The Sixth Estate

Judging from the Conservative insiders’ Twitter feeds, they plan to keep the Coalition Hypothesis alive as long as possible. I have faith in my fellow Canadians to come to the right decision on this over the next month, especially now that they know Stephen Harper actually forms coalitions, too. But, since Harper is all into the “unCanadian Bloc” shtick, it’s fair to ask just how far his own commitment to Canada runs. Not very far, if his associations with the Albertan sovereignty movement are any indication.

In fact, in 2001, Harper and a number of men who went on to become his close advisors wrote an “open letter” to Albertan premier Ralph Klein outlining their vision for an independent Alberta within Canada — precisely the same sort of “distinct society” notion espoused by certain Quebec activists during and after their referendum defeats. At the very least, Harper argued, Alberta should cut itself off from the federal government as far as possible to pursue its own course, and it should use the model of the Quebec independence movement as its guide. (Can you imagine how Harper would react if Ignatieff said that?) But I won’t put words in Harper’s mouth on this. Instead, I’ll just quote him directly:

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Climate change and energy is the most important file in the Canadian government right now, with the possible exception of healthcare — and, like healthcare, it’s one on which the Harper Government™ has indicated it would not take any positive action whatsoever. This isn’t surprising because Stephen Harper is on the record stating that he thinks actually trying to do anything to limit and avoid the damages of global climate change is a “socialist scheme.” Over the next century, we will do — or not do — grave damage to the biosphere through climate change. The next years are critical and our government, like the one to the south, is abandoning its responsibilities entirely.

Harper’s position on climate change is much more moderate than certain Conservative politicians, but it’s worth noting that he does believe we are causing permanent global warming. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be massively boosting military assets for the eventually ice-free North (which, left ice-free, wouldn’t need these assets in the first place). His real feelings on the subject came out in a 2002 letter to Canadian Alliance supporters, around the time that Canada was ratifying the Kyoto Accord, in which he described the Kyoto Accord as merely a “socialist scheme to suck money out of” capitalist countries to China using the climate change myth as a pretext:

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The Harper Government™’s Coalition Conspiracy Theory is still being relentlessly pushed on Twitter, but has been largely excoriated in the media. In addition to the Firewall Letter, which I’ll post shortly, I’d like to give it one last parting shot, one which the media seems to have forgotten but is much, much worse than the Firewall Letter. This is, according to Harper today, the sort of anti-patriotic stuff that just can’t be trusted in government. He should be called upon to explain it.

It was December 2000, and the right had just gone down to another defeat, thanks to the dramatic crashing and burning of Stockwell Day. Harper, then at the anti-public healthcare group the National Citizens Coalition, was losing his own battle to overturn Elections Canada’s election spending limit laws. (The same sort of laws he flaunted in 2006, you may recall). He had had enough of Canada. So he fired off a paranoid letter to the National Post proposing “Separation, Alberta-Style.” It was a call to arms, inspiring Albertans to create a party modelled on the Bloc Quebecois (the one Harper now denounces as separatists) and explicitly daring the federal government to provoke a nascent Albertan separatist movement:

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The rule of law is one of the most important elements of Canadian democracy. It is what separates conscientious collective action from partisan mob rule. Everybody plays by the same rules — including the Crown, and including the government. A lot of blood has been shed over this principle, not always justly of course. But it underlies Canadian democracy just as it does all other British democracies.

Except for Harper democracy, though, which is noted for its contempt for the rule of law. The recent round of contempt rulings and the election fraud (the “In and Out” scandal) are good examples, but a much more relevant one is the Harper Government™’s law fixing election dates every four years. Remember that one? It’s still there. It’s still a law. Which means that for the first time in Canadian history, in 2009 a government decided to cancel an election. Surprisingly this historic moment passed without much comment.

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Amidst all of the complaints about the F-35 and Harper’s inane new election proposal to allow income splitting after the budget is balanced, there’s another important element of the Harper Government™ budget which is skating by unnoticed. It’s the projections. Each budget, the government discloses what it spent the year before, what it plans to spend in the current year, but also what it expects to spend in future years. These are key because they let us know when Harper can be expected to introduce his promised tax reforms. The Conservatives, incredibly, have blown every projection since 2007.

Everyone who’s ever had trouble with credit card debt — or with losing weight, for that matter — knows the psychological trap it’s so easy to fall into: one last big purchase, one last chocolate bar, and then I’ll start cutting down much more seriously tomorrow. The Conservative budgeting over the past five years shows the same problem. Every year, the government has started out in a worse fiscal situation than it promised it would be the year before. But, each year, they promise that in subsequent years, they’ll be making ever-bigger cuts to make up the difference:

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One of the most infuriating pieces of doublespeak over the first weekend of the election campaign has been the Harper Government™’s assertion, through its various Twitter minions in particular, that the Liberal “coalition” killed off a bill that would have sent life-saving generic HIV and malaria drugs to poor people in Africa. This is obviously nonsensical because we have documentary proof that the Conservatives blocked the bill in the Senate. Knowing full well that the vast majority of Canadians think poor people should not be denied access to necessary medicine, the Conservatives are attempting to shift the responsibility onto the shoulders of their political opponents.

The last Harper Government™ barrage against the bill was a secret letter sent from  minister Tony Clement to Tory Senators, which, incredibly, openly states that the government opposes the bill because the drug companies asked them to. Of course they did. The drug companies care more about profit than human lives. The Harper Government™ cares more about its corporate buddies than human lives. So the government asked Conservative senators to block speedy passage of the bill by its supporters, who could see the writing on the wall as well as anyone else and were urging that the legislation be passed before the government fell.

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I feel dirty even writing that statement for my own purposes, but it seems appropriate. Frankly, I’m surprised that neither the media chattering class nor the Liberal Party simply reads this into the record every time the Harper Government™ publishes another of its odious ads attacking Liberal patriotism. Not that there aren’t plenty of continentalists on the Liberal benches, but what do you make of Harper’s speech to the Council for National Policy during a visit to Montreal?

Harper began by being patronizing (as always) to his American hosts at this right-wing think tank, telling them that they probably didn’t know even “fairly basic stuff” about Canada. So he would educate them, he claimed. What followed was an unprecedented and horrifying diatribe against Canadian culture which would be bad enough from any public figure, but is abominable for someone who subsequently became Prime Minister of the country:

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I sincerely hope we will not be seeing an election campaign waged on such a silly premise as that the Liberal Party might seek support from other parties in the event of a minority government. Stephen Harper would do the same thing. You have to, in order to govern. As a matter of fact, that’s precisely what Stephen Harper tried to do in 2004. With the Bloc. You know, the ones he now says are illegitimate separatists who have no place in government.

This point cannot be made loudly enough, or frequently enough, and with our effort hopefully we can push the media into driving the point home too and not allowing the Harper Government™ to continue on this particular odious campaign tactic. Stephen Harper says that we can’t trust the Liberals because they’d try to buck the will of the electorate by joining with separatists in the Bloc Quebecois to form a government. Well, maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. But the point is immaterial, because Harper is projecting. That’s exactly what he tried to do in 2004. It didn’t work, so now he’s blaming the Liberals for trying it instead.

Before I go on, let me make another important point. There is no coalition plot. If there was, they wouldn’t need to wait till May to “throw out the election.” They already had a majority. They already could have offered to form a government. They didn’t. Ergo, no coalition. That this is even an issue shows how fundamentally incompetent the Parliamentary press gallery has become.

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