There Are Reasons For Harper's Slide

                                                http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Six months ago, it looked like the prime minister was well on his way to his fourth mandate. The public supported his entry into the war on ISIS. They were scared of the terrorists Mr. Harper said were just outside the gates. And the economy seemed to be doing well. But, Michael Warren writes, things have changed:

Today we are losing that war and public support has dropped dramatically. It’s becoming clear the only way to defeat ISIS militarily is to put allied troops on the ground. But that’s too controversial to contemplate before the election. Chances are the Islamic State will consolidate its territory in Iraq, Syria and Libya and continue terrorizing western countries at will. Over the next few months Canadian voters will be reminded of this grim reality on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, the terrorist attacks on Parliament Hill and in Quebec created a climate of fear, amplified and exploited by the government, which provided the prime minister political permission to re-craft the balance between Canadian freedoms and security by writing tougher anti-terrorism laws. Eighty two per cent of Canadians favoured the idea of such legislation. But support had been cut in half by the time the final Bill C-51 was introduced. It was widely criticized for giving CSIS too much power without sufficient oversight and for encroaching on our freedoms and privacy.

And what of the economy? When the Conservatives met their pledge to balance the budget, and with a $7-billion surplus no less, the government’s economic strength seemed unassailable. Add to that the Tories’ promise to spend the surplus on a slate of populist policies — income-splitting, increased limits on tax free savings accounts, expanded child care benefits — and the Conservative outlook could hardly have been sunnier. But for many voters that’s a distant memory.

Since then the opposition parties have advanced their own proposals for income transfers and child-care schemes that have broad voter appeal. Moreover, Canada’s economy shrunk for the first time in four years in the first quarter. Even Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz described the economy’s first three-month performance as “atrocious.” 

Add to that the revelations which have come out of the Duffy trial and the prime minister starts to look like the Incarnation of Incompetence. There are three months to go before the election. Recent history suggests that a lot can happen in three months. Things can change dramatically. So making predictions about victory are certainly premature.

Just ask Stephen Harper.

A Grave Mistake

                                               http://news.nationalpost.com/

The story of the Harper Party's rejection of Ches Crosbie's candidacy in Avalon tells you much more about Stephen Harper than it does about Mr. Crosbie. Stephen Maher writes:

It is part of the culture of the distinct society of Newfoundland to have a bit of fun, to mock oneself, one’s fellows and, especially, one’s betters, who must either laugh or lose face.

So Crosbie put on a Stephen Harper wig, a kilt, a seal-skin vest, took up a wooden sword and performed the final, bloody scene of Macbeth, in which, in this version, Stephen MacHarper confronts Mike MacDuffy, swearing he will not “yield to one of Senate born.”

“Before my body, I throw my political friends,” Crosbie declaimed. “Lay on, MacDuffy, And damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ ”

Mr. Harper makes jokes at other people's expense. But if there's one thing he won't -- or can't -- do, it's to laugh at himself. And the National Candidate Selection Committee doesn't believe in laughing at Harper's expense, either:

Crosbie didn’t learn that some humourless mainlanders disliked this until Monday, when he got an email from Dustin van Vugt, executive director of the Conservative Party of Canada, informing him that the National Candidate Selection Committee had held a meeting.

“The NCSC has disallowed your candidacy as a potential nomination contestant for the Conservative Party of Canada,” Van Vugt wrote.

There were three reasons, the party said: the MacHarper skit, his role in a lawsuit by Labrador residential school survivors and an innocuous interview he gave to the Hill Times, the newspaper that covers Parliament Hill.

The problem, you see, is that Crosbie claimed he would be an independent voice for the good burghers of Avalon. The Harper Party will have none of that. Maher writes:

I don’t think Harper’s palace guard cares about the Crosbies or about Newfoundland’s tradition of satirical humour.  They care about winning, and they have a script to follow. It calls for candidates to stand silent while Harper stands at centre stage, sternly warning that only he can protect our families from terrorists.

