I Agree. Stephen Harper is the Most Dangerous Prime Minister Ever

There is a letter to the editor published in the Ottawa Citizen by Harvey Davey:

I taught Canadian history for more than 30 years. I marvel at Harper's successes. Yes, he has made some serious blunders but they have not stopped him. He learns from his mistakes. I believe that Stephen Harper is the most dangerous prime minister we have ever had. The Opposition must get its act together.

I think that Michael Ignatieff has found his feet. This summer tour was a great idea. He is relaxed and motivated and I'm feeling optimistic.

Stephen Harper is burning himself out, governing from crisis to crisis. And as more people have joined the opposition to his gutting the mandatory long from, we have more voters who will tell other voters that these guys have got go.

The National Statistics Council issued an urgent call for the federal Conservatives to reconsider their decision to scrap the mandatory, long-form census.

The council, a 40-member volunteer advisory group whose members are selected by the federal government, said Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision would undermine the value of the information that Canadian businesses, governments and social agencies rely on to plan their programs and invest private and taxpayers’ dollars.

Loss of the information from the mandatory, long-form census in 2011 would leave “a serious gap” in monitoring the economic and social changes occurring in society while “depriving Canadians of the statistics they need for informed decision-making,” Ian McKinnon, chair of the council, said.

Catch 22 Conservatives, a grassroots group mobilizing for the next election, has posted a great satirical piece on the census. Well worth the read. Join them as well. The more the merrier.

And don't forget Canadians Rallying to Unseat Stephen Harper.

We can do this guys.

Harper's Pig-Headedness Causing Strain in Canada/US relationship.”

Despite Harper's love of everything American, or should I say everything Republican, he is causing an unnecessary diplomatic crisis, with his unmoving stance on repatriating prisoners.

George Bush was more enlightened than this man.

After years of cordial relations with the United States on the issue of prison transfers, the Harper government’s recent crackdown on repatriating offenders may be causing a diplomatic rift. Documents obtained by Postmedia News under Access To Information indicate the U.S. Department of State sent a diplomatic note to the Canadian Embassy in Washington last December outlining concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the transfer of offenders.

“The U.S. government has apparently done what it could to bring this unfair situation to the attention of the Conservative government of Canada,” said Dick Atkins, a prominent U.S. attorney who specializes in international offender transfers. “I know that in my speaking to U.S. government authorities they said they had exhausted their remedies.” For more than 30 years a matter of routine procedure, the Conservatives decided last year to get tough on Canadians who want to serve their sentences for crimes committed in other countries on home soil.

Michael Ignatieff and the Man from Shawinigan

I have to be honest, I never voted for Jean Chretien or Paul Martin. I guess as a long time PC supporter, I still held onto the old prejudices, somehow believing that they were the enemy.

But since then I have come to respect Mr. Chretien as a statesman, and recognize his contribution to our country.

I've also realized that things are not always as they seem, and as Joe Clark once said about Stephen Harper, and the PC's fall from grace; that for those who didn't want to stick it out and rebuild the party, the "alternative was frightening".

And we are now learning just how "frightening" the alternative really is.

I called my blog Pushed to the Left and Loving it, because when I felt that there was no longer a party in the centre, only an extreme right-wing neoconservative option, and I lost my home; I discovered that the other side of the fence wasn't so bad after all.

For decades the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives battled for that coveted centre position because that's where most Canadians hang out. But once elected they worked toward consensus building.

But neoconservatism is the exact opposite. They don't want to build a consensus, they just want everyone to get out of their way.

Stephen Harper's former campaign manager, Tom Flanagan, once suggested that their biggest challenge was convincing Canadians that they were moving to the centre, when they were not. Harper even managed to fool us for awhile, but his latest actions in regards to the G-20, the 16 billion dollar military jet contract, closing the prison farms, Fox News North, the census debacle and his "white's only" hiring options, have blown his cover.

He's still the same right-wing extremist that defined him in his Reform Party days.

So despite all the rumours, Michael Ignatieff's visit with Mr. Chretien was a hit. I knew it would be. Both man are intelligent and genuinely care about this country.

My journey to the place where I now promote Michael Ignatieff and the Liberal Party, was not an easy one. I inherited the gift (curse?) of skepticism from my dad, who always reminded me to question everything, to arrive at my own truth.

