who have studied the Christian nationalist movement, which is also referred to as 'Dominionism', submissiveness is required to make it work.
In a politico-religious context, dominionism (also called subjectionism) is the tendency among some conservative politically-active Christians, especially in the United States, to seek influence or control over secular civil government through political action. The goal is either a nation governed by Christians, or a nation governed by a conservative Christian understanding of biblical law. (4)
Movement conservatives see the end result as a nation whose laws are based on the Old Testament. There can be no exception. And they are very clear in their understanding that fundamentalist Christians must assume control of all levels of government, beginning with school and municipal boards. It stems from Genesis, where God commissions man to exercise "dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
George Grant, one of their founders (and I will be writing a lot more on this) states:
"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less... Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ." (5)
It's up to us to decide what kind of Canada we want for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. This is not a movement with any flexibility and it does not represent Canadian values. When Stephen Harper decided to exploit the religious right for political gain, I'm not sure if he understood just what that meant. He is a "born-again" Christian, but I believe he worships on the altar of capitalism. This is now out of his control, I'm afraid.
Sources:
1. MP favours spanking, Star Phoenix, October 5, 2009
The Buy America/Sell Canada Agreement went into affect on February 16, and not since the Louisiana Purchase have the Americans gotten such a good deal.
And all of this was done without input or debate.
When Stephen Harper stood up in front of the Council for National Policy and told them how much he hated Canada, they must have started drooling.
No wonder James Dobson, one of the founders, put so much money into Harper's 2006 election campaign. He knew it would pay enormous dividends.
He [Harper] called the Reform Party a “conservative Republican” organization that espoused “a constitutional agenda that challenges the way our entire political system operates.” Most revealingly, Mr. Harper shared his view that the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties would ultimately merge and “one party is going to win out….And Reform is not going to lose that contest in the long term.
The trade agreement that gives absolutely nothing to Canada but a huge boost to the United States runs to 2011, but according to Maude Barlow, there are other things in this agreement that need close scrutiny, especially when it comes to health care.
Government ministers have avoided saying just how much the recent deal on Buy American preferences, whose implementation was announced at a quiet news conference in Vancouver this week, is worth to Canadian suppliers. As the details of the agreement emerge, the reasons for this evasiveness are now clear. ... In return for these meagre scraps, the provinces and municipalities have offered up temporary market access to U.S. suppliers worth an estimated $25 billion Canadian). More ominously, Canada has bowed to U.S. pressure to permanently bind purchasing by Canadian provincial governments under the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (the GPA).
But while these popular programs are not immediately threatened, provinces and municipalities are now on a slippery slope. Further negotiations with the U.S. and the European Union will certainly mean more concessions and further restrictions on the use of public purchasing for local development.
When they signed up to Ottawa's negotiations last summer, the provinces were promised a meaningful exemption from U.S. Buy American laws. They didn't get one. Through sleight of hand, and with Ottawa's acquiescence, Washington managed to pocket the provincial governments' offers on the table, while leaving its Buy American preferences almost fully intact.
The unseemly haste with which this deal was approved is also problematic. The agreement warranted parliamentary scrutiny ... Thee federal opposition parties have raised legitimate concerns. But with Parliament prorogued, there was no proper debate .... If democracy had been allowed to run its course, Canadians would likely have rejected this unfair and detrimental deal.
So every February 16, the Americans will be celebrating 'Canada on a Silver Platter Day' . And in the meantime, we will also be adding another national holiday to our calendar. The date has yet to be determined but it will be 'We're finally rid of Stephen Harper Day'. I'm already blowing up balloons.
"Rob is a true reformer and a true conservative. He has been a faithful supporter of mine and I am grateful for his work." Stephen Harper
Rob Anders first won the Calgary West riding for the Reformers in 1997, after Stephen Harper stepped aside to run the National Citizens Coalition. Anders was also with the NCC, acting as the director of Canadians Against Forced Unionism.
A strong social conservative, he also belongs to James Dobson's Focus on the Family, (an offshoot of the Council for National Policy); Charles McVety's Canada Family Action Coalition and the Right-wing Fraser Institute.
It would appear that the riding association in Calgary West is not so thrilled with his performance and negative imaging, and have been trying to oust him.
Rob Anders and Donna Kennedy-Glans don’t agree on much, but they agree on at least one thing: they haven’t seen much of each other since Anders was first elected in Calgary West under the Reform banner in 1997.