Yet another reminder that Canada is ruled by a paranoid, humourless man. Extending his stay at 24 Sussex would be a grave mistake.

They Never Offer Bribes

                                                 http://news.nationalpost.com/

This week, Pierre Poilievre made sure that the public saw him handing out cheques. Michael Harris writes:

There he was, in all his obsequious glory, standing beside the massive press run of the expanded Universal Child Care Benefit outbound cash flow. It looked like a reprinting of the Oxford English Dictionary, so thick were the sheaves of cheques. One hundred and sixty bucks a month for kids under six — and a brand new $60 a month for those 6 and over. Mind the fine print; the UCCB is taxable in the case of the lower income spouse. All is never quite what it seems to be in Harperland.

It's not a new strategy. It's been Standard Operating Procedure for a long time:

The hijacking of public money for private political use is not new with this crowd. You will recall that the Harperites actually posed beside giant ceremonial cheques bearing the logo of the Conservative Party back in 2009.

MPs like Colin Mayes, Larry Miller and James Bezan all tried to take political ownership of government funding cheques. The message was clear. Remember who butters your bread, forgetting it seems, that both this bread and this butter are publicly owned.

And, of course, there is that one billion dollars that has been spent on "public service announcements:"

Here is another one. The Harper government has spent nearly a billion public dollars in party advertising thinly disguised as public service announcements. It is a scandal much bigger than Ad Sponsorship, and includes the obscene costs associated with the PM’s nauseating photo-ops. That’s where the already-announced gets announced again and again, and then re-announced by lesser mortals at smaller PR events across the country.

It's all about buying votes. The Mike Duffy trial has made abundantly clear that, in Harperland, you can be charged with accepting a bribe, but nobody will offer you one.

Alone At Last

                                               http://www.quickmeme.com/

Stephen Harper's allies are abandoning him. At last count, 46 of the 166 Conservatives who rode into Ottawa in 2011 have left the Harper stable. Andrew Coyne writes:

It isn’t just the half-dozen ministers who have, just months before the election, announced their retirements, in some cases (John Baird) without so much as a day’s notice, in others (James Moore) without a word of acknowledgment from the prime minister. It isn’t the two dozen other MPs who will not be running again, or the notable absence of star candidates among the new recruits.

It is the palpable sense of other ministers maintaining their distance, in rhetorical terms at least, unwilling to indulge in the harshly partisan attacks he demands of his subordinates. The undying loyalists, the ones whose careers he promoted on just this basis — the Pierre Poilievres, the Chris Alexanders — will stick with him to the end. But that is pretty much all that remains, a dwindling palace guard of zealous staffers and the callower ministers. “The Harper government” used to be a branding exercise. It is now an almost literal description.

Harper has become, in Michael Harris' phrase, a Party of One. The numbers are bad and they keep getting worse:

Averaging the polls together, the ThreeHundredEight.com poll-tracking website shows the Tories sliding steadily all through the last two months, from a pallid 32 per cent at the beginning of May to a dismal 29 per cent at the end of June. Worse, only about five to seven per cent of non-Conservative voters would consider them as their second choice. 60 per cent of voters tell EKOS the government is moving in the wrong direction, versus just 32 per cent for the contrary.

Still, the folks in charge say it's steady as she goes:

The strategy is to stay the course, make no sudden moves, until voters return to their senses. Yet there are distinct signs of jitters in Conservative central command. Recent days have witnessed a pro-Harper political action committee launching and shutting down in the space of a week, followed by the production of an anti-Trudeau attack ad so grotesquely over the top — it features photos of ISIL victims just before their execution — it had even stalwart Tory supporters denouncing it.

Only the true believers are left -- and their numbers are dropping. Mr. Harper may, indeed, find himself alone at last.

