The Harper Kremlin
Crossposted from christindal.ca.
It's hard to believe how much I used to agree with Stephen Harper when he was in opposition. Don't get me wrong--I almost never saw things the same way as he did on matters of policy. But on process and Parliament, Opposition Leader Stephen Harper was absolutely right to call for more transparency and accountability, and, specifically, for the Prime Minister to respect Parliamentarians and refrain from centralizing power and stifling dissent. When the Opposition Leader became PM part of me thought, "oh well, at least we'll see some positive action with regards to governance." If you ever want to accuse me of being naive, there's your proof.
Since being elected, Harper has made protester-choking Jean Chrétien look like the king of listening and consensus-building. After awhile, however, all of the evidence becomes overwhelming, and we forget old scandals as new ones take their place. In today's Globe, Lawrence Martin reminds us of this damning chronology, saying that "in just 20 months, [Harper] has become master of everything he's touched. To search the annals for another Canadian PM who accumulated so much cold-blooded authority in such a short time is to come up empty."
- One of the first things Harper did was to eliminate the position of Deputy Prime Minister, kicking off the "storyline...of imperious control."
- The Conservatives created a 200 page manual instructing committee chairs on how to disrupt and sabotage the mechanics of our democracy, including storming out of meetings if necessary (which, in time, they did).
- Last August, the government ordered the RCMP to remove journalists from the Charlottetown hotel lobby where caucus was meeting so that they couldn't ask nettlesome questions.
- Unlike past governments, the Harper government does not reveal the dates of cabinet meetings in advance, making it next to impossible for the media to know to show up and ask questions afterwards and further ensuring that MPs will not be allowed to speak. Martin adds that "our diplomats are in the same boat. The extent of their gagging is also said to be unprecedented."
- If journalists want to ask the government a question, they must do so from a pre-approved list. "Journalists got an early sense of what was coming when Mr. Harper tried to ban them from covering ceremonies for soldiers killed in Afghanistan."
Looking over my past posts, I'm also reminded of when Harper said that questioning the government's foreign policy amounts to having a "passion for the Taliban," when he tried to hide a pay raise for senior officials, when he hypocritically appointed committee chairs instead of allowing them to be elected by parliament, when his government bought positive news headlines, etc.
Then, Martin explains, last week saw a rush of evidence to further substantiate our concerns about Harper's leadership:
- Last week, only two cabinet ministers were allowed to speak to the media about the throne speech. All 123 of his remaining MPs were silenced, unable to represent those who elected them.
- Last week, we found out about plans to spend two million of our dollars on "robust physical and information security measures." That's code for a government-controlled media briefing centre where Harper would be able to more easily curtail the press' pesky freedom. (These plans were abandoned and denied as soon as they were discovered.)
- Last week, accusations and evidence emerged that the Conservative party has been using a partisan party database to track government constituency work. There are a number of problems with that, the primary one being that it's illegal.
- Last week, the duly elected executive in Bill Casey's riding was told that even if Conservative members want him to be their candidate again, Harper will not allow it.
Then, today we learn that the elected riding president has been removed in accordance with Harper's wishes. There's also a report in today's paper that under this government compliance with the Access to Information Act has "both slowed down and decreased," a fact which "goes against the Harper government's promise to bring additional openness and transparency to Ottawa in the 2006 election campaign." This extreme centralization of power and interference with the media's ability to do its job is perhaps more reminiscent of Putin's Russia than any other "democracy." Martin concludes with these words:
- The march of democracy in this country is intriguing. Mr. Chrétien took a protester by the throat. This PM, who came out of the populist Reform Party movement, has practically the entire government by the throat.
It is fascinating, if not chilling to see his shrewd acts unfold. There are many who think his strategy, a sort of reverse
glasnost, is succeeding. There are others who think that building his version of the Kremlin in Ottawa is not what the people had mind.- Chris Tindal's blog
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Comments
Harper the Hypocrite
Like his role model, G.W. Bush, Mr, Harper seems to have no qualms about saying one thing - what he believes we want to hear - and then doing something entirely different. Where I come from, that's called "lying."
