For starters, he owes it to his party. Former Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber had it right. The Conservatives under Harper are no longer Conservatives — not fiscally, not socially, not politically. They are a lost tribe following a cult figure.
That figure has led them into record deficits, tawdry scandals and strange alliances like the one with China. Harper has turned conservatism into just another brand of political opportunism — power for power’s sake. It is no longer tethered to a philosophy — just to an individual.
Second, this PM is becoming something of an Mountie magnet. Under his watch, the RCMP raided Conservative Party headquarters in 2008 looking for evidence of election fraud going back to 2006; charges followed three years later. The national police charged one of Harper’s former senior aides with influence peddling. Bruce Carson’s court case is pending — in the meantime he’s apparently writing a tell-all book.
Along with the Sûreté du Québec and Interpol, the RCMP investigated and arrested another senior Harper appointee for fraud. This man was placed in front of Canada’s deepest intelligence secrets with no apparent qualifications and a dubious past.
And the Mounties aren’t the only ones lifting rocks. Investigators from Elections Canada are looking into scores of federal ridings for alleged voter suppression. Charges have been laid already against a Conservative Party worker. The want us to believe the whole thing was masterminded by 22 year-old Michael Sona, apparently the Professor Moriarty of election-stealing. No, really. A judge has found that CPC computer data was used in cases of attempted electoral fraud in ridings beyond Guelph — though without any material effect on the outcome of the vote.
Add to that the fact that Elections Canada recently sent a recommendation to the justice department regarding potential violations of the Canada Elections Act by the PM’s own parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro. Elections Canada doesn’t do that if it isn’t recommending charges.
And did I mention that ex-Harper candidate Saulie Zajdel was recently arrested in Quebec’s corruption probe for bribery, breach of trust and fraud? This is the guy Harper put on the federal payroll in a minister’s office after he was defeated in the 2011 election. The PM even made a joint appearance with Zajdel in a Montreal pub in March 2012.
The Mounties also are talking to Harper’s former chief-of-staff, Nigel Wright. For now, no one knows if he is a witness or a suspect — only that he is co-operating by handing over hundreds of pages of documents. As one of the central figures in the Senate scandal put it to me, “He has a big stake in keeping his name clear. Would he out the PM rather than fall on his sword?”
Third, this is a dude fresh out of ideas. Apart from pitching a free-trade deal with Antarctica, the PM has nothing to offer on the economy besides glowing self-appraisals, bad commercials on the public dime, and discount-rate foreign workers inflating his dismal job creation numbers. Cheaper phone bills — a populist Hail Mary critics say will come at the expense of Canadian companies and workers — is designed to do what the GST cut did: show voters this government is the champion of the little guy.
Fourth, there is the prime minister’s appallingly bad judgment combined with his toxic blame reflex. From Helena Guergis to Mike Duffy, Harper has spent more time washing his hands of people than Pontius Pilate. It was Harper who invited Patrick Brazeau, Pamela Wallin and Duffy to become senators. They didn’t volunteer. And it was the PM who turned Duffy and Wallin into human cash registers for the CPC. As mentioned above, it was Stephen Harper who put Arthur Porter, now in custody in Panama fighting extradition to this country, at the head of the Security Intelligence Review Committee. It was Stephen Harper who hired Bruce Carson, a man with a criminal record, as a top advisor.
It was Stephen Harper who left Senator Irving Gerstein in charge of the Conservative Party Fund even after the debacle of the In-and-Out scandal. That was the little contretemps in which charges against Gerstein and three other party officials were dropped in return for the party pleading guilty to exceeding election spending and submitting fraudulent election records.
This the Tories called a “victory”.
Since Senator Gerstein’s name appears in court documents filed by the RCMP in their investigation of the Nigel Wright/Mike Duffy affair, has the PM picked up the telephone and asked if Gerstein knew about the deal to use party funds to cancel Duffy’s debt, or that Wright himself would pay? As the top Tory in the land, wouldn’t that be the normal thing to do, especially when his own chief-of-staff was involved?