The best example of this was in high school, when we were given an assignment to write a political essay, choosing from democracy, monarchy, communism, etc.

I chose communism because I thought it would be easy, given the headlines in the middle of a the Cold War. But when I completed my first draft, my dad handed it back and said that it was not an essay based on anything other than rhetoric, and to be fair I had to at least learn what communism really was. (he was certainly not a sympathiser, but a life long Liberal)

So every day I headed to the library and asked for the Communist Manifesto. It was not allowed to be out on the shelves at the time, and I felt like an adolescent boy asking the druggist for condoms.

But I worked my way through it, and while I decided that I preferred democracy, I reached that decision based on fact. My paper was more balanced, showing the pros and cons, rather than just falling back on the popular opinion of the day, that everything was a "commie plot".

Michael Ignatieff is no communist either, but also drew his own conclusions about political and social structure.

From his Massey lecture series ( The Rights Revolution, 2000, Anansi, Pg. 19-20):

"... some civil inequalities between men and women, between gays and straights, between Quebecois and English Canadians, have been addressed by rights talk. But what about inequalities between rich and poor? One of the strange features of rights talk has been that it makes visible some inequalities — sexual and linguistic inequalities, for example — while obscuring others — such as those based on class and income. I'm no Marxist, but I am astonished that social and economic inequality, the focus of so much socialist passion when I was a student, has simply disappeared from the political agenda in Canada and most other capitalist societies.

This disappearance has something to do with rights talk. It can capture civil and political inequalities, but it can't capture more basic economic inequalities, such as the ways in which the economy rewards owners and investors at the expense of workers. The economic system may not infringe anybody's individual rights, but the whole machine ends up reproducing enduring types of social inequality. Rights talk not only fails to capture this kind of inequality, but also diverts the attention of the political system from it"

So in the past thirty years, we've talked about women, aboriginals, gays, and lesbians. But what about the workers? What about the way their union rights have been eroded? What about the economic insecurity of our poorest fellow citizens? Why can't our politics address this? It can't be because everyone has shared the fruits of our recent economic boom. It can't be because the poor don't exist. It must be because they have become invisible.

He wrote that in 2000, without a political agenda, and it was after reading the Rights Revolution that I realized that we share common ground. I'm no Marxist either, but I know that our current system isn't working and neoconservatism is only making it worse.

The gap between rich and poor is growing and unfortunately our most vulnerable citizens are still "invisible".

I am not anti-corporation and recognize that we need a healthy business structure if there is any hope for success. But I don't believe they should be pandered to in the way that this government is pandering to them. Massive corporate tax cuts, while they are telling the rest of us that we have to suck up the recession, caused by the greed of the corporate sector in the first place.

The rights of the workers must be considered. A neocon vision is low wages and a free market. But what they fail to consider is that the reason businesses are doing well is because of good union jobs, that create buying power. If everyone is making minimum wage, who will be left to purchase anything other than essentials?

We need someone with a vision that encompasses all citizens, and I really believe that Michael Ignatieff is that person. And I also believe that he has the best team, that he will not silence and keep chained.

And I know in my heart that my skeptical dad would have voted for him, and that's good enough for me.

Exposed! Undercover at a Meeting of Harper's Base

So after learning that Harper is now playing strictly to his base, the only thing he has left to lose; I've been tracking them as they move about, roaring now and then, sometime growling and always drooling.

When I heard that they were meeting this weekend, I hid in the bushes and taped the whole thing. These are the transcribed notes:

"Ugh" ... "Ugh, ugh, bah!" ... "Schlipm, mig, boo" ... "Ugh, ugh!" ... "Bah ..."

This nonsense over wanting to put an end to affirmative action is as old as the Reform Party, and after years of trying to convince us that they are not racist, I suppose they no longer care.

"... the notion that some Reform members may have strong Anglo-Saxon nativist inclinations is supported by more than merely the background profiles of its leaders, members and supporters. It is supported also by the words of many of its ideological mentors who depict Canada as not only historically an Anglo-Saxon country but also part of a wider Anglo-Saxon culture that is in need of recognizing and re-establishing its heritage." (Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada, By Trevor Harrison, University of Toronto Press, 1995, ISBN: 0-8020-7204-6, Pg. 170)

This also parallels a similar movement in the U.S. with Harper's colleagues, like Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute. According to Marci McDonald in the Armageddon Factor, 700 conservatives have graduated from Blackwell's school, including Harper MP Rob Anders.