Oh - and the real reason he wants the body bags from Afghanistan to be hidden from public view: when Canadians see the true cost, support for war diminishes. This is one of the reasons that ending the Vietnam War became a priority in the U.S.: Americans saw how many of their boys were dying. Mr. Bush and Mr. Harper learned from that experience that concealing the truth is necessary to push an unpopular agenda, so they both have ruled that the bodies be unloaded in darkness. Mr. Bush has been more successful in carrying this through, of course.
This willingness to deceive in order to hide his agenda makes Mr. Harper truly dangerous, especially given the climate crisis we are facing - and his clear disbelief or disregard for the consequences we are facing.
Brian Gordon
Nominated Candidate, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca
Green Party of Canada
Trained Presenter
An Inconvenient Truth
People - Planet - Prosperity
The New Green Economy
Re: Harper the Hypocrite
It is just as easy to say that Harper wanted to keep the media from entering a frenzy every time a soldier died. I have read soldiers in Afganistan complain that the only time the media wants to do a story about their mission is when someone gets killed (i.e. "if it bleeds, it leads".) I don't think it does our party any good at all to make hysterical comments.
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong." H.L. Mencken
Are you saying I was being hysterical?
Bill?
The point is that, from the point-of-view of a government that wants to conceal the effects of a war, hiding the bodies is the way to go. Mr. Bush does it, Mr. Harper effectively put the decision on the families. Mr. Harper could just have easily invited the media to Afghanistan in order to focus them on the good things Canadians are doing there.
Brian Gordon
Nominated Candidate, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca
Green Party of Canada
Trained Presenter
An Inconvenient Truth
People - Planet - Prosperity
The New Green Economy
"Put the decision on the families"?
I am simply saying that we should not be "playing to the cheap seats" as a party, but rather trying to consistently work out the subtle nuances of these and other issues.
As for "putting the decision on the families", my understanding is that he tried to ban the media from all military funerals, but that the families of many of the soldiers freaked about this and said that freedom of the press was one of the things that the soldiers were fighting for, so he backed down and left it up to the survivors. As far as I know, this was not allowed in the USA, where the ban was kept in place no matter how much the families opposed it.
But to give the Devil his due, the media are a bunch of morons when it comes to things like this. They will simply ignore 100 stories about other things---no matter how objectively important---in order to get one sound bite of a teary-eyed mother weeping over a casket. That is because, as McLuhan said, "the medium is the message" when it comes to tv news. Part of the reason why Harper is such a control freak about the media is because he can say, with a great deal of justification IMHO, that he was unjustly vilified by the media when he was in the Reform Party.
I have not worked for the GPC for 20 years to sit idly by while it is "dumbed down" to the same level of mendacity as all the other parties.
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong." H.L. Mencken
Chris -- Great Post!!
Hey Chris,
As always a great post!
Jim
Every government has had to live with a stupidly hostile press.
Lambton Kent Middlesex EDA (SW Ontario)
I have to agre with Bill,that the media do appear to have less than no sense of proportion, no sense of fairness, and far less than no thought as to the negative effect their own stories will have.
We are not all that well served by a media that is responsible to nobody trying to run the country from the sidelines with so little balance of their own.
Every government that I have observed has deserved criticism that it has not received, but none of them have earned the sensationalized treatement of the media on so many relatively trivial matters.
Dead soldiers are a good media focus, for the media's interest. It does nothing to discuss whether we are building a more peaceful world with our actions, or whether we are building another generation of fanatical opponents. It does nothing to discuss what needs to be done either by Canada, by Afghanis, or by the UN. It only tugs on heart strings, but it tugs on both ends of those heart strings. Some will want to stop OUR bloodshed while others will more respond to the harm we are inflicting, not on the enemy, but on our allies by giving our enemies justification for their ongoing drive to get foreign forces out of their country.
The problem here is thaqt all combatants have a history that says they are right, that they absolutely must not fail. Everyone has virtue on their side, and nobody is getting together to discuss anything. We all know that the other side would only discuss anything as long as they are winning. They know it just as well of us.
Ultimately we can continue to war against 'the enemy' until we have nobody left to discuss anything with. This will establish a regime that has no experience in discussing and deciding via democratic means, and very frankly it will have little reason to develop any experience along those lines. The only result of such behavior would be that someone else's views may prevail over their own.