The auditor general says the Harper government misinformed Parliament to win approval for a $50-million G8 fund that lavished money on dubious projects in a Conservative riding. And she suggests the process may have been illegal. The findings are contained in a confidential report Sheila Fraser was to have tabled in Parliament on April 5.
The report was put on ice when the Harper government was defeated and is not due to be released until after the May 2 election. However, a Jan. 13 draft of the chapter on the G8 legacy infrastructure fund was seen by The Canadian Press. It reveals that Industry Minister Tony Clement, the mayor of Huntsville, and the general manager of Deerhurst Resort chose the 32 projects that received funding — with no regard for the needs of the summit or the conditions laid down by the government.
According to Harper "the manager of Deerhurst Resort is very capable of choosing which projects to fund with G8 money." really? Since when, especially when much of the money was used to upgrade his resort, getting it ready for sale.
On Twitter: "Newsflash: Harper announces "it was only $50 million, plus it's Tony's fault" on alleged misspending of G8 fund". Typical. Blame someone else. I thought he was supposed to have a steady hand on everything.
And while the Conbots are joining the Tea Party 'birthers', because of an old article suggesting that Michael Ignatieff may have voted in the British elections (who cares?), Kady O'Malley tweets: "Okay, I'd say @M_Ignatieff's voting record prolly a little less relevant than the govt allegedly misleading Parliament on G8 funds."
Maybe what they really meant as late breaking news was that he lied to a room full of people ... more than once.
Lie List:
1. Canada’s quick recovery “due to the economic action plan”: Canada has not recovered and we still own 125 billion in sub-prime mortgages used to give the appearance of economic recovery. Otherwise known as the "not a bank bailout"
2.The impossibility of raising taxes: Stephen Harper is now presiding over the largest tax increase in Canadian history, due to his HST (aka Harper Sales Tax) and the 35% increase in payroll taxes.
3. The Liberal coalition wants to see a carbon tax to pay for the Kyoto Accord: There is no Liberal coalition, though most Canadians would like one. Here's hoping. Harper also knows that unfortunately, the carbon tax is off the table. Instead he won a Colossal Fossil award for sabotaging climate change talks.
4. And they want to see people working for 40 days, then being able to claim employment insurance: That was only a temporary measure to help the unemployed. Instead we are now in the middle of an unemployment crisis, with Harper laying off EI employees.
So clearly the news wasn't about lying.
Not even about hypocrisy:
“It’s kind of ironic that Harper’s standing in front of these carved native statues,” said one government worker, who was afraid to use her name. “Especially after the funding cuts that have gone on in the last year, to groups like the aboriginal healing foundation.”
I don't know. I'm sure there's a late breaking news story in there somewhere, but I'll be darned if I can find it.
The former head of Statistics Canada was set to speak out about the Harper government's controversial census change just before he abruptly quit his post, newly released documents show. The papers reveal that Munir Sheikh was going to tell staff that data from a voluntary long-form survey would not be as useful as the current mandatory form. They also show that the government tried to shape the statistics agency's public comments on the matter.
“Many of you have asked whether I believe the National Household Survey will satisfy the needs of all users of the previous long form,” says a draft text of Mr. Sheikh's planned speech to staff. “My response is that the NHS will meet the needs of many users but will not provide useful data to meet the needs of other users of the mandatory long-form census data.”
As Harper is drowning in fake lake and Canadians are drowning in the 125 billion dollar bank bailout, Stephen Harper is terrified of having to face the electorate.
His best hope is that there will not be an election. He wants to focus on the economy. (ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha)
Did I mention the 125 billion dollars in worthless paper that the Canadian taxpayers now own?
Mr. Harper told Reuters that “notwithstanding what was largely a dysfunctional session,” the government managed to push through important measures such as a budget law, refugee reforms and a Canada-Colombia free-trade pact. “People want this government to focus on the economy and that's what we're going to continue doing. So I'm not looking to have an election in the fall and I don't think that's what Canadians are expecting us to do either,” he said in a wide-ranging interview.
Did I hear that he gave an interview and no one was beat up? Couldn't be.
“An election in the fall is in the cards and we are preparing for it,” says a senior Layton official. “We never know when Ignatieff and the Liberals will have had enough of supporting the Conservatives’ confidence votes after confidence votes. Who would have thought the Liberals would prop up Harper a hundred times (and counting!)?”
