Under The Bus

While these Raging Grannies could perhaps use the services of a good singing coach, their hearts, and their lyrics, are clearly in the right place:

Harper's Uncanny Ability to Maintain his Political Fortunes

In reading Lawrence Martin's Harperland, I was struck by how many times Prime Minister Harper and his operatives have had their political skins saved, not just by their own Machiavellian machinations, but by external events.

Take, for example, Harper's first unnecessary prorogation of Parliament in order to avoid a confidence vote that would have surely toppled his government. Having badly miscalculated the political opposition to ending public subsidies for all parties, a measure he included in Finance Minister Jim Flarherty's 2008 economic update, he faced the prospect of a coalition of the Liberals and the NDP, with a promise of support for at least 18 months from the Bloc Quebecois, to form a new government after a confidence vote in the House. According to Martin, Harper was ready to concede defeat having made a rare but huge tactical error. But fate intervened to save him.

Although not part of the coalition, the Bloc Quebecois leader, Giles Duceppe, was invited by Dion and Layton to take part in a public signing to demonstrate their ability to work together and thus form a replacement government without an election, something quite constitutionally legitimate. However, the inclusion of Duceppe gave Harper the opening he needed, whereby he went on a campaign to denounce this unholy alliance with 'separatists' as an attempt to 'highjack democracy.'

Harper was successful in his propaganda blitz and the rest, as they say, is history. His visit to Governor General Michelle Jean secured him the intended result: a prorogation of Parliament, during which the idea of a coalition lost its momentum, largely due to the public outrage against it that Harper had fuelled.

Similarly, in 2010, to avoid a showdown in Parliament over his refusal to turn over Afghan detainee documents that many believe would have shown that his Goverment had known that those Afghans turned over to the authorities by the Canadian military faced torture, he once more prorogued Parliament, this time on the pretext of 'recalibrating' his Government's agenda. Initially, this backfired on the Prime Minister, as Canadians expressed their outrage through protests, Facebook petitions, etc. But then two things happened: the devastating earthquake in Haiti, and the opening of the Winter Olympics in B.C. The ensuing public diversion of attention allowed the Harper regime to dodge another bullet.

There are numerous other examples in the book, but what does all of this suggest? That Harper is capable of using any opportunity for political benefit, which leads me to predict the following:

Given that he has already used the terrible recent tragedy in Japan to suggest now is not the time for an election, there is little doubt in my mind that he will use Canada's entry into the Libyan conflict to do two things. He will again suggest that a time of war, as he has called it, is not the time for political games by the opposition parties in trying to engineer an election; experienced and stable leadership in paramount in these perilous times. Also, he will take the opportunity to talk about how this sudden incursion into Libya demonstrates the need for up-to-the-date military aircraft, and so his Government's decision to spend untold billions on the 65 F-35 jets is yet another example of his wise and prescient leadership.

Once more, external events will likely save this Prime Minister's hide.

The Dark Shadow of Stephen Harper

The dark presence of Stephen Harper loomed heavily today during the Parliamentary Committee hearing into whether International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda should be held in contempt of Parliament for her earlier misleading and evasive answers regarding her department's defunding of KAIROS.

While the evaluation of her testimony will undoubtedly split along party lines, her 'answers' to the Committee's questions, in which she frequently simply proclaimed her probity, had all of the earmarks of a carefully scripted and carefully rehearsed performance, doubtlessly orchestrated by the Prime Minister's minions (a.k.a. The PMO). Her inability or unwillingness to answer questions with either a 'yes' or a 'no' without very animated prompting by M.P. Pat Martin bespoke the evasiveness of someone with something to hide. While watching this performance, I was reminded of all the evidence Lawrence Martin brings forth in Harperland that nothing happens in the Harper Regime without the explicit approval of Mr. Harper or his operatives.

Let the spin begin.

More on Harperland - Intolerance of Dissenting Opinion and Misuse of the RCMP

While I am a reasonably fast reader, especially when it comes to fiction, I sometimes have to slow down and digest small chunks of non-fiction that deal with the political arena, lest I do grievous harm to my blood pressure or mental state. Such was the case as I made my way through Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, dealing as it did with how the right wing exploits natural or human-made disasters to advance the cause of free-market economics, despite the damage that system can do to those upon whom it is imposed.

I am exercising similar caution with Lawrence Martin's fine political analysis, Harperland, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, confirms our worst fears and suspicions about the Harper regime. This morning I read a couple of parts that reflect both Harper's contempt for opposing viewpoints and his authoritarian bent:

Michael Biels, a history professor at the University of Ottawa, wrote a newspaper piece opposing Harper's decision to confer nation status on Quebec. Senator Marjory Lebreton, a former Mulroney loyalist who was named Senate leader for switching her fealty to Harper, contacted the university and demanded that Biels be disciplined and forced to issue an apology. Fortunately the university resisted her demands, saying that freedom of speech is a mainstay of academic institutions. Since the implications of this incident are obvious, no further comment from me is needed.

Many will recall the next example, which occurred when the Conservatives had a caucus meeting in Charlottetown in 2007. As was the tradition P.H. (Pre-Harper), journalists gathered in the lobby of the hotel to talk to caucus members as they passed by. The Prime Minister's Office, with its Harper-directed mandate to keep media contact to a minimum, ordered the RCMP to remove the reporters from the hotel. Besides this wholly inappropriate and probably illegal use of our federal police force for political purposes, this incident made me wonder anew exactly what role Harper played in another political misuse of police authority, the widespread violation of Charter Rights that occurred during the G20 Summit in Toronto last June.

While I strongly encourage everyone to read this fine book by Lawrence Martin, I do have to post this warning: CONSUMPTION OF ITS CONTENTS MAY POSE RISKS TO YOUR PHYSICAL OR EMOTIONAL HEALTH

A Refresher Course in Harper's Disdain for Democracy

I am currently reading Lawrence Martin's book Harperland, which anecdotally confirms some of our worst fears and suspicions about Stephen Harper and the Harper Government (see, even I've taken to referring to our government that way), and even though I no longer subscribe to The Globe and Mail, I do check it regularly for columns by Martin.

Today's piece, entitled On the road to the Harper government's tipping point, is a reminder of the myriad abuses of democracy that the Prime Minister is responsible for. At a time when many of us despair of the possibility of any change in the next federal election, it is useful to remember that the fate of our democratic traditions and institutions ultimately does reside in our hands, no matter how much the government seeks to undermine those traditions and institutions.