Blackwell is currently backing a group called Youth for Western Civilisation, who have been doing things like selling muffins, where the price is dependant on race, in protest of affirmative action.

These guys are so transparent.

A column in the Toronto Star this weekend: Job equity has old Tory roots, gives the reasons for this initiative and that it began with the Tory party of John Diefenbaker, (which is not the same as the current "Tory" party which began with William Aberhart. Diefenbaker's party folded in 2003).

The affirmative action program is clumsy, to say the least, when it refuses to even consider worthy applicants of other backgrounds. The question is what Day and his voluble ally, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, are really up to here. The targeting of specific groups — such as aboriginals, the disabled, visible minorities and women — to the exclusion of other applicants is hardly rampant: of the 5,000 public service jobs posted last year, only 91 were designated for one group, such as aboriginals.

A maladroit web application process can be modified, but that does not mean that the rest of the employment equity philosophy should be discarded, throwing minorities out with the bathwater. If the Tories were to follow up by tweaking the offending measure, fair enough. But look at what Kenney is saying: “All positions should be on the basis of equality of opportunity and merit.”

Actually, that’s what the Bill of Rights attempted in 1960, and it did almost nothing to right the wrongs of exclusion in employment. That’s why the landmark report of a royal commission headed by Rosie Abella (now a Supreme Court justice) argued persuasively that affirmative action was needed to redress the imbalances — with recruitment and targeting of under-represented groups.

Gotta go. I hear that Harper's base is having a burping contest and I don't want to miss it. They were originally going to have the burp the alphabet, until it was discovered that only a few actually knew the alphabet, so instead they are burping "How, dry I am"

Can't wait.

Ralph Goodale Sums Up the Reform-Conservatives Nicely

Ralph Goodale has explained very nicely the reasons for the census change, as well as clearly outlining the history of the Harper government ignoring facts, and attacking anyone who disagrees with them.

Thomas Walkom also points out the hypocrisy of this government:

Industry Minister Tony Clement says he’s axing the mandatory questionnaire because the state has no right to demand intrusive information, such as the number of bedrooms in a home. Yet his is the same government that requires airlines to collect and hand over detailed personal information on everyone who flies – and then give much of it to a foreign state.

It’s also the government that last month transformed downtown Toronto into an armed camp, where police arbitrarily stopped and searched people going about their lawful business and then—equally arbitrarily—arrested and jailed scores more. Until forced by the courts last year, Harper’s “non-intrusive” government used all of its power to keep Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik from returning to Canada.

Once Abdelrazik (who has been charged with no crime in any country) did return, this government intruded into his life to deny him the most basic rights: to work, to earn an income, to open a bank account. So no. The Harper government is not libertarian. It has used the full muscle of the state to walk over the civil and constitutional rights of those it purports to represent.

Or maybe they are just using the census to deflect attention away from the billions spent for the G-20, the billions being spent on military jets and the billions being wasted on tougher crime measures, when Canada's crime rate continues to decline.

Everything's a game.

Will Stephen Harper Feel the Wrath of Guergis?

Helena Guergis, after being cleared of criminal charges (though she still faces an ethics violation) had asked for a face to face with Stephen Harper. Which face?

Guess we'll never know.

However, she has stated that she will be running in the next election, possibly as an independent. Guergis, who was a staffer in the Mike Harris government, is not ready to hang up her lawn signs, even if the good old boys in the party told her to take off her shoes and get back in the kitchen where she belongs, now that she is pregnant.

James Travers has an interesting take:

Fear and confusion are power tools. Craftsman Stephen Harper is using both by banishing Helena Guergis and supporting Tony Clement’s quixotic tilt at the census. If cause and effect were connected in this capital, Guergis would be back in caucus today and Clement would be out of cabinet. After all, the RCMP has cleared her of criminal wrong-doing in connection with husband Rahim Jaffer’s back corridor lobbying while a summer storm is rising over the industry minister’s bizarre assault on a benign target.

