Watching the last days of this parliamentary session is like taking in the demise of a skinny-assed bull at the hands of an incompetent matador – messy, cruel, and slightly disgusting.
You know the bull will soon drop to its knees, pink froth at the nostrils, eyes rolling up inside the skull, instinctively thrashing the air with sluggish horns. It doesn’t know the contest is now a formality – like democracy in Canada.
Shut down in committee, de-financed by legislation, closed off in debate and out-voted on every item of the Harper government’s undeclared agenda (as measured against the party’s 2011 election platform), the opposition bellows and staggers along. The House of Commons is a grotty dust bowl where the bull always dies ingloriously.
Yes, the opposition, official and otherwise, has been reduced to thrashing around in search of a message that will resonate. A delay here, a fleeting embarrassment inflicted on the government there. On rare occasions, there is an editorial pat on the head from a press that has the odd twinge of conscience over its central preoccupation – shamelessly kissing the third-rate matador’s butt. Otherwise, the non-Harpers have that sinking feeling that comes from knowing that their horns will never really make contact, that their opponent has swarms of banderilleros, picadors and, of course, that cape and sword called a majority government to finish the job at will.
In many ways, the Harper legacy will come down to this: how much can he get away with? Incumbency furnishes a speedy getaway car. From a legislative perspective, Harper might as well be King Tut. He can do whatever he wants for the next three years or so. Bill C-38, which makes the War Measures Act look like a piece of legislation declaring a public holiday, demonstrates just how aware this PM is of the total power vested in him. And how oblivious he is to Canada’s institutional integrity. One-third of C-38′s monstrous abuse of process is dedicated to dismantling environmental legislation that was never mentioned in the 2011 Tory master plan.
Harper gets it. It’s now or never, baby.
But what about all those spectators sitting in the arena watching the bull’s slow and sloppy death in the dust? Will the daily bludgeoning of democratic institutions become the new normal or will it offend? Might it even become the proffered evidence of Stephen Harper’s superiority and fitness to govern? After all, this is a torero who goes for ears, nose and tail with brio.
Some commentators have tripped over themselves equating the PM’s uncivil bloodlust with political virtuosity. If that view carries the day, it will be parliament that the public ends up despising, not parliament’s usurpers. Far fetched? Just over a year ago, a party fresh from being found in contempt of Parliament was rewarded with a majority government.
So far, most of the financial press and the Big Thumbsuckers from the mainstream media (with wonderful exceptions like Canadian Press), have more or less ignored if not endorsed Canada’s odd transition from a majority government to a virtual one-party system. There was a time when a $10 billion lie about a government acquisitions program like the F-35 would have sunk the QM2 in the media. Now it wouldn’t swamp a dory. There was a time when if a minister misled the House (i.e., lied his brains out at the behest of Dear Leader), the stories would keep coming until he was going.
Now, nobody goes, and stories big and small disappear down the rabbit hole of the 15-minute news wheel. Peter MacKay, Bev Oda, and Christian Paradis still have chauffeurs, $16 orange juice, and work the public teat like maniacs at the pump. (I have it on good authority that the Christian Paradis wing over at the ethics commissioner’s office is almost finished.)
Gazebo Tony is in charge of transparency in government – irony in hot pursuit of farce.
Jim Flaherty, like Ebenezer Scrooge in a pin-striped suit, openly talks about balancing the budget by putting the elderly and disabled to work, and yes, all those lazy young Indians. “Are there no workhouses, are there no prisons?”
Peter Kent, ah Peter Kent, what can I say but recite a few lines from the seductive hunchback of Twickenham who saucily penned them for the collar of a pooch of the peerage: “I am His Highness’ dog at Kew: Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?” Never mind Peter, everyone knows.
How ridiculous can it get? The other day a Globe and Mail pundit opined that the deciding factor in whether or not Stephen Harper wins the next election will be the “tone” of his government from here out to 2015. That’s like saying the trouble with John Edwards was his penchant for pricey haircuts, or that Conrad Black’s braising in a Chicago courthouse was the result of lawyers not of the first rank representing the blameless fellow.
Stephen Harper’s gamble comes down to this — do Canadians give a hoot about the fact that their democracy is now a mere formality. Do they accept the Nixonian proposition that when your leader does something wrong, it’s actually right because he’s your leader? In other words, do we, like the wall-eyed People of the Corn in the Republican Party south of the border, believe that the office sanctifies the man?
Harper has concluded that with the proper balance of fear, marketing, and suppression of dissent, he can successfully argue that a small pox scar is really a dimple. Look what climate change deniers have done with a handful of zealots and scads of money from people like the Koch brothers.
But there is only so much fear you can put into people, just so much, and no more. And when people stop fearing you, that dimple starts looking like a small pox scar after all.
Did these guys rig an election? Are they letting the FBI loose in Canada because their real intention is to erase the border? Are they crushing organized labour to save the economy or just some money for their corporate allies? Do they work for Canadians or for Big Oil? Are the bombs, drones, jets, tanks, armored vehicles and ships, all $500 billion worth, about protecting Canada? Or are we turning into Northern Command placing our order against the next escapade?