I guess Layton forgot that it was his government that voted to keep Harper in power.
The Canadian media has not yet picked up this story, or maybe are ignoring it; but Stephen Harper told Bloomberg Press that he will use his position at the G20 to halt climate change talks.
He will try to convince them that the economy comes first, despite the fact that our economy certainly does not come first with him.
So all his talk about going to Copenhagen to address this, was all talk. He'll go for the photo-ops, but not much else.
The above is from the Liberal Party's 'anywhere but Copenhagen contest'. You can check it out here. Some of them are very funny and very creative. This is one of my favourite's.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he will use Canada’s co-chairmanship of next year’s Group of 20 countries meeting to urge members to put economic recovery before efforts to protect the environment.
“Without the wealth that comes from growth, the environmental threats, the developmental challenges and the peace and security issues facing the world will be exponentially more difficult to deal with,” Harper said in an address to South Korea’s National Assembly.
Harper is in Seoul, his last stop on an Asian tour, to discuss with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak how the G20 conference they’re co-chairing in Canada will advance efforts to coordinate a global recovery. The remarks were made ahead of global climate change talks starting today in Copenhagen. Toronto will host the next G20 summit on June 26 and 27, and the following summit will be in Seoul in November, Lee and Harper said today in their meeting.
Participants at the Copenhagen conference, including Lee, Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama, said last month that their original goal of completing a climate accord at the meeting was out of reach.
About 190 nations will gather in the Danish capital until Dec. 18 to set a framework for a treaty to curb emissions blamed for global warming. Talks have been slowed by differences between industrialized nations such as the U.S. and developing countries, including India and China, over emissions-reduction targets and how much financial help rich nations should provide to poor ones.
A story in the Winnipeg Free Press today featured an interview with Harper's former campaign manager, Tom Flanagan. The story was Flanagan offering praise to Michael Ignatieff, as a world-famous scholar, and stating that the Liberals were lucky to have him as their leader.
Maybe as a university professor himself, though with not the same level of success, Flanagan may have felt a bit guilty over the personal attacks. Who knows?
However, the more I thought about that piece, the angrier I got. Not anger over the belated praise for Mr. Ignatieff, but something else that the former Harper insider revealed.
He admitted that Stephen Harper had lied during the parliamentary crisis, and that he had indeed tried to form a coalition with Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton in 2004, and that the Harper coalition "...would have included the Bloc as a full partner." That's quite a statement to make.
Do you remember the mess that was created with the accusations of 'coup' and 'treason'? He divided the country in one of the ugliest displays ever witnessed, and now an insider admits that the whole thing was a fraud?
But you know what the worst thing about this is? That tomorrow no one will mention it. The mainstream media will either not report it or simply gloss it over. A Prime Minister lying and threatening national unity is not news now.
We're on a need to know basis, although I suppose a headline 'Harper lied' would not really be news after all. Sigh.
I've been kind of tracking a story since there were first rumblings about Stockwell Day and the Reform-Conservatives, planning to open private, for-profit penitentiaries. This is naturally part of their so-called 'law and order' agenda.
But they couldn't expect American firms to move in with our crime rate so low. Solution. Mandatory sentences and send children to jail. That will fill them up quicker. But do we really want something like the incarceration and rehabilitation of prisoners being based on profit?
Will guards be properly trained? Will they be unionized and assured fair wages and benefits?
The above video outlines why these prisons fail, and we should all fight this move. I know it's part of the dismantling of our government by Stephen Harper, a long time dream of his, but this is absolutely not the way to go.
On April 27, 2006, the Ontario government announced the end of a bizarre venture. Canada's first large privately run prison, a 1,200-inmate maximum-security superjail in the cottage country north of Toronto, was a failure and would be taken over by the province.
The Penetanguishene-based Central North Correctional Centre was a striking attempt at getting in on the controversial private-prison craze that has swept the United States, where for-profit businesses now run approximately 150 prisons housing about 150,000 inmates.
Ontario's five-year experiment with the concept, launched with much fanfare in 2001 by Robert Sampson–at the time the law-and-order Tory correctional services minister–ended amid revelations of flawed security, inadequate prisoner health care, and higher reoffending rates once the privately housed inmates were let back out into the world.