Canada Day 2015

                                         http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.ca

Yesterday, Greece defaulted on its creditors. We are in yet another financial crisis. Jim Stanford writes:

No one can predict how the European drama will unfold next. Or how other after-effects of the 2008-2009 crisis (such as the coming rise in U.S. interest rates) will shake still-fragile economies around the world. What is certain, however, is that globalized, financialized, polarized capitalism is incapable of finding the stable and efficient equilibrium fantasized by conventional neoclassical economists. Repeated outbreaks of credit-fuelled, speculative exuberance are inevitably followed by panic, retrenchment, and recession. This will keep happening. We don't know precisely when the next crisis will occur, nor its precise proximate cause. But we do know another crisis will occur, with 100 per cent certainty. And we do know that the 99 per cent of humanity who do not possess enough financial or business wealth to support themselves without actually working for a living, will be asked again to bear the brunt of the subsequent pain and dislocation.

On this Canada Day, we need to remember that those who presently hold the reins of power are manically devoted to the same neo-classical economics that has caused our recurring financial crises. And it doesn't have to be that way:

This pattern of repeating crisis and growing polarization is hard-wired into the DNA of modern capitalism: an economic system organized around the self-serving decisions of a surprisingly small and privileged segment of society. This crisis, no different from the last or the next, was not an unpredictable, unpreventable, one-off occurrence: a "black swan" event. Rather, it was the predictable, preventable result of an economy that puts the interests of financial wealth above the interests of the vast majority in working and supporting themselves. And it will happen again, unless and until we change the fundamental rules of the game.

Stanford writes that,  just as Naomi Klein suggested in The Shock Doctrine, these crises are organized for the benefit of the fabulously wealthy few:

She showed how ruling elites regularly take advantage of moments of fear and confusion, arising at moments of economic, social, or even natural disaster, to enforce painful changes that they were preparing for years -- but that most people would not tolerate under "normal" circumstances.

Today is a day to reflect on what we've become. And what we've become -- particularly in the last decade -- is an ongoing tragedy.

Paying To Be Lobotomized

                                             http://www.bewareofthedoug.com/

We are awash in images, Chris Hedges writes. And that makes it easy for corporate propagandists to succeed. It's been that way for quite awhile:

The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic engagement and resistance to corporate power.

We have become, Hannah Arendt wrote, "atomized" -- unconnected and illiterate individuals. And, as long as we are unconnected, corporate power brokers will succeed by simply numbing and dumbing down the nation's citizens:

Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a steady stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the dictator’s speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that were not under the iron control of the party.

The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads, why censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.

The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within the parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and clichés, are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the public unconsciously ingests them. And the isolated public in a totalitarian society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety, fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of state propaganda—content, respectful of authority, just, economically secure and free—is mistaken for reality.  

In Canada, all this has been accomplished with public money. We are paying to be lobotomized.

Better Than The News

                                                  http://ici.radio-canada.ca/

HarperPAC had a lifespan of one week. Given Mr. Harper's use of American political consultants and tactics, it's passing strange that an idea which has so much currency south of the border should die so quickly in the Great White North. If you wonder why the political action committee did not make it into the prime minister's arsenal, Michael Harris writes, remember that Mr. Harper seeks control -- of everything:

In less than a week, three of Harper’s old buddies, one of whom shared a past with him at the National Citizens’ Coalition, pulled the plug on HarperPAC. Not only that, but they promised to return all the money they had collected. (I would like to see the list of donors.)

Why did they do that?

In a word, they were poaching the Harper brand and Himself was not pleased. It was like stealing the formula for Coca-Cola. In fact, Harper was reportedly so displeased that the party and the prime minister were plotting a legal battle to force the shutdown before the group voluntarily disbanded.

It's all rather bizarre. When he was head of the National Citizens Coalition, Stephen Harper went all the way to the Supreme Court to argue for third party advertising. But that was then. This is now. And now:

It is all about controlling the message. As his political woes deepen, Harper has a habit of moving away from substantive discourse and doubling down on the emotional and irrational. He is a master channel changer and his success begins where debate ends.

