The Central Question

                                     
Elizabeth Thompson reported yesterday that those who are invited to attend one of Stephen Harper's "public" events are now required to keep their mouths shut:

Members of the public who attend Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s campaign events are being required to agree to a gag order before they can walk through the door, iPolitics has learned.

While attendance is by invitation only, and attendees are vetted by the Conservative Party before receiving a ticket, those who want to attend a campaign event in person are also being asked to agree to a number of conditions including not to transmit any description of the event or any images from it.

And his candidates are also being told to keep their mouths shut:

When Harper visited Belleville, Ontario on Friday, the local newspaper was given an advance heads up by a local Conservative organizer that he was coming but directed to only send a photographer and advised the prime minister would not take any questions from the media. Nor did the local Conservative candidate Jodie Jenkins agree to repeated requests from the Belleville Intelligencer for an interview.

Now, reporters are being barred from Harper's displays of "public" support:

On Tuesday, veteran Queens Park reporter Susanna Kelley was refused entry to a Harper campaign event. While she arrived 20 minutes before the start of the event, she was told she could not enter because RCMP sniffer dogs were not available to check her out.

All of which suggests that the prime minister's mental health has been seriously compromised. Which begs the question, "Do we really want a man who displays symptoms of full blown paranoia occupying the highest office in the land?"

Image: https://twitter.com/hashtag/farleymowat

Paranoia Unbound

Stephen Harper has always defended his abolition of the long gun registry by saying it prohibited farmers and hunters from using the tools of their trade. But last week, in Saskatoon, he said that Canadians needed guns to protect their castles:

“My wife’s from a rural area and obviously gun ownership wasn’t just for the farm, but was for a certain level of security when you’re a ways away from immediate police assistance,” he said.

He now suggests that Canadians are under attack from jihadists and from prisoners who will not be behind bars forever. Lawrence Martin writes:

The Conservatives were already pushing hot buttons everywhere – provocative rhetoric about the niqab, sabre-rattling on Russia and Iran, fear-mongering on terrorism, lock-’em-up-forever legislation on crime and punishment.

It’s hard to recall another time when we have witnessed such a flame-throwing approach to politics, policy and Parliament. Too often, the governing party resembles a band of belligerents rather than sage public servants. How many fights do they want to pick? Are they not concerned about the impact on the country’s social fabric, the dangers of pitting one Canadian against another?

We have known for a long time that Stephen Harper is paranoid. But there used to be a few people in his government who could keep him from going over the edge. No longer:

Other governments had men at the top who served as voices of reason or restraint – think of Don Mazankowski in Brian Mulroney’s government, or John Manley under Jean Chrétien. Mr. Harper has no such force of measured resistance in his office or cabinet, no one to keep his harder-edged ideological impulses in check.

And his acolytes in Parliament are sounding like Joe McCarthy:

 

Meanwhile over at the Commons public safety committee, critics of the government’s security legislation were being treated as if they themselves were threats to national security. Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney spoke out against the “so-called experts” raising concerns about the bill – a group that includes national security specialists, former prime ministers and former Supreme Court justices.

One witness from a civil liberties group was accusingly asked if she was “fundamentally opposed to taking terrorists off the streets.” Another Tory questioner said the executive director of Greenpeace’s opposition to new surveillance measures “makes me wonder if your organization is a national security threat.”

Mr. Harper now knows no restraints. He is Paranoia Unbound.

Full Blown Paranoia

Commentators are lining up to praise Jim Flaherty. Andrew Coyne is not among them. Under Flaherty, he writes, budgets ceased to have much meaning. They became masterpieces of obfuscation:

Under Flaherty, not only did budgets cease to be budgets — now they are Economic Action Plans — but they ceased to mean much of anything.

The budget and the estimates are not only expressed on different accounting systems, but parliamentarians are provided with no means of reconciling the two. Actual departmental spending, as recorded in the public accounts, routinely bears no resemblance to either.

More and more spending is now disguised as tax credits, materially understating both expenditures and revenues. Even the official spending figures have proved harder and harder to trust. Requests for details on spending cuts from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which departments are statutorily obliged to provide, have been rebuffed. Sometimes, as in the case of the F-35 program, they’ve simply been false.

And, instead of budgets, we got omnibus bills -- all supposedly in support of the economy. Those bills hid a mountain of contradictions:

Should we remember the Flaherty who, against every axiom of economics, cut the GST rather than cutting income taxes, then larded up the tax code with all manner of special tax breaks for favoured political interests? Or should we remember him as the tax cutter who made deep reductions in corporate tax rates, the policy innovator who brought in the Tax-Free Savings Account and the Working Income Tax Benefit, the free trader who eliminated all tariffs on intermediate goods?