Today, Sampson has secured a gig with the Stephen Harper Conservatives leading a federal panel reviewing Canada's prison system. Its mandate includes finding "opportunities for savings including through physical plant realignment and infrastructure renewal".
Does the choice of Sampson mean the feds want to privatize Canadian prisons? Stockwell Day, the federal public safety minister, says no. "The question of privatization is not on the table," he told journalists after Sampson's appointment last April. But some critics aren't so sure. "We have to be very vigilant to see where this review is going and how broad it gets in terms of an agenda around privatization," NDP MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East) told a reporter.
Len Bush, national representative of 15,000 provincial prison guards in the National Union of Public and Government Employees, is also skeptical about Day's denial. "He's not actually come out and said, 'No, I won't privatize.' We would welcome him saying so. It looks to us that this is their direction, even though they're not in a situation where they feel they can say it publicly," he said on the phone from his Ottawa office.
Sampson submitted his report to the government on October 31, but it remains under wraps. In late October, though, news leaked from the Sampson panel suggesting that it was preparing to scrap statutory release, the virtually automatic discharge of prisoners under conditions similar to parole after they've served two-thirds of their sentences. Instead, "you'd have to show why you deserve to be released [at the two-thirds point]," a Canadian Press story quoted an unnamed source "familiar with the panel's report" as saying. "It'll put more people in [prison], so they're going to need more resources."
This has stoked the privatization fears: that the Harper government's law-and-order agenda could unleash a crisis of overcrowding in prisons, and guess what the magical solution will be? Private prisons. There is just one catch: crime experts say all this–dramatically increased prisoner numbers, possible privatization of prisons, and get-tough measures, including increased and mandatory sentences–will probably make Canadian communities less safe, not more.
At first glance, the plan may seem reasonable to some: make wrongdoers show they've changed. What could be wrong with that? It would force some to shape up, right? Wrong. Such a change would create instant havoc in already overcrowded provincial and federal prison systems by adding up to 30 or 40 percent more inmates virtually overnight, according to Neil Boyd, an SFU criminology professor who spoke to the Georgia Straight from his Bowen Island home.
The change in the statutory release rule could suddenly add another 2,200 prisoners to the federal corrections system, which currently houses 12,000 inmates–an increase of almost 20 percent, Anthony Doob, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, estimated on the phone from his office. "The math is pretty straightforward. You could create a crisis almost overnight by changing parole practices."
Combined with other tough crime measures being proposed by the Harper government, a sudden tsunami of inmates would also swamp provincial prison systems, since many of those affected are those with sentences under two years.
"It [the increase in inmates] will come as a rude surprise to the provinces," said Craig Jones, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, speaking on his cellphone from a conference in Toronto. "The feds will crack down on crime, but the provinces will be punished."
In October, Harper introduced his Tackling Violent Crime Act, Bill C-2, into the House of Commons, complete with a shopping list of ideas courtesy of the U.S. law-and-order lobby, including mandatory minimum sentences for certain offences and harsher penalties for gun crimes. Harper declared the bill a confidence motion and said he'd accept no amendments to it, meaning the government will fall should it be defeated by the opposition–unlikely, since the Liberals desperately want to avoid an election.
Criminologists and prison guards say the actual result of the Harper crime package will probably be not safer communities but, rather, private prisons in which the bottom line is king, not inmate rehabilitation.
With five to 10 years needed to build a new prison from conception to construction, coupled with Harper's ideological predisposition to outsourcing government programs, Jones said it's not a big leap to privatized prisons coming to Canada in a big way. "Our anxiety is they're going to grow the prison population so quickly, they will be left with few options."
Creating a crisis to push through a controversial change is straight out of the playbook of Mike Harris's Conservative government in Ontario when it privatized the Penetanguishene prison, NUPGE's Bush said. "The strategy of the Harris government was to create a crisis and bring privatization forward to deal with the crisis," he said. "You take an overcrowded situation, add more people, and you create a crisis. We were hoping the experience elsewhere would have taught them."
The U.S. experience with privatized prisons is full of cautionary tales. After federal and state authorities brought in tougher law-and-order crime laws (among them the infamous "three strikes" statutes)–like the mandatory minimum sentences now being proposed by Harper–in the 1980s and '90s, the American prison population quadrupled, from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million today. (Another 4.8 million Americans are out on parole or probation, meaning a total of one in 32 adult Americans is under the control of the justice system in one fashion or another.)