But that’s not how official Ottawa works. What matters here is control and the Prime Minister is proving the point by blatantly exercising it so arbitrarily.

... A weak minister and public embarrassment, Guergis delivered ample reasons for dismissal well before she and Jaffer became titillating news. Still, harsh understates the punishment imposed by a Prime Minister who has yet to explain why he tolerates sorry performances and nasty behavior from some colleagues only to crush Guergis. A special joy of authoritarian leadership is that no justification is required. Ministers serve at the Prime Minister’s pleasure and no one carries party colours without Harper’s signed approval.

I'm no fan of Guergis, but anyone who challenges Harper is OK in my book.

A Donkey arrives to try and talk to an ASS!

As with every decision made by this government, that to close the prison farms in Canada is purely ideological and driven by the "free market".

Harper and his Reformers have already put out a tender under NAFTA to provide dairy products to our prisons, rather than maintain a rehabilitation program that has been enormously successful.

Insider Ian Brodie, when asked why the Harper government ignored expert advice, provided us with the answer:

Ian Brodie, the former university political science professor who served as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff from 2006 to 2008, explained why in an unusually candid talk on Conservative strategy last spring at McGill University in Montreal. “Every time we proposed amendments to the Criminal Code, sociologists, criminologists, defence lawyers and Liberals attacked us for proposing measures that the evidence apparently showed did not work,” Brodie said. “That was a good thing for us politically, in that sociologists, criminologists and defence lawyers were and are all held in lower repute than Conservative politicians by the voting public. Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition of university types.”

Yes Kids. Stay in school and some day maybe you can be reduced to a "University Type".

They just don't get it.

The Harper government wants to close prison farms for several stated reasons. One is that few inmates who work in the farm program actually go on to farm, once released. Well, of course. An ex-convict needs capital to buy land and farm machinery, and where is he to find that? A prisoner who has worked on the land and with animals leaves jail with something not easily captured on ledgers, something that most prisons are hard pressed to provide: the beginnings of groundedness and a sense of peace, perhaps even a feeling of a job well done.

After losing an important court case, "Save the Prison Farms" will now have to resort to civil disobedience. They are using a donkey, in the hopes that perhaps he can speak 'Ass', clearly the only language neoconservatives understand.

For those of us following this movement, we are not surprised. Stephen Harper has always had an aversion to farming, preferring the corporate boardrooms to the agricultural community.

Journalist and author Murray Dobbin was there when the Reform Party was still just a glint in Harper's eye:

Three policies* in The Reformer struck me immediately and started me on the course of writing this book. The first was on agriculture. I have an urban background, but no self-respecting student of politics in Saskatchewan is unfamiliar with the issues facing farmers. The farm-policy resolution which startled me stated that the party's policy was not guided by the interests of producers, but by the "demand of consumers for ... secure supplies of food at the lowest competitive prices."

While this resolution might not cause alarm at the dinner tables of urban Canada, it is tantamount to a declaration of war on the family farm. It was a cheap food policy. If actually carried out it could wipe out half the farmers in western Canada. Farmers, today, are in greater danger of bankruptcy than at any time since the 1930s: grain prices are actually comparatively lower than they were then. If Reform was a populist party, what explained a farm policy that would reverse sixty years of populist reforms? (2)

What Harper fails to understand is that in Kingston, we will make this an election issue. Their candidate Brian Abrams has refused to attend any meetings and has done absolutely nothing to help the cause. This gives Kingstonians a glimpse into what would happen if he was elected. He will be nothing more than a potted plant in Harper's halls, and he already has enough of those.

Something for them to think about.

Footnotes:

* The other two were medicare. "Not only was the policy one of eliminating the nation-wide health care system, but it was phrased in such a way that the impact of the policy was obscured ... one system for the rich and another for the poor." and the GST. "... the Party's Policy Committee, declaring that the Reform Party only opposed the GST "in its present form" and suggesting a Reform government would keep the tax."

Sources:

1. Cultivating convicts: Considering their effect on prisoners, it would be folly to close down Canada's prison farms, By Lawrence Scanlan, Globe and Mail, December 07, 2009

2. Preston Manning and the Reform Party, by Murray Dobbin, Goodread Biographies/Formac Publishing, 1992, ISBN: 0-88780-161-7, Preface vii