The last thing Harper and his apparatchiks want is a reasoned discussion about the Iraq Mission against ISIS. Literally everything being done in Iraq and Syria has been done before — there and elsewhere — and failed; sending in the trainers, boots on the ground, partnering with Iran, arming the Kurds, and hoping for a political alliance between Shia and Sunni factions forged by the government in Baghdad.
Here is a number to keep in mind. At the peak of the second Iraq War, the U.S. had 505 bases manned by 166,000 troops in country. A total of $25 billion U.S. was spent training and equipping of the Iraqis with virtually nothing to show for it. 

Mr. Harper is doing  everything he can to make sure the facts don't get out -- whether on Iraq or climate change.  He proclaims -- in the words of Kory Teneyche -- that, "We're better than the news. We're truthful."

The Death Of The Liberal Party?

                                               http://blogs.theprovince.com/

Jeffrey Simpson asks a question which needs asking. Peter C. Newman tried to answer it after the last election. But, like Mark Twain's first obituary, his answer proved to be premature.  What is happening these days, however, raises the question yet again -- because, at the moment, the traditional Liberal coalition simply isn't there. Simpson writes:

Quebec, the federal Liberals’ bastion from 1896 to 1980, has not voted a majority of seats for that party in 35 years. Quebeckers spent many years and six elections refusing to think about participating in governing Canada, or even being much interested in federal affairs by voting for the Bloc Québécois. When they ditched the Bloc, francophone Quebeckers did not return to the Liberals, but voted en masse for the New Democratic Party, which remains their preferred federalist option.

The Prairie West had departed the Liberals more than half a century ago. Voters that comprise two other elements of the Canadian political mosaic split more recently from what had been the grand Liberal coalition.

French-speaking minorities outside Quebec in New Brunswick, northern and eastern Ontario and Saint Boniface in Manitoba used to be the most faithful of Liberals. Most of the ridings with these minorities have not voted Liberal in many elections.

Similarly, Liberals used to dominate Ontario’s industrial cities (or parts thereof): Windsor, St. Catharines, Hamilton, (the east part of) London, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, Cornwall. They don’t hold these seats any more, in part because private-sector union presence has dwindled. Liberals, not New Democrats, used to win a majority of these voters.

In 1990, when Jean Chretien won the  Liberal leadership, he was called "yesterday's man:"

He had been in and around politics for most of his adult life before becoming leader. It was said that he had lost touch with his native province, Quebec; that he was a terrific handler of files that someone smarter than himself had crafted; that he was corny, folksy and likeable but lacked the gravitas to be prime minister.

Not enough people understood that, as one of his female cabinet ministers once said (privately of course), he had “balls of steel.” Cross him and you paid a price. He had been underestimated politically throughout his career, and had not been accorded the respect of intellectuals and senior strategists in the Liberal Party. It was asserted that he did not know enough about the world; that he did not read his briefing notes; that complexity was his enemy; and that in due course all these alleged weaknesses, and others, would do him in.

But all of those years in the cabinet had made him a very smart politician. It remains to be seen if Trudeau knows what Chretien knew.

I'll be away tomorrow. But I should be back on Monday.

Another Willy Loman

                                                 http://chicagocritic.com/

Stephen Harper believes in marketing. His career has been based on his firm conviction that he can sell anything to Canadians. But, Michael Harris writes, the sales pitch isn't working like it used to:

As we begin the bumpy descent towards the October election (assuming it will be called), there is only one question to be answered: can Harper (assuming he runs) market his way to victory in the most important election in the country’s history?

The PR-as-reality machine has slipped its gears. Consider the economy. Aren’t we really better off with Steve, the CPC fondly asks? Not according to this year’s first quarter numbers for the GDP, which took the country half-way to a recession.

As for balanced budgets — if you go one-for-seven in baseball you end up on the bus that takes you from the bigs to the boonies. It took Harper seven years to balance his first budget.