It's a myth, however, that the explosion in inmate numbers was about getting violent, hardened criminals off the street. Instead, the crackdown disproportionately targeted marginalized people and small-time drug offenders.
Authorities turned to private companies to build and run many prisons. The largest operator by far is the Nashville, Tennessee–based Corrections Corp. of America, with 65 facilities under management, including 40 it owns outright, that house 72,000 inmates. Business at CCA is booming. Since 2000, its shares have shot up from $4 to almost $29.
But an independent study of CCA in 2003 found the company had failed to: provide adequate medical care to inmates, control violence in its facilities, and prevent a rash of escapes. Civil-rights violations have also been raised in hundreds of lawsuits against CCA by prisoners and their families, including several that revolved around inmate deaths. The study, cowritten by the U.K.–based Prison Privatisation Report International and the U.S. community group Good Jobs First, also said CCA tried to keep down costs by paying staff poorly, which resulted in high turnover and mistreatment of prisoners. Substandard conditions also had resulted in prisoner protests and uprisings, while several CCA guards had been convicted of drug trafficking inside the facilities.
A low point for the company came in the late 1990s, when it agreed to a payment of $2.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by prisoners at its Youngstown, Ohio, prison who said the facility was unsafe after a rash of stabbings. "It's been a nightmare,"
The plague of scandals at CCA and other private prison operators prompted Business Week to publish a story in 2000 titled "Private Prisons Don't Work" that said "the industry's heyday may already be history."
But while U.S. authorities step back from the ailing crime policies of the 1980s and 1990s, the John Howard Society's Jones sees the Harper government embracing the same troubled approach. " This government seems enthralled by the Bush administration," he said, noting that Harper's crime policies "seem to reflect a close study of the American model".
Jones said the Harper crime agenda is likely to fall heaviest on marginalized people, just as the measures did in the U.S. "Police go where the pickings are easiest. It will fall disproportionately on marginalized, mentally ill, and minority youth. You will not see more Conrad Blacks in jail," he said. "It's not about justice; it's about acting Old Testament."
"There's just no support for the idea that punishment will get the social safety we want. We should be looking at success stories," Boyd said, pointing to European countries that have promoted crime prevention and improved social housing over incarceration.
In fact, that's exactly the approach that was favoured by a crime prevention council within Canada's Public Safety Ministry when it reviewed corrections policy back in 1996. The council's study, which is posted on the ministry's Web site, doesn't mince words in its criticism of U.S. mandatory minimum sentencing as a failed model that did little to reduce crime rates while merely increasing the prison population.
"Not only is the cost of automatic incarceration brought about by this policy inordinately high, but it does little to stem the ongoing tide of new offenders," noted the study, titled Money Well Spent: Investing in Preventing Crime. "Minimum mandatory sentencing requirements rely upon the false assumption that people who are contemplating a criminal act–youths in particular–go through a rational process of planning their act and weighing the consequences of being apprehended."
As for Harper's plan to tighten parole eligibility, U of T's Doob said the notion goes against everything that's known about the importance of transitioning prisoners into society through supervised programs like parole and halfway houses. "Probably the worst thing you could do is hold a guy his whole sentence and then give him a bus ticket with no job, no program, and no controls."
Jones is also flabbergasted. "The evidence is clear that incarceration is the last resort. Most people do not benefit from it and a number of people get worse. Prison is an expensive way to make bad people worse."
Jones also is alarmed about privatized prisons making a return. "The staff [in private prisons] has less training. They employ harsher measures because they're cheaper; the conditions deteriorate. The inmates eventually get out, so it passes on the costs of dealing with them to future governments and generations. The issue is they're going to be worse when they get out."
Doob agreed, saying the evidence on privatized prisons is clear: "The data that exists in various countries suggests there are real problems in the ways that private companies run these things."
Harper apparently isn't even finding many allies within the Correctional Service of Canada, even though it is likely to enjoy a massive budget increase to accommodate the new inmates. Jones said senior corrections officials see Harper's regressive policies as reversing years of hard-won policy gains in areas like parole and crime prevention.
"When the tide turns so dramatically, they [corrections officials] see their work as being undone," he said. "It turns back the clock on 40 years of progressive corrections policy."