“There’s no sense of relationship with the MP,” says Kennedy-Glans, a corporate lawyer and former Nexen vice-president. Like many other political observers, she describes Anders as a lacklustre representative who’s inaccessible, narrow-minded and lacking in empathy. “It’s been really hard to get involved in federal politics in this riding for the last little while,” says Kennedy-Glans, who’s lived in Calgary West for almost 25 years. “I’m finding that’s where a lot of people are at." (1)
This wasn't the first time they tried to get rid of Anders, yet Stephen Harper has gone to enormous lengths to hold onto him, even having the national party change the rules just to accommodate him.
CALGARY (CBC) - The Conservative Party's national council has taken over the Calgary West riding, whose board members have been trying to oust the local Tory candidate for the next election.The 30-member board of the Calgary West Conservative Association has been trying to oust MP Rob Anders and hold a nomination race in the riding .... (2)
And yet Harper himself stated that he would not play politics like this. So why such an interest in an MP who has been called an embarrassment by his own constituents? According to a posting on the National Citizens Coalition's own website:
I think Harper should be paying attention to the riding of Calgary West where Rob Anders continues to be our candidate despite a big show of unhappiness in the electorate. Maybe the NCC should look into the political shenanigans that the cabinet has pursued in order to keep Anders in the seat despite the fact that after three elections the cabinet doesn’t think Anders is worthy of an important position in the conservative ranks. Perhaps there are other ridings with similar problems. We want a riding election for our candidate, not a shoe-in organized by cabinet "new rules."
There are indeed "other ridings with similar problems", including:
I suspect it's Ander's ties to so many groups who have been pivotal to Harper's success, from Focus on the Family to the Progressive Group of Independent Businesses. He couldn't fire him even if he wanted to, or there would be hell to pay.
I've been sharing an article from the Walrus; Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons, because it's important to understand just how heavily involved he is with the Religious Right. Harper himself is a born again Christian, who does a fairly good job hiding his fundamentalism.
I have absolutely no problem with Christians or any religion, but I do have a problem with these guys, because let's face ... they are not Christians ... they are nuts!
In this post I'm including a portion of the Walrus article as well as one from Dennis Gruending who has been writing about this for some time now. We have to WAKE UP!!! They want our laws to be based on the absolute interpretation of the Bible. Every single word. When they say they want us to be stoned, they mean it literally. With stones!
And despite the fact that they are allowed to register as charities, where they can solicit thousands of dollars, and enjoy tax free status if they claim to be non-partisan, the video above includes a shot of Stephen Harper and his family, and one of Pierre Poilievre. I don't know if anyone has ever estimated how much money it costs tax payers to have nuts running amok on Parliament Hill, but I'll bet it would be mind boggling. I think any religious organization that becomes involved in politics should lose their tax free and charitable status.
Although, sadly (or terrifyingly) this is not just about nuts running amok on Parliament Hill. These guys have a tremendous influence on this government's policy, especially when it comes to foreign affairs. I have no problem with praying, I just have a problem with lunatics who have this much sway with our elected officials.
The Ottawa-based National House of Prayer (NHOP) is organizing a National Prayer Sunday for our government and its leaders on June 29. You may not have heard of the NHOP or its prayer list so I will take a brief look at both. You may be surprised – but first a brief bit of history.
Rob and Fran Parker are a couple from British Columbia who say they felt God calling them to set up a house of prayer in the capital. Mr. Parker has a long association with an organization called Watchmen for the Nations, and after a gathering of the group in 1996 he organized a prayer-walk from Calgary to Ottawa. In 2004, the NHOP purchased a former convent not far from parliament hill for $900,000. They’ve added staff and volunteers and regularly host groups, including youth, from across the country to engage in formation as prayer leaders.
NHOP personnel appear to have ready access to parliament hill. They attend question period, sit in at committees and lead prayer meetings. They were invited by the National Prayer Breakfast in 2007 to participate in a workshop following the meal, and the publicity for this year’s event invited people to an NHOP open house.
Each week on its website the NHOP asks people to offer prayers on a variety of issues and for individuals in public life, and the group also posts other prayer requests and observations on a blog. The most prayed for piece of legislation in 2008 has been MP Ken Epp’s Bill C-484 (The Unborn Victims of Crime Act), which would create a separate offence for killing or injuring a fetus during an attack on a pregnant woman. The bill has passed second reading in the House of Commons and has been sent off to a committee for examination. It is controversial because many believe that if passed the bill could be used as a wedge to re-criminalize abortion. The NHOP blog posting on April 30 talked about “practical things” that could be done to support Epp and his bill. These included praying, organizing a national fast, signing a petition of support on Epp’s website, and writing handwritten letters to MPs in support of the Bill C-484.