The picture of Dean Del Mastro making his way in handcuffs and leg irons to a waiting police van blows a hole in the tough on crime sales pitch. A sizable number of Harper's caucus isn't buying it anymore:

Nearly three dozen non-offering MPs — that’s a sizeable percentage of the whole crew. When you add in cabinet lunkers like John Baird, Peter MacKay and James Moore, not to mention small fry like Christian Paradis and Shelly Glover, you have to start wondering about the captain. After all, these people are professional wind-sniffers. They smell defeat.

The man who was hell bent to re-make Canada in his own image is beginning to look like another Willy Loman.

The Courts Know Their Man

                                       Adrian Wyld / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault has launched a Charter challenge to the Harper government's destruction of gun registry data. Steve Sullivan writes:

The Federal Court had to decide whether to believe the government’s assurances that it would not destroy the data while Legault’s case proceeds. It chose discretion over faith — it signalled, effectively, that the Harper government’s solemn word of honour wasn’t going to be nearly good enough this time. Justice department lawyers tried to convince the court that there was no need for the government to produce a physical copy of the records because the Public Safety minister had made “four separate undertakings” to preserve them.

On Monday, the court told the government to deliver the goods by 10 a.m. Tuesday so they could seal the information until all court challenges are dealt with.

The Harper government does not like being reminded about its obligations:

In 2009, when the will of Parliament was to replace his government with a Liberal-NDP coalition, Harper went running to the Governor General with his tail between his legs. In 2011, when the will of Parliament held that Harper’s government should immediately turn over data on the cost of corporate tax cuts and crime bills, it refused — and was found in contempt of Parliament as a result.

What is the source of this obstinacy? The man who insists that the government bear his name:

Stephen Harper seems to have learned just one lesson, and that one early on: winning is all, while rules are for the weak. We all knew kids like that on the playground growing up — the ones who would change the rules mid-game if they were losing, or burst into tears and run home. Most people outgrow that kind of stuff. Harper turned it into a career.

He really believes that rules can be changed at his whim:

His government changed accelerated parole laws for first-time, non-violent federal offenders already in prison serving their sentences. The Supreme Court told him it was unconstitutional and out of bounds. Harper ignored them. When a Conservative MP introduced a private member’s bill to extend the time between parole hearings for violent offenders sentenced after the law’s passage, the government amended it to apply it retroactively so offenders already serving their sentences might have to wait five years for their next parole hearing — even though the law at the time they were sentenced set the period at two years.

The courts know their man. And they keep reminding him that he can't unilaterally change -- or make -- the rules.

Another Name For Financial Madness

                                            http://people.opposingviews.com/

Last Saturday, 250,000 Britons marched against Austerity -- something the newly re-elected David Cameron believes is good for the UK. Which raises the question, Who is austerity good for? Duncan Cameron writes:

Both social democratic and neoliberal market economists defend austerity, but the reasoning (do not spend more than you receive in taxes) behind the policy is not strong enough to explain why the doctrinaire approach was adopted.

Big capitalists support austerity, but cutting public spending is bad for business. Mainstream media sell austerity as if it were new and true, even while it undermines audiences and readership, and drives away advertisers.

The remarkable willingness to pursue austerity, despite its destructive consequences, originates in the people who run the bond market: investment bankers, hedge-fund operators, pension-fund managers, and wealthy rentier capitalists of all stripes.

The people who profit from austerity are behind it.

We live in a world where bond dealers are king:

The game for the bond-market dealers is to make money selling corporate debt, since that is where the bankers' fees add up the fastest.

The more government bonds dealers have to sell, the less the need for pension funds and investors to load up on corporate debt, and the lower the profits for the investment houses that sell corporate bonds.
Government deficits create the need for borrowing so the financial market "austerians" rant about the need to balance government budgets, so as to maintain the value of existing government debt, and leave room for new corporate debt.

Private companies rely on selling bonds to finance business expansion. The bond market overshadows the stock market. Stock markets, where money is raised through selling ownership shares, is limited to well-established companies with a record of profit-making.