Well guess what folks? Harper is going to do what Harper wants to do and Harper wants an American style private prison system. Living in Kingston, I am very concerned. We are blocks from a federal prison and there are several others in the vicinity. Up to now I haven't really worried about it, but I will now.
There have been several protests recently about the Reform-Conservatives' decision to close down the farms and sell the land. These farms were a very important part of rehabilitation. I suppose though they would cut into the profit of the corporations poised to take over.
The Conservative government plans to bring in an American-style prison system that will cost billions of taxpayer dollars and do little to improve public safety, according to a report released Thursday in Ottawa.
"It tramples human rights and human dignity," University of British Columbia law professor Michael Jackson, co-author of the 235-page report, titled A Flawed Compass, told reporters.
Moreover, there is "a near total absence of evidence" in the government plan that its measures will "return people to the community better able to live law-abiding lives," said co-author Graham Stewart, who recently retired after decades as head of the John Howard Society of Canada.
Their report provides a scathing review of a government blueprint for corrections called A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety. A panel led by Rob Sampson, a former corrections minister in Ontario ex-premier Mike Harris's Tory government, drafted the plan, which is being implemented by the Correctional Service.
In addition to constructing super prisons and implementing work programs, the program will eliminate gradual release and deny inmates rights that are now entrenched in the Constitution.
However, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said the plan is not based on a U.S.-style prison system at all. "I don't know where that suggestion comes from," he told CBC News in an interview.
"We don't have a capital program for creating and building new prisons right now, so attacking the government is a little odd."
Rather, "the changes we're proposing [are] to improve our system, protect society more and make sure offenders get the help they need," particularly mental illness treatment, Van Loan said.
The government wants to create an incentive system for prisoners to participate in rehabilitation programs, "because that's important for not just the safety of society, which is … the most important principle, but also for the prisoner to integrate into the community ultimately," he said.
The current practice of statutory release is the "wrong approach," he added.
"That means somebody has a nine-year sentence; at six years, even if they're not participating in their programs, they're automatically … released into society."
But Jackson said the plan undermines public safety by making prisons more dangerous places and constricting inmates' reintegration into society.
By keeping prisoners locked up longer, the plan places an enormous financial burden on taxpayers, he added.
Perhaps worst of all, Jackson said, it "will intensify what the Supreme Court has characterized as the already staggering injustice of the overrepresentation of aboriginal people in the prisons of Canada."
A recipe for prison violence: Jackson
By stressing punishment rather than rehabilitation, the plan ignores lessons of the past, which led to the prison riots and killings that dominated Canadian news in the early 1970s, Jackson said.
"My greatest fear is with this road map's agenda and its underlying philosophy, we will enter a new period of turmoil and violence in Canadian prisons," he said.
"I do fear that prisons will become more abusive, prisoners will become more frustrated and that we could go back to a time not only when the rule of law was absent but a culture of violence is the dominant way in which prisoners express their frustrations."
Stewart called the blueprint "an ideological rant, which flies in the face of the Correctional Service's own research of what works to rehabilitate prisoners and ensure community safety."
"The fact is that you cannot hurt a person and make them into a good citizen at the same time," Stewart said.
The government has already allocated hundreds of millions to the plan, even though it has had no input from either Parliament or the public, according to the report.
By Sarah Schmidt, Canwest News Service June 9, 2009
OTTAWA — None of the 57 newly hired inspectors at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is dedicated to meat inspection, despite a promise by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz at the height of the deadly listeriosis crisis that they'd be on the "front lines."
In newly released information prepared for parliamentarians probing the state of food safety in Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency says some of the new hires are working on the implementation of Product of Canada labelling guidelines, while others are conducting border blitzes for "high-risk commodities."
Others hired under the federal government's Food Safety Action Plan are sampling and testing high-risk foods, completing laboratory method validation studies for high-risk commodities or designing an enhanced identification system for food manufacturers. "Of these 57 full-time resources, none are dedicated to meat inspection," the briefing note, tabled Tuesday, states.
When Ritz announced these new positions last August after a definitive link was made between tainted meat produced at a Maple Leaf plant in Toronto and the deaths of Canadians, he told reporters the government was "targeting another 58 people to be on the front lines."
The CFIA was responding to a request from the NDP's food safety critic Malcolm Allen, who asked for a status report on these new hires, and whether they are "doing meat inspection or are they doing other things."