Earlier in 2008 another blog entry requested prayers for passage of Bill C-2, the federal government’s anti-crime bill. Yet another recommended prayers that a conservative jurist be appointed to replace Mr. Justice Michel Bastarache, who has announced his retirement from the Supreme Court of Canada. The same blog entry expressed approval that the court appears to be turning back a growing number of charter cases.
Another entry requested prayers for “a total overhaul or abolition of the current human rights councils in this country” and referred readers to conservative pundit Ezra Levant’s articles for further information. The case provoking the prayer request involves a human rights complaint into comments made about Muslims by writer Mark Steyn in Macleans magazine. (Ezra Levant is Jason Kenney's buddy and Mark Steyn wrote an article that got these guysin a flap because he talked about Muslims outnumbering Christians)
The NHOP website is also requesting prayers for the success of an event called The Cry, which is to be held on parliament hill on August 23rd. The website says: “Let’s intercede that thousands of believers will attend this wonderful event.” Similar youth rallies were held in 2002 and 2006 to dramatize concern about what organizers described as the moral and social decline in Canada.
Guest speakers at those rallies included the Parkers from NHOP and David Demian, head of Watchmen for the Nations. Demian and his organization are dedicated supporters of the Israeli government and its policies.
Where does NHOP fit into the wider picture? In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen in January 2006, the Parkers describe the prayer house as a registered charity that welcomes Christians of all denominations. They say it is not an advocacy group and does not endorse political parties. (Yeah, right. So where's the picture of Michael Ignatieff or Jack Layton) churches and religious organizations with links to the grassroots evangelical groups that helped Stockwell Day defeat Preston Manning in the 2000 Canadian Alliance leadership race.” (But they don't support any party?)
The NHOP exists within a charismatic and Pentecostal movement known for its emotional and enthusiastic forms of worship. NHOP also leans toward Christian reconstructionism – a belief that government and all of society must submit to the Bible’s moral principles. It may be this strong Biblical focus that explains an NHOP blog posting following a demonstration at the Chinese embassy this spring calling for a free Tibet. “Some of our prayers go in that direction,” the NHOP blog said. “However, on another level, our deeper cry in prayer is ‘Free Tibet!’ Free it from the centuries of spiritual darkness and oppression that the Tibetan Buddhist priests exerted over the people. Free them from the power of blinded obedience to the Dalai Lama.”
This statement is particularly odd because the government named the Dalai Lama as honourary Canadian citizen in 2007, one of only four people ever to receive that distinction.
The NHOP is just one of a number of conservative Christian groups to locate in Ottawa within the past few years, a development that indicates the growing influence in Canada of the religious right.
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Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons
At 7:30 on a drizzly June morning, the Confederation Room—the largest and most ornate hall on Parliament Hill—was already crammed to capacity with more than four hundred MPs, civil servants, and their guests, all of whom have turned up for the National Prayer Breakfast. An overflow crowd of 150 was being shepherded into an adjoining salon with closed-circuit video screens. Those numbers might not mean much in Washington—where the annual mega-event of the same name draws more than three thousand, including the president, making it the highlight of the social calendar for the Christian right—but this year’s turn-out was the largest in the forty-year history of the Ottawa breakfast.
Jack Murta, the former Mulroney cabinet minister who now runs the event, attributes the enthusiasm to a new breed of more committed Conservative evangelicals in the House. So many flocked to his weekly parliamentary prayer breakfasts earlier this year that he had to encourage some to drop out. “It was getting unwieldy,” he says.
Not that there is a shortage of prayer meetings on Parliament Hill. The Conservative caucus has its own Thursday-morning Bible study class, and for the last three decades civil servants have gathered for prayer groups in almost every department, including three in Defence. Even Jack Layton’s New Democratic Party has created a faith and social justice caucus.
But the newest prayer hub in the capital is also the most improbable: a missionary delegation to the federal government led by Rob Parker, a pastor from Vernon, BC, who feels he’s received a divine calling to bring prayer to the country’s leaders—and, not coincidentally, to help them see the error of their ways. Last year, in a stately neo-Romanesque convent formerly occupied by Les Filles de la Sagesse, Parker and his wife, Fran, opened the National House of Prayer. In its handsome panelled salons, weekly prayer teams who’ve flown in from churches across the country send up supplications forthe nation.