The international bond market is huge; outstanding securities amount to a whopping $20.89 trillion; and that does not include domestic bonds.

Bond used to be the name of a man who had a license to kill. It has since become a name for financial madness.

It Will End In Catastrophe

                                    http://predicthistunpredictpast.blogspot.ca/

Pope Francis' encyclical continues to make waves. Five Republican candidates for president -- who are also Catholic -- have attacked Laudato Si, claiming Francis knows nothing about science. They forget that the Pope's first degree was in chemistry. They and their followers profess what Gary Wills calls "Holy Ignorance:"

When a Republican politician, asked about climate change, says, “I’m not a scientist,” most of us hear just a cowardly way of dodging the question; but the politician’s supporters hear a brave defiance of an alien force. When we hear only “science,” they hear “godless science,” the kind that wants to rob them of their belief in creation and force evolution into their minds. That science is marching in a battalion of forces—the media, the academy, the government—that has them besieged. “I’m not a scientist” does not mean, “I have not heard enough about the science, and need to hear more,” but “I know the evil intent or effect of science, and I will not let it affect me.” They summon a courage not to know. 

True to his Jesuit training, however, Francis is all about the courage to know -- and the courage to argue an entirely different case:

"The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth."
"The emptier a person's heart is, the more he or she needs to buy, own and consume."
"Leaving an inhabitable planet to future generations is, first and foremost, up to us."
"For indigenous communities, land is not a commodity, but a gift from God, a sacred space."
"Earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone."
"We should be particularly indignant at the enormous inequalities in our midst."
"We have to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor."

What Francis has done is marry science to traditional Catholic social teaching. Concern for the planet and concern for the poor amount to the same thing. That's a case modern neo-liberalism has been trying to deny for almost fifty years.

For the pope, neo-liberalism amounts to self- centred nihilism -- and it will end in catastrophe.

Why Does Chong Stay?

                                                       http://www.cbc.ca/

Michael Chong used to be Stephen Harper's Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. The story of how he came to resign his position makes interesting reading. Michael Harris writes:

Chong was the Intergovernmental Affairs minister back in 2006 when the prime minister broke all the known rules with his unilateral declaration that Quebec was a “nation.”

Harper did not bother to put the measure through cabinet, but simply did it by decree. Even though Chong was the minister responsible, he wasn’t informed about Harper’s decision until he was on his way to Wednesday caucus back in November, 2006. His then deputy minister, Louis Levesque, gave him the news.

The deputy also informed his minister that he, Levesque, had been in talks about the nation status issue the night before. It was staggering news. Chong’s deputy was involved in this hugely important decision and the minister was not? It was the clearest example of executive governance under Harper yet on record.

The rising star of the Conservative party was shocked by the PM’s unilateral action. He believed that it was the duty of the Clerk of the Privy Council to tell Harper that even the PM had to obey the rules. But with the Clerk’s office politicized under Harper, just like every other part of the government, that never happened.

Harper’s unilateral authoritarianism did not come as a complete surprise to Chong. As an MP and cabinet minister, he had noticed that Harper liked to make most of the big decisions at meetings of Planning and Priorities, a small but powerful committee of handpicked subordinates which the prime minister chairs. In the early innings of the Harper government, full cabinet rarely met and P&P did most of the heavy lifting.

Chong mulled over whether there was a way he could rationalize support for nation status for Quebec. He concluded that it was policy and procedural poison. There was nothing he could do but become the first Harper cabinet minister to resign.

Now the unelected Conservative majority in the Senate has gutted Chong's Reform Act  -- which passed the House by a vote of 260 to 17. The Duffy trial has shown us that Mr. Harper makes sure that caucus votes his way. He can't claim that he knew nothing about what was going on in the Upper House.

Garth Turner refused to endure such arrogant insouciance. So did Bill Casey and Brent Rathgeber. Why does Chong stay?