In an interview, Allen said the revelation shows Ritz wasn't being forthright with Canadians. "How do you square a circle?" he said.
"The minister left the impression with Canadians that all the inspections that were hired in the last little while were meat inspectors, and now we know this is untrue. The CFIA has unequivocally said to us this is not what they're going. So the difficulty we have, Canadians have, how to you have confidence in a minister who tells you . . . 'This is our remedy, we will hire people to do meat inspection,' and then they hire people and they don't do meat inspection."
In a statement Tuesday, the ministers office said there is "no discrepancy" between Ritz's statement last August and the newly released details. The CFIA said all inspectors are considered "front-line." (More jokes???)
At the time of Ritz's announcement involving the new hires, the union representing meat inspectors had already publicly complained of a shortage of staff stationed at meat plants, emphasizing the workload challenges with the introduction of the Compliance Verification System in April 2008. The inspection system requires plant inspectors to complete specific tasks on a prescribed timetable and review additional paperwork produced by the operators.
On Tuesday, union president Bob Kingston said he's not surprised by the latest revelation. "We've known all along they had nothing to do with meat inspection," he said of the new hires. "We've been saying it since Day 1. All they did was up a certain total of a certain classification and put their best foot forward, whether it was correct or not correct."
The parliamentary hearings, scheduled to wrap up this week, were called after people consumed contaminated meat last summer from a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto, resulting in the death of 22 Canadians.
Staffing levels at meat plants has dominated the parliamentary hearings.
Don Irons, a Toronto-based CFIA food processing supervisor, testified last month that "we were grossly understaffed at the time (prior to the listeriosis) outbreak. There are not enough inspectors to fully implement CVS (Compliance Verification System) 100 per cent." On Monday night, Brian Evans, the agency's executive vice-president, challenged this assessment. "I reject the notion that resources and staffing were insufficient to face the outbreak last summer . . . those who say otherwise serve a different agenda and constituency," he testified.
Meanwhile, CFIA president Carole Swan has privately warned Ritz of "challenges" in this area, according to another document already tabled with the food safety committee. According to the talking points prepared for her meeting with Ritz on Jan. 26, Swan briefed him that the "inspection program (is) experiencing workload challenges in meeting delivery requirements."
"Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm." - Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
The new Conservative Party of Canada was created on a lie and fueled with corruption; changing the face of politics in Canada. By capitalizing on the nostalgia of the old 'Tory' name, Stephen Harper was able to lull Canadians into thinking that his party had a tradition, and many of his newest supporters mistakenly take comfort in the belief that they are following a Party that is a century and a half old.
Of course, most of his core followers do know the difference and expect him to push their social conservative agenda; which is to make abortion a crime, make homo-sexuality a crime or at least ban equal marriage, eliminate the gun registry and scrap the Human Rights Commission.
A Tory by definition is an 'ardent supporter of established institutions in politics’ (Webster's) and Canada’s first Tories represented the United Empire Loyalist ideals, rejecting free trade and closer ties with the United States; modeling Canada after British institutions.
By contrast, Mr. Harper’s brand of conservatism is inspired by US based neo-conservatism, and supports closer ties with the United States, privatization of federal institutions and smaller government. This is evident from many of his interviews and speeches , and not a ‘Hidden Agenda’.
Sadly, the Tory party created by Sir John A. is no more and Johnny's political views would be in direct contrast to those held by our current Prime Minister. Therefore, I have come up with a few names that Mr. Harper could adopt to identify his 'New' party:
Conservative Reform Alliance Party (CRAP) Canadian Republican Alliance Party (still CRAP) Republican Elite Delegation of Never Ending Caucasians Klan (REDNECK) Brotherhood of Integrated Opportunistic Teetotalers (BIGOTs) New Organization of Godfearing Alliance at Your Service (NOGAYS)
For all his bravado and strong leader nonsense, Stephen Harper is a man filled with fear. The fact that most Canadians simply don't like him, and many actually hate him, I suppose some his fright is justified.
However, some of it is simply paranoia; looking for enemies that exist only in his mind, but hamper his effectiveness as leader of this country.
One of the many online encyclopedias defines “siege mentality” as “a shared feeling of helplessness, victimization and defensiveness” which “refers to persecution feelings by anyone in the minority, or of a group that views itself as a threatened minority.”