Fanning out across the city on prayer walks, they end up in the Commons’ visitors’ gallery for Question Period three times a week. Except for their rapt expressions of concentration, they might be just any other tourist group. They don’t bow their heads or kneel. “You don’t have to have your eyes closed to pray,” Fran Parker points out.
National unity is a frequent topic, and they’ve offered “strategic prayers” for Trade Minister David Emerson as he wrestles Washington over the softwood lumber dispute—an issue key to many of the Parkers’ supporters in BC. They’ve also prayed for the nation’s security with Stockwell Day, one of their biggest supporters in cabinet. “We say, ‘Let’s cover our waterways,’” Rob Parker explains. “‘Let’s cover our nuclear plants.’” The teams often drop by MPs’ offices, offering a takeout prayer service, but the Parkers try to avoid naming the parliamentarians they’ve prayed with, or the subjects on which they’ve pleaded for intercession.
“You have to be careful with the non-Christian media,” Fran confides. “A reporter kept asking us whether we prayed about same-sex marriage. No way we’re going there.”In some political circles, the National House of Prayer might be dismissed as a marginal Christian outpost, but Stephen Harper’s Ottawa has put out the official welcome mat. Jack Murta invited Fran Parker to address a seminar after the National Prayer Breakfast, and every Friday afternoon the couple runs a prayer meeting in the Parliament Buildings’ chapel, just across the street from the pmo.
Even though he’s never had an official meeting with the prime minister, Rob Parker says he has “certainly shared with him in passing—in the hallways or whatever. He was very glad we’re doing what we’re doing.”A Pentecostal who believes that God’s will is revealed to believers in portents and prophetic utterances, above all when they speak in tongues, Parker had embarked on a seventy-three-day prayer walk from Calgary to Ottawa six years ago with a charismatic Christian group called Watchmen for the Nations. When the walkers arrived in Ottawa, Parker prayed for God’s mercy on the nation and, as his wife tells it, “Rob looked around and thought, ‘Man, all these embassies, but I don’t see an embassy of prayer here.’
”Still, it took the 9/11 attack to convince Parker that his mission couldn’t wait. Watching evangelist Billy Graham lead Washington’s national memorial service, he was shocked when he switched channels to Ottawa’s commemorative rites. “There was no mention of God,” he says. “I found out later in the newspapers that the name of God or Jesus was not allowed to be used. We were too multicultural.”
As Parker recounts on the National House of Prayer website, “I cried out to God that Canada has become a ‘Godless nation’ and asked Him to intervene.”The Parkers talked up the notion of a prayer embassy across the country, but two years ago they were ready to give up when they received a divine thumbs-up. The morning after they’d read a passage from Jeremiah about the siege of Jerusalem, a newspaper headline on the Liberals’ sponsorship scandal proclaimed, “Paul Martin under siege.” For Fran Parker it was an unmistakable prophetic sign. “We thought, ‘Yes, it’s a siege of righteousness,’” she says. “We realized it was a wake-up call: we’ve got to make things right.” (I wonder what sign they got when the RCMP raided the Reform-Conservative offices and it was revealed that these good little Christians had (allegedly) forged receipts to get money they weren't entitled to)
Last year, when they discovered the abandoned convent, they knew it was the building they’d been praying for when a real-estate agent pointed at the Chinese embassy out the back door.
“That’s China behind you,” he said—the very phrase uttered by a prominent Pentecostal preacher who had singled out the Parkers during one of his Ottawa revival services. But the $900,000 price tag was too steep and the demand for a $500,000 down payment daunting. Then Christian broadcaster Dick Dewart invited the Parkers to appear on his Alberta-based Miracle Channel. Within days of the show, they’d raised $300,000, and a Chinese evangelical congregation in Toronto kicked in with a $225,000 interest-free loan. “We represent thousands in the land,” Fran Parker says.
Now the Parkers host as many as thirty-five prayer activists a week who pay their own travel expenses and donate $20 to $50 a night for room and board in return for a unique glimpse of the capital. When they’re not on Parliament Hill, they can often be found praying inside the Supreme Court, whose rulings have sparked so much evangelical outrage. This summer, the activists focused their spiritual attention on the offices of those MPs who might be wavering on whether to support reopening the same-sex marriage debate. But their most frequent destination is the Peace Tower, where they pray beneath the nation’s motto inscribed on one wall—a motto inspired directly by the Bible.
In 1867, as the Fathers of Confederation were wrangling over what to call their newfangled federal entity, Samuel Tilley, the premier of New Brunswick, sat down for his morning devotions when his Bible fell open at Psalm 72, verse 8: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, And from the River to the ends of the earth.” Tilley and his fellow pols took it as divine intervention. Ever since, that defining verse has inspired Pentecostal and charismatic Christian groups such as the Parkers’ to believe that the Dominion of Canada has a destiny linked to scriptural prophecy.