And speaking of normal things to do, where is the PM’s denunciation of the appalling results of Senator Pamela Wallin’s audit? Or is the prime minister’s silence a sign he was perfectly willing to go along with these party-beneficial abuses as long as they were hidden from public view, just like the million dollar-plus cheat of the In-and-Out scandal? Did Harper himself have a hand in issuing the marching orders for partisan senators? He was the one who, last February — on the same day he told Mike Duffy he had to repay his housing expenses — stood up in the House of Commons and declared that Wallin’s expenses had passed his personal smell test. A dead flounder would be fresh lavender by comparison.
Harper’s answer to everything? Everyone and anyone in hot water has simply let him down and disappointed him. This is a boss who stands behind you just long enough to give you a hearty shove when the going gets tough.
But no one should be fooled. What about the guy who put all these people in the positions they allegedly or actually abused? You don’t have to be a CIA intelligence analyst to see a pattern.
Fifth, Harper should call it a day because he has personally gutted any national dialogue in this country at a time when so many of the big issues facing Canada cry out for consultation and collegial action, not knee-capping unilateralism. Why don’t we have a national water strategy that would prevent a company like Nestle from stealing water from the Great Lakes or helping itself to B.C.’s groundwater? Why is there no national food policy? Why is there no national energy strategy, assuming there are those who don’t believe that “all tar sands, all the time, yippee-ki-yay” is a strategy? One reason is that the prime minister of Calgary refuses to meet the premiers. Without that chat, pipelines are pipedreams — and national unity just wind in the treetops.
Reason number six for Harper to go is the moral and diplomatic bankruptcy he has brought to Canada’s international affairs, highlighted by his choice of John Baird as the face of our diplomacy. Harper just isn’t interested in the wider world. Six hundred people are shot down in Cairo by a military junta after a coup and the man who likes to say Canada stands up for human rights is silent. In a tinderbox world crying out for statesmanship, Harper offers one-sided partisanship, disdain, or willful blindness. Which is why the issue for him is Coptic Christians, not all Egyptians. He has absolutely nothing to offer in the face of an international tragedy — unless you think cheap replacement workers for our striking professional Foreign Affairs officers qualifies.
The seventh reason for Stephen Harper to find a new job is that he has squandered the prestige of the prime minister’s office to the point where, on many files, he is merely part of the problem. Ask yourself if the man too big to talk to Theresa Spence, and too small to apologize for government medical experiments on native children, has any chance of reconciling longstanding differences between the government of Canada and First Nations peoples. But there is an even more ominous question: Does he even want to? I don’t think so.
And that brings me to the eighth reason Harper should pack his bags. He doesn’t much like people.
And as strange as this may seem, he doesn’t much like politics either. At least not the part most of us would associate with the world’s second oldest profession — meeting people, experiencing the world, trying to make things better for the people whose affairs you temporarily hold in trust. As Preston Manning told me, the Stephen Harper he knew didn’t enjoy constituency work, didn’t enjoy speaking, didn’t enjoy foreign travel. He was a one-issue operator — the economy. The CEO prime minister has shown how little he has to bring to the wider complexities of running a country. What else can you say about a public figure living in the 21st century who thinks the environmental movement is about poor countries screwing money out of rich ones?
Reason number nine for getting out of Dodge is Stephen Harper’s choice of fishing buddies. No time to meet the premiers, no time to meet labour leaders, no time to meet child-walkers from Hudson Bay — but nine hours to go fishing with a beer-swilling bully with a thing for thugs.
The final reason Stephen Harper should pack it in comes down to an axiom of all middle-age governments burying their belt buckles in paunch: When all credibility gone, there is always a brisk market in press secretaries. Seven, isn’t it? Can’t wait for number eight.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
No comments:
Post a Comment