And what about the individual cases? Who could be happy about the fact, reported by Jennifer Ditchburn of the Canadian Press, that Jason Kenney’s account of the fake citizenship show on Sun TV was just as fake as the show itself? It was Kenney who said that the saga of the Dirty Half Dozen, those Citizenship and Immigration employees who performed as fake new citizens in the government infomercial on Sun TV, were pressed into service without the knowledge of his office or execs over at Peladeau’s Folly who still have their Harper T-shirts.
Government emails obtained by CP tell a different story — that senior government officials were adamant that Sun News not only knew that CIC employees were part of the bogus show, but that its executives were actively involved in the decision to use them because only three authentic citizens could be mustered for the occasion.
Sadly, the departmental account of what actually happened was suppressed in favour of the minister’s Orwellian version in which some poor, brow-beaten bureaucrat took the fall, complete with the show trial confession exonerating the guilty. Kenney is now doing his imitation of Ptolemy trying to prove that the sun orbits around the earth by adding more circles to his mendacious explanation. Pinocchio with power is a dark proposition.
And who can be happy that Canada’s sad-sack defence minister, a man working on second chance number 59, is back in the news trying to drive round pegs into square holes. It has been revealed that Peter MacKay’s office chastised DND for not showing enough zeal in defending the minister when he got caught diverting a Search and Rescue helicopter in Newfoundland to get a VIP lift to the Gander airport. It was the minister, you will recall, who made up all those self-serving stories about getting hoisted out of some rich guy’s salmon camp in the line of duty. What upset MacKay’s office was not that DND didn’t vigorously “defend” the minister when the story broke, but that it didn’t lie for him.
Stephen Harper’s answer to his “image” problem is ruthless messaging — the kind of stuff the more whacked out climate deniers in the U.S. have gotten up to. They recently put a picture of the Unabomber on a billboard to make the point that serial killers and crazies are the kind of people who believed in climate change. Outrageous, yes, but it brought in $5 million worth of what was called “earned media.” So how surprising is it that the Harper government employs a version of the same strategy on its critics — with us or with the child-pornographers, environmentalists as dangerous radicals, Maude Barlow as Lady Frankenstein.
Still, people who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they don’t agree with operate in a fickle forum. Today you’re dispatching bulls like there’s tomorrow. Suddenly you catch a horn or the crowd turns against you. Democracy is a little like water: you don’t miss it until the well runs dry.
Getting thirsty?
Original Article
Source: iPolitics
Author: Michael Harris
You know the bull will soon drop to its knees, pink froth at the nostrils, eyes rolling up inside the skull, instinctively thrashing the air with sluggish horns. It doesn’t know the contest is now a formality – like democracy in Canada.
Shut down in committee, de-financed by legislation, closed off in debate and out-voted on every item of the Harper government’s undeclared agenda (as measured against the party’s 2011 election platform), the opposition bellows and staggers along. The House of Commons is a grotty dust bowl where the bull always dies ingloriously.
Yes, the opposition, official and otherwise, has been reduced to thrashing around in search of a message that will resonate. A delay here, a fleeting embarrassment inflicted on the government there. On rare occasions, there is an editorial pat on the head from a press that has the odd twinge of conscience over its central preoccupation – shamelessly kissing the third-rate matador’s butt. Otherwise, the non-Harpers have that sinking feeling that comes from knowing that their horns will never really make contact, that their opponent has swarms of banderilleros, picadors and, of course, that cape and sword called a majority government to finish the job at will.
In many ways, the Harper legacy will come down to this: how much can he get away with? Incumbency furnishes a speedy getaway car. From a legislative perspective, Harper might as well be King Tut. He can do whatever he wants for the next three years or so. Bill C-38, which makes the War Measures Act look like a piece of legislation declaring a public holiday, demonstrates just how aware this PM is of the total power vested in him. And how oblivious he is to Canada’s institutional integrity. One-third of C-38′s monstrous abuse of process is dedicated to dismantling environmental legislation that was never mentioned in the 2011 Tory master plan.
Harper gets it. It’s now or never, baby.
But what about all those spectators sitting in the arena watching the bull’s slow and sloppy death in the dust? Will the daily bludgeoning of democratic institutions become the new normal or will it offend? Might it even become the proffered evidence of Stephen Harper’s superiority and fitness to govern? After all, this is a torero who goes for ears, nose and tail with brio.
Some commentators have tripped over themselves equating the PM’s uncivil bloodlust with political virtuosity. If that view carries the day, it will be parliament that the public ends up despising, not parliament’s usurpers. Far fetched? Just over a year ago, a party fresh from being found in contempt of Parliament was rewarded with a majority government.
So far, most of the financial press and the Big Thumbsuckers from the mainstream media (with wonderful exceptions like Canadian Press), have more or less ignored if not endorsed Canada’s odd transition from a majority government to a virtual one-party system. There was a time when a $10 billion lie about a government acquisitions program like the F-35 would have sunk the QM2 in the media. Now it wouldn’t swamp a dory. There was a time when if a minister misled the House (i.e., lied his brains out at the behest of Dear Leader), the stories would keep coming until he was going.