It’s a controversial view—and nevermore so than now. This spring, in Kingdom Coming: the Rise of Christian Nationalism, New York writer Michelle Goldberg traced the growing influence of American fundamentalists who embrace what’s known as dominion theology, calling for a society where civil law is replaced by Biblical prescriptions and born-again Christians take over the task of governing to prepare for the thousand-year dominion of Christ.
Their first skirmish in that struggle has centred on restoring religious terminology not only to holidays like Christmas, but to official discourse. Goldberg warns that many of those “dominionists” not only have ties to the Bush White House, but seem determined to turn the US into a theocracy. “It makes no sense to fight religious authoritarianism abroad,” she writes, “while letting it take over at home.”
The Parkers are careful to dismiss the notion that theocratic designs lie behind their National House of Prayer. “It’s not about getting a Christian government or a Christian nation,” Fran Parker says. “It’s about praying for our leaders to restore the nation to righteousness.” But in a relaxed moment after the National Prayer Breakfast, she admits that she believes Canada has a divinely inspired destiny—a covenant with God that has been broken by governments that failed to stop practices such as abortion that “defile the land.”She’s convinced that the nation has received a prophetic warning to return to its Christian roots.
She has not the slightest doubt that celestial nudge came last May 24 when the Peace Tower clock stopped at 7:28 a.m.—precisely the number of the psalm and verse that gave the country its designation and motto. “And what day did it stop?” Parker asks, underlining her point. “Victoria Day! On the news that night, they said it might take seventy-two hours to fix,” she says, pausing for effect. “Seventy-two!” she marvels. “Just so you get it!”
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As I've said before, I have no probelem with praying on Parliament Hill or anywhere. Most politicians practice some sort of faith, but we can't let these nuts assume that everyone wants to be dictated by the literal word of the Bible or any biblical prophesies. We need to send them a clear message. Stop being so nuts or get off the Hill!
He might as well be. It's pretty clear that the radical Evangelicals have been given more of a voice in this country than we have. I say radical Evangelists, because men like Charles McVety don't represent the majority of Christians in this country, and not even the majority of Evangelicals.
Some people assume that Stephen Harper is actually a moderate who works to try to silence what has been referred to as the 'dark element'. However, that is absolutely not true. In fact he set up a separate office in his government for the Religious Right, with Jason Kenney as the "go to' guy, and Charles McVety is always welcome.
Stephen Harper has connections to the Council for National Policy, an extreme Religious Right organization with a pro-military, pro-war agenda. And these nuts have drafted a foreign policy that involves the complete destruction of the Muslim world, to fulfill an end of day prophesy.
One of McVety's teachers at his Canadian Christian College, outlines this scenario, which involves putting all the Jews in boats, then shipping them to Israel where they will embrace Christianity or be slaughtered. Reverend Dean Bye, states: "It is estimated that upwards of six million Jewish people are still dwelling in North America ... North American Jews must recognize they must all “return” to Israel and he warns: “the time of the U.S.A. being a safe haven for the Jews has ended!” . He adds that “we don’t throw them overboard [like Jonah] but lovingly assist them home to Israel. "
But as Dr. Stephen Scheinberg, a man who has written extensively on the subject points out "... most of the Jewish community has not responded to his generous proposal that they leave their homes for aliyah to Israel," even if they are being 'lovingly assisted'.
But the fact that these people are allowed input into our foreign policy platform, should be of concern. As journalist Marci McDonald points out in the Walrus "Harper’s stand has also raised more unsettling questions. What does it mean if and when a believer in the infallibility of Biblical prophecy comes to power and backs a damn-the-torpedoes course in the Middle East? Does it end up fuelling overenthusiastic end-timers who feel they have nothing to lose in some future conflagration, helping speed the world on Hagee’s fast track to Armageddon?
In the above video, Charles McVety is trying to defend his position on the censorship law being hidden in the Income Tax Act. The Globe and Mail discovered that he was actually behind this motion, that received no public debate.
We might argue that the films he's referring to could offend some people, but they don't have to watch. It's art. But once we open that door and give a single person to put their stamp of approval on what's offensive and what isn't, that my friend is censorship of the worst kind.