It goes on: “Dictatorships have been known to encourage this point of view among their ownpeople, since it justifies the continuance of those in power. A contemporary example is North Korea. This is also very commonly used in the field of sports, where coaches or managers often create a siege mentality in their players by highlighting an environment of hostility from outside the club (whether or not the hostility is real or exaggerated doesn’t matter).”
Hmmm. Stephen Harper as Kim Jong-il, the pint-sized Korean despot? I don’t think so. I’m also not sure the Prime Minister feels especially helpless, given the feebleness of his opposition. But there’s something in those two paragraphs that sounds a lot like this government, and may explain its chronic need to identify and destroy enemies, real or imagined.
If there’s anything that typifies the Conservatives under Mr. Harper, it’s the notion that anyone outside the party is to be viewed with suspicion, and even within the party trust is to be handed out sparingly. Beyond the fortified redoubt of the Prime Minister’s inner circle, everyone is on permanent probation.
A degree of paranoia in the Tories is understandable. The party’s long history in opposition, the maddening ability of the Liberals to hold power no matter how cynical their actions or arrogant their attitude, the inbred bias of a system built and sustained for decades by Liberal interests, and the Conservatives’ own tendency to self-destruct ... it would have been surprising if the Conservatives DIDN’T have a sense that the gods were against them.
Before he became prime minister, Mr. Harper didn’t hide his belief that Liberals had stacked the courts and stuffed the civil service with fellow travellers. “The reality,” he said near the end of the 2006 election, “is that we will have, for some time to come, a Liberal Senate, a Liberal civil service -- at least senior levels have been appointed by the Liberals -- and courts that have been appointed by the Liberals. So these are obviously checks on the power of a Conservative government.”
It shouldn’t come as a total shock, then, if the government views official Ottawa as less than a welcoming environment, or if it sees the need to place a few more sympathizers on the boards and bodies and commissions that have been relentlessly packed with Liberal sympathizers for so many years. But well into its third year of power, the list seems as lengthy as ever, the enemies seem to be multiplying, and the government’s tolerance for resistance growing weaker.
Linda Keen won a place on the enemies list when she dared to challenge the government’s view of who caused the problems at the Chalk River nuclear reactor before Christmas. Back talk from civil servants is not encouraged around the PMO, and Keen was peremptorily canned.
When Stéphane Dion made some nasty allegations about Mr. Harper’s role in the Chuck Cadman affair, Mr. Harper could have shrugged it off as he shrugs off so much other silliness directed at him by the opposition. Instead he sued, accusing the Liberals of a “reckless indifference to the truth” while acting “with spite and ill will toward the prime minister.” Similarly, when Elections Canada denied a rebate to dozens of Conservative candidates after the 2006 election, ruling their claims invalid, the Tories launched a civil suit rather than swallow the loss and let the issue die. It’s not like they couldn’t afford it: Tory coffers are jammed full of money just waiting to be spent.
When Elections Canada sent the RCMP around to Conservative headquarters last week, the party responded with charges of bias. Pierre Poilievre, another in a seemingly endless supply of Tory attack dogs, was sent out to declare the government is “very concerned with the conduct of Elections Canada.” Reporters who sought access to documents related to the case were told the party didn’t have them; then when they suddenly appeared they were handed out only to a favoured few. When other reporters showed up anyway they were told it was all “a private meeting”, even though it clearly wasn’t.
The thing is, if you expect to find enemies everywhere, you’ll probably succeed. The Liberals have been justly criticized for refusing to accept that Canadians knew what they were doing when they kicked them out in the last election, that it wasn’t all just some giant misunderstanding. But the Tories are similarly guilty of dragging out old grudges well beyond the best before date, treating criticism like an attack on the legitimacy of the government itself, reacting to dissent by trying to silence the dissenter, rather than dealing with the substance of the issue.
It doesn’t inspire public trust. If the Tories think there’s a conspiracy to get them, how do we know we’re not all part of the conspiracy? Confident governments slough off the kind setbacks and accusations the Conservatives have faced as part of the job. They don’t haul out the lawyers, shut down the committee, fire the commissioner or flee down the back stairs before anyone can ask a question. That’s what you do when you’re hiding something. Since Mr. McParland wrote this article, we've discovered that Stephen Harper lied about the Cadman tape, and many Conservative MPs could be convicted of fraud in the "In and Out" scandal.