Now, nobody goes, and stories big and small disappear down the rabbit hole of the 15-minute news wheel. Peter MacKay, Bev Oda, and Christian Paradis still have chauffeurs, $16 orange juice, and work the public teat like maniacs at the pump. (I have it on good authority that the Christian Paradis wing over at the ethics commissioner’s office is almost finished.)
Gazebo Tony is in charge of transparency in government – irony in hot pursuit of farce.
Jim Flaherty, like Ebenezer Scrooge in a pin-striped suit, openly talks about balancing the budget by putting the elderly and disabled to work, and yes, all those lazy young Indians. “Are there no workhouses, are there no prisons?”
Peter Kent, ah Peter Kent, what can I say but recite a few lines from the seductive hunchback of Twickenham who saucily penned them for the collar of a pooch of the peerage: “I am His Highness’ dog at Kew: Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?” Never mind Peter, everyone knows.
How ridiculous can it get? The other day a Globe and Mail pundit opined that the deciding factor in whether or not Stephen Harper wins the next election will be the “tone” of his government from here out to 2015. That’s like saying the trouble with John Edwards was his penchant for pricey haircuts, or that Conrad Black’s braising in a Chicago courthouse was the result of lawyers not of the first rank representing the blameless fellow.
Stephen Harper’s gamble comes down to this — do Canadians give a hoot about the fact that their democracy is now a mere formality. Do they accept the Nixonian proposition that when your leader does something wrong, it’s actually right because he’s your leader? In other words, do we, like the wall-eyed People of the Corn in the Republican Party south of the border, believe that the office sanctifies the man?
Harper has concluded that with the proper balance of fear, marketing, and suppression of dissent, he can successfully argue that a small pox scar is really a dimple. Look what climate change deniers have done with a handful of zealots and scads of money from people like the Koch brothers.
But there is only so much fear you can put into people, just so much, and no more. And when people stop fearing you, that dimple starts looking like a small pox scar after all.
Did these guys rig an election? Are they letting the FBI loose in Canada because their real intention is to erase the border? Are they crushing organized labour to save the economy or just some money for their corporate allies? Do they work for Canadians or for Big Oil? Are the bombs, drones, jets, tanks, armored vehicles and ships, all $500 billion worth, about protecting Canada? Or are we turning into Northern Command placing our order against the next escapade?
And what about the individual cases? Who could be happy about the fact, reported by Jennifer Ditchburn of the Canadian Press, that Jason Kenney’s account of the fake citizenship show on Sun TV was just as fake as the show itself? It was Kenney who said that the saga of the Dirty Half Dozen, those Citizenship and Immigration employees who performed as fake new citizens in the government infomercial on Sun TV, were pressed into service without the knowledge of his office or execs over at Peladeau’s Folly who still have their Harper T-shirts.
Government emails obtained by CP tell a different story — that senior government officials were adamant that Sun News not only knew that CIC employees were part of the bogus show, but that its executives were actively involved in the decision to use them because only three authentic citizens could be mustered for the occasion.
Sadly, the departmental account of what actually happened was suppressed in favour of the minister’s Orwellian version in which some poor, brow-beaten bureaucrat took the fall, complete with the show trial confession exonerating the guilty. Kenney is now doing his imitation of Ptolemy trying to prove that the sun orbits around the earth by adding more circles to his mendacious explanation. Pinocchio with power is a dark proposition.
And who can be happy that Canada’s sad-sack defence minister, a man working on second chance number 59, is back in the news trying to drive round pegs into square holes. It has been revealed that Peter MacKay’s office chastised DND for not showing enough zeal in defending the minister when he got caught diverting a Search and Rescue helicopter in Newfoundland to get a VIP lift to the Gander airport. It was the minister, you will recall, who made up all those self-serving stories about getting hoisted out of some rich guy’s salmon camp in the line of duty. What upset MacKay’s office was not that DND didn’t vigorously “defend” the minister when the story broke, but that it didn’t lie for him.
Stephen Harper’s answer to his “image” problem is ruthless messaging — the kind of stuff the more whacked out climate deniers in the U.S. have gotten up to. They recently put a picture of the Unabomber on a billboard to make the point that serial killers and crazies are the kind of people who believed in climate change. Outrageous, yes, but it brought in $5 million worth of what was called “earned media.” So how surprising is it that the Harper government employs a version of the same strategy on its critics — with us or with the child-pornographers, environmentalists as dangerous radicals, Maude Barlow as Lady Frankenstein.
Still, people who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they don’t agree with operate in a fickle forum. Today you’re dispatching bulls like there’s tomorrow. Suddenly you catch a horn or the crowd turns against you. Democracy is a little like water: you don’t miss it until the well runs dry.
Getting thirsty?
Original Article
Source: iPolitics
Author: Michael Harris
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