I find war movies terribly offensive when they glorify killing. I find John Hagee terribly offensive when he said that Hitler was doing God's work by forcing Jews to Israel (not to mention the six million he killed)
I also agree with George Stroumboulopoulos, that if the only issue is our taxes, then maybe we should rethink tax breaks for churches, especially when they become political. He stated he was a Conservative. That's a partisan message. Cut off his tax breaks, because I'm offended.
However, I'm going to share more of the article that appeared in the Walrus; Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons, that reveals how deep Harper plans to take his social conservative policies, despite the fact that he keeps telling us he doesn't have any.
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For Harper, the courtship of the Christian right is unlikely to prove an electoral one-night stand. Three years ago, in a speech to the annual Conservative think-fest, Civitas, he outlined plans for a broad new party coalition that would ensure a lasting hold on power. The only route, he argued, was to focus not on the tired wish list of economic conservatives or “neo-cons,” as they’d become known, but on what he called “theo-cons”—those social conservatives who care passionately about hot-button issues that turn on family, crime, and defence.
Even foreign policy had become a theo-con issue, he pointed out, driven by moral and religious convictions. “The truth of the matter is that the real agenda and the defining issues have shifted from economic issues to social values,” he said, “so conservatives must do the same.”Arguing that the party had to come up with tough, principled stands on everything from parents’ right to spank their children to putting “hard power” behind the country’s foreign-policy commitments, he cautioned that it also had to choose its battlefronts with care.
“The social-conservative issues we choose should not be denominational,” he said, “but should unite social conservatives of different denominations and even different faiths.”
These days, though Harper seems firmly set on that theo-con path, he has every reason to see a minefield ahead. In 1989, when Preston Manning convinced him to set aside his MA studies and shepherd Deborah Grey through the Byzantine byways of Parliament, Harper and Grey sailed smack into the maelstrom of the abortion debate.
Former Evangelical Fellowship president Brian Stiller calls it “the most galvanizing issue in the last twenty years”—one that makes today’s inflamed passions over same-sex marriage pale in comparison. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision striking down the law banning abortion, Stiller and Brian Mulroney’s government tried to cobble together an uneasy compromise: a bill that would have sentenced doctors to two years in prison for performing abortions when a woman’s life was not at risk, but that was not an outright ban.
Grey never made a secret of either her pro-life views or her evangelical faith—at her election-night victory party, she sang “What a day that will be/When my Jesus we shall see” with a gospel choir before network cameras—but the abortion vote posed a conundrum for her.
Privately, Preston Manning shared her views, but he also made clear that her job as the solitary torchbearer of his new populist party was to represent her riding. Harper set about polling Beaver River, Alberta, and to Grey’s relief a majority of voters opposed the bill. She might have been more elated if she hadn’t been so appalled by the vitriol that was unleashed before the results were in, when she’d made clear that she might have to follow her constituents’ wishes, not her conscience.
“I got more hate mail from Christians than from anybody else,” she marvels still. “I had believers come to my office and say, ‘You’re no Christian. May you rot and burn in hell.’”As Manning watched last winter’s election from the sidelines, he fumed at what he likes to call the “sham tolerance” of the national media. “There was considerable receptivity to the argument that Mr. Harper comes from the wrong part of the country,” he says, “and holds these religious convictions which are dangerous.” For Manning, it brought a sense of déjà vu.
In Reform’s earliest days, he’d dodged sly digs about his religious “wing nuts” and later watched as Stockwell Day, the outspoken Pentecostal who had snatched the Canadian Alliance from him, was caught in a creationist quagmire. After the cbc resurrected footage of Day opining that Adam and Eve once walked with dinosaurs, Warren Kinsella, then a Liberal operative, promptly went on TV with a purple Barney doll to crack, “I just want to say to Mr. Day that The Flintstones was not a documentary.”
Day’s leadership was swamped in a gusher of guffaws. “There’s a taboo in the House of Commons that you do not talk about your deepest spiritual convictions,” Manning says in exasperation. “Part of the reason is that people who open themselves up just get hammered.”
Now Manning is doing his part to ensure that his spiritual protege and the estimated seventy evangelicals in the Conservative caucus—however well muzzled—don’t suffer the same fate. Last year, he set up the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, a $10-million Calgary-based non-profit aimed at training Conservatives how to run ridings and campaigns, then staff MPs’ offices.
He calls it “a school of practical politics,” but one of the centre’s main preoccupations is tutoring the Christian evangelicals now flooding into Ottawa on how to survive the perilous waters of public life.
In February, less than a month after Harper’s victory, Manning took over Ottawa’s Holiday Inn to kick off his centre with a three-day seminar called Navigating the Faith/Political Interface.