Of course he was both, but the confusion underscores how far afield the Tories have wandered in the last eight years. Even after the recent cuts, Flaherty leaves with spending higher than it was at the start of his tenure — after inflation, after population growth. It wasn’t the GST cuts that drove us into deficit: had Flaherty only left spending where he found it, revenues would have exceeded spending in every year but 2009-10, when with the help of the recession it might have hit $10-billion — versus the $56-billion actual figure.

Of course, the real finance minister has always been Stephen Harper. Those contradictions are his contradictions. They are what the prime minister wants to hide. That is why Joe Oliver's swearing in yesterday was done in secret. Harper's paranoia is now full blown.

Afraid Of People

The Conservatives have introduced a bill to "reform" the civil service. Lawrence Martin writes that, essentially, it is a directive that non conservatives need not apply:

Call it the Loyalty Act. According to the bill brought forward by MP Mark Adler of the York Centre riding, if the disclosures turn up suspicious past political activities, MPs or senators could then demand an investigation of the offender or offenders.

What might those suspicious activities be? Who knows? The employee might have done something terrible in the past … like holding a membership in a non-Conservative party riding association.

If this all sounds very familiar, that's because it is. This government doesn't trust anyone who has not received its imprimatur. And there are lots of the anointed who have since proved they were unworthy of that imprimatur. So the solution has been to impose a code of silence on any and all who do their bidding:

This is the crew which faced a backbench revolt over MPs being gagged on the Commons’ floor, which sent out party interns to disrupt a speech by an opposition party leader, drafted an enemies’ list, muzzled Canadian scientists, tried to bring in a draconian union disclosure bill, and is demanding that employees at Library and Archives Canada and elsewhere sign highly-restrictive loyalty oaths.

This is the government which imposed gag orders, closure and time limits on committee work with near-record frequency; bars cabinet ministers on the hotseat from answering questions in the House; crushed Rights and Democracy and other groups which failed to follow its political line; suppressed reports; eliminated databases; cut down the census; used vast sums of taxpayers’ money to propagandize its own work and demonize opponents; is under the microscope for alleged suppression of voters’ rights; and ran a cover-up out of the PMO on the Senate expenses scam.

The bill is a product of full blown Conservative paranoia. And it speaks volumes about the psychological health of the man who leads the party. He's afraid of people.

Fearing Nothing But Fear

In a short piece for the Canadian International Council, Roland Paris asks the essential question about Prime Minister Harper: What Is Stephen Harper Afraid Of? It's been clear for some time that Harper, for all his bravado, trusts no one. That has been the source of the Nixonian parallels which Bob Rae and several commentators have noted.

But while his paranoia has been on display domestically for some time,  in a recent interview  with Macleans, Harper extended his dyspeptic view of the world to the international arena. Paris writes:

Harper’s world seems to be full of danger and struggle. In response to open-ended questions on foreign policy, he repeatedly came back to these themes. Most interestingly, he offered a Manichean vision of international relations as a struggle between good and bad, and of moral clarity as the greatest asset and most reliable guide to foreign policy.

This is nothing new. George W. Bush was not a man of nuance. Claiming that "you're either with us or against us," he marched his country into two wars -- the results of which are now pretty clear. But Harper goes much farther than Bush and asserts that war is essential to Canada's identity:

War and conflict figure prominently in this story. In the interview, Harper traced a connection between war and the emergence and development of the Canadian nation, arguing that the War of 1812 “essentially began to establish our sense of national identity” and was the “genesis of the geographically wide and culturally diverse nation we have today.” He then explained that Canada has consistently been “on the right side of important conflicts” – including the Second World War and the Cold War – “that have shaped the world and that are largely responsible for moving the world in the overall positive direction in which it is moving.” There is a theory of history encapsulated in this short statement – one that emphasizes, again, the enduring struggle between moral forces, and the transformative and redemptive potential of this struggle. These “big conflicts,” he explained, have been “the real defining moments for the country and for the world.”

There are many Canadians who would argue that the Canadian identity is precisely the opposite of  what Harper is selling. Like a child who is used to getting his way, the Prime Minister wants to remake the country in his own image.

It's all of a piece. For Harper politics is war. What he seeks both domestically and internationally is unconditional surrender. The problem is that Harper is an arm chair general. He has no real experience of war. If he had actually had that experience, he would know that his position and his vision are ludicrous.