A sold-out group of more than one hundred MPs, aides, and public-policy researchers turned up to take notes at what the Ottawa Citizen dubbed “Mr. Manning’s Charm School for Unruly Christians—or What Not to Say.”While Manning blames media hostility and intolerance for much of the fix in which evangelicals find themselves today, he also concedes that some Christians bring on their own image woes. “Some of these faith-oriented people conduct themselves in such a way that they scare the hide off the secular,” he confided later. (They don't scare off the secular, they scare off those who aren't nuts)
He counselled newly elected MPs to curb their zeal. “The preference is to ride into Parliament with a speech that will peel the paint off the ceiling,” he told them, “but you’ll set your cause back fifty years.” Much of his advice amounted to spin control: ditch the God talk and avoid the temptation to play holier-than-thou. “You have to advocate righteousness,” he said, “without appearing self-righteous.”
For the seminar’s theme, Manning chose Matthew 10:16, in which Jesus is about to send his disciples out into the world “like sheep among wolves” to carry on his work. “He said, ‘I’m going to give you a few guidelines first,’‘’ Manning explains. “And one of the major ones was, ‘Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.’ In other words, be shrewd—be as smart as the other guy—but be gracious. Be non-threatening.” Manning promptly illustrated the difficulty of following his own advice. “In a moment of spontaneity, Mr. Manning went off his notes,” the Ottawa Citizen reported, “and said many people become gay after ‘horrific’ experience with heterosexual relationships.”
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Now I find this whole idea very disturbing. Do we not have a right to know that Stephen Harper has a strong social conservative agenda and is only waiting for a majority to implement it? Should we not know that more than half his caucus feel that they're 'holier-than-thou.
These are very important issues, and if he really believes that this is what's best for Canada, why not make that public, instead of 'muzzling' your caucus and 'controlling' the dark elements. If there are dark elements that need controlling, that's a very serious issue.
For instance David Sweet started the Canadian chapter of the Promise Keepers, that promotes male dominance in the home. Why did he remove that from his website? If our science minister doesn't believe in science, don't we have a right to know that?
When everything is so secretive, how can we trust them with anything?
In the continuation of the article from the Walrus, Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons, it reveals how Stephen Harper carefully crafts his faith based messages to appeal to both the moderate Christians, and the extreme. Author Murray Dobbin had noted that Harper had a knack, when writing Reform Party policy, for making his points ambiguous enough that he kept out the extreme elements, while not exactly keeping out the extreme elements.
It has been said that he was behind the cancelling of a national child care plan, the raising of the age of consent and the implementation of Canada's new censorship laws.
In the video above, he met with the most powerful cabinet ministers, including Rob Nichols (Justice) and Stockwell Day (Security). But we also know that he was an invited guest of Jim Flaherty at his reading of the budget and has unlimited access to Jason Kenney.
Charles McVety is head of the Canadian branch of Christians United for Israel, and like most of the Reform-Conservatives, believes that every word of the Bible is true, and that our constitution should be based on that book and that book alone.
If you polled Canadians you would probably find that a large portion would profess to being Christian. But if you polled Canadians and asked them if they believe we should annihilate all Muslims, put the Jews and a boat and force them to go to Israel, where they accept Christianity or die; the numbers would be significantly lower. But sadly, that's what McVety believes, and sadly, McVety holds a special place of honour within the chambers of the Reform-Conservatives.
More from the Walrus magazine article: Stephen Harper and the Neo-Cons
Harper has been so careful not to reveal his faith that many voters were stunned when he capped off his election-night victory speech with “God bless Canada.” Was it a slip of the tongue—a case of rhetorical exuberance swamping his celebrated intellectual cool? Or, as some critics insisted, a shameless aping of every American president within recent memory, no matter their political stripe? Even New York Times correspondent Clifford Krauss noted that it was “an unusual line in a country where politicians do not customarily talk about God.”
In fact, Harper had already used the tag line as opposition leader, and he wasn’t the first prime minister to do so. On February 15, 1965, Lester Pearson jubilantly roared out the same benediction as he hoisted Canada’s first red and white maple leaf flag over the Parliament Buildings. “It’s just ridiculous to think that this is some novelty that was learned by watching Republicans on television,” scoffs Preston Manning. “This is a country that used to end every public meeting by saying, ‘God Save the Queen.’”
As pundits pondered the significance of Harper’s taste in exit lines, one thing seemed clear: a politician known for attempting to control his party’s every public utterance had chosen to invoke what National Post columnist Warren Kinsella dubbed “the G-word.” If, as suspected, Harper was sending a message to the country’s estimated 3.5 million evangelicals—not to mention the 44 percent of Canadians who tell pollsters they’ve committed their lives to Christ—what was he trying to tell them?
In his pre-election chat on the Drew Marshall Show, Harper managed to work in an undisguised plug: “I always make it clear that Christians are welcome in politics,” he said, “and particularly welcome in our party.” That invitation has not gone unnoticed. As Janet Epp Buckingham, director of the Evangelical Fellowship’s Ottawa office, notes, “In the last election, the media was pointing out that evangelicals are scary, and in the election before that the Liberals were doing quite a bit of fear mongering. It’s such a relief to have a party that says, ‘You guys are welcome here.’” (No one suggests that all Evangelicals are scary, only those from the Christian Right and Christians United for Israel)
That relief translated into votes. According to an Ipsos-Reid poll in April, 64 percent of weekly Protestant churchgoers—the vast majority of them evangelicals—voted Conservative in the last election, a 24-percent jump from 2004. For the first time in the history of polling in Canada, Catholics who attend church weekly also shifted a majority of their votes from the Liberals to Harper’s party. While the Ottawa press corps has been preoccupied with Harper’s ability to keep the most blooper-prone Christians in his caucus buttoned up, he has quietly but determinedly nurtured a coalition of evangelicals, Catholics, and conservative Jews that brought him to power and that will put every effort into ensuring that he stays there. Last spring, when Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty could barely wangle an hour with him, Harper made time for dozens of faith groups, including a five-woman delegation from the Catholic Women’s League which hadn’t managed to snare a sit-down with any prime minister in twenty-four years.
“Smile if you’re a so-con,” ran a headline in the Western Standard above a photo of the meeting. “Canada’s traditional Christian groups can’t say enough good things about the Tories’ social policies so far.”
Harper’s agenda turns out to be hidden only to those who don’t know where to look. Within weeks after the election, the first leak about his upcoming legislative package outlined a plan by Justice Minister Vic Toews, one of the most conservative evangelicals in his cabinet, to raise the age of sexual consent to sixteen from fourteen.
The media greeted the scoop with a barely concealed yawn, but the Evangelical Fellowship, which had been lobbying for years on the issue, recognized it as a custom-tailored bulletin. Says Epp Buckingham, “We took it as a message that we were being heard.”
Borrowing a page from Bush’s White House, which boasts a deputy responsible for “Christian outreach,” Harper has installed a point man for the religious right, among other groups, in his government, under the title “director of stakeholder relations.” But evangelical activists know that a more direct route to the prime minister is through his parliamentary secretary, Jason Kenney.
After the election, many in the Ottawa press corps were astonished when the Calgary loyalist who served as a critic in every recent Reform/Alliance shadow cabinet didn’t win a portfolio. But these days, Kenney may have more clout than any minister, playing emissary to groups with whom Harper doesn’t wish to leave prime ministerial fingerprints, above all on the religious right. Despite being a Catholic, Kenney is a regular on the evangelical circuit, turning up at so-con confabs and orchestrating discreet meetings with the boss. “Jason,” says one Ottawa insider, “has a lot more influence than you might think.”
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The problem for those of us on the left, is that we are viewed by Reform-Conservative supporters, especially from the Religious Right, as all being secular. That couldn't be further from the truth. But since this group has politicized religion, it has become like an 'us against them', when in fact, we all share some common ground. Just like the Religious Right, there is a Religious Left.
Wikipedia describes this Religious Left (or Christian Left) as "a spectrum of left wing Christian political and social movements which largely embraces social justice and a counter-point to the Christian right which largely embrace social conservatism."
They go on to say that the most common religious viewpoint which might be described as 'left wing' is social justice, or care for the poor and the oppressed ... Supporters of this might encourage universal health care, generous welfare, subsidized education, foreign aid, and government subsidized schemes for improving the conditions of the disadvantaged.
The Christian left believe in private prayer. According to Matthew 6:5-6:"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."
In his book The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right, Rabbi Michael Lerner claims that the political left "often sees religion not merely as mistaken but as fundamentally irrational, and it gives the impression that one of the most important elements in the lives of ordinary Americans is actually deserving of ridicule." and "The Left's hostility to religion is one of the main reasons people who otherwise might be involved with progressive politics get turned off."
Stephen Harper can craft his messages in such a way that it would appear he is tolerant of all religious thought, when it fact, he clearly belongs to the judgemental, and espouses the right-wing philosophy of eradicating social programs.