He Knows An Easy Mark

Opposition to the Prime Minister is building. But Stephen Harper has always known that more voters despise him than support him. That's why the Fair Elections Act -- with its truly Orwellian title -- is now law. Linda McQuaig writes:

Stephen Harper's re-election strategy depends on a lot of you not voting. And if you mess with his plan by showing up at the polling station on Election Day, he's prepared for that, too: he's made it a lot harder for you to vote.

The prime minister has made it so much harder that "many tens of thousands" of Canadians may be denied their constitutional right to cast a ballot in the upcoming federal election, according to Harry Neufeld, former chief electoral officer for British Columbia. 

When Harper spouts his line about Conservative values being Canadian values, he knows that what he's saying is patently false . But he's been very good at rigging the game in his favour. That's because he's very good at a very old type of fraud -- bait and switch:

The Conservatives put the new election laws in place ostensibly in response to the national outcry over the robocall scandal, in which party operatives were accused of using automated phone calls to direct non-Conservative voters to the wrong polling stations on election day. The misleading calls were reported in ridings across the country and appeared to be targeted based on information from closely guarded Conservative party data.

In the end, only one person, Conservative staffer Michael Sona, who worked on a local campaign in Guelph, was convicted and jailed. However, in his verdict, Judge Gary Hearn wrote that "the evidence indicates he did not likely act alone."

The scandal raised the extremely serious question of whether the governing party had deliberately undermined the legitimacy of election results. Surely what was needed was a thorough investigation and a tightening of the election laws to ensure no such thing ever threatened our democracy again.

What we got instead was a bait-and-switch that the Conservatives have turned to their advantage. They overhauled the election laws all right, but the new laws did nothing to prevent the sort of treachery involved in the robocall scandal. If anything, they make it tougher to uncover robocall-style deception in the future by preventing the release of details about investigations conducted by Elections Canada.

He's a con man of considerable talent. And he knows an easy mark when he sees one.

Not With A Bang

James Moore left yesterday. And Don Meredith was booted from the Conservative Senate caucus earlier in the week. It looks like things are falling apart in Harperland. And, as she travels the country, Chantal Hebert writes that she's picking up on that vibe, too:

In Ontario and British Columbia, the NDP has been on the move in the polls while Conservative support has stalled or declined. Ditto in Atlantic Canada

The NDP and the Liberals have long been communicating vessels for opposition votes but there is more than the usual opposition arithmetic at play behind the deficit in support of the Conservatives.

By all indications, a sizeable proportion of the 2011 supporters that they expected to come home as disenchantment with the Liberals set in are keeping their options open and/or are checking out the New Democrats.

It was not supposed to be this way. The budget and Bill C-51 were supposed to put the opposition parties on the ropes. But, instead, the Harperites have fewer and fewer defenders:

But perhaps what struck me most was how few people were willing to speak up in defence of the government. As opposition to Harper has become more vocal, support for his re-election has become more discreet.

That stands in stark contrast with the immediate lead-up to the last campaign when even non-Conservative voters would often readily concede that they felt Harper had managed the global economic crisis with competence. That sentiment was omnipresent in Ontario — where he subsequently won his majority.

Four years later, many die-hard Conservatives privately admit that they expected more from their party’s first majority government in almost two decades. They are underwhelmed by the sum of Harper’s third mandate.

More than a few of them find it hard to take pride in a team that has chosen to dumb itself down by making ultra-partisan MPs such as Pierre Poilièvre and Paul Calandra its poster boys in the House of Commons.

It may all come to and end, as Eliot wrote, not with a bang but a whimper.

Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty

                                                 http://beamingnotes.com/

Stephen Harper wants to build a monument to the victims of Communism. Critics call it a misplaced monstrosity. But while those critics bemoan the ugliness of the proposed monument, Harper has been busy constructing a much uglier monument to himself. It's called Bill C-51. Michael Harris writes:

C-51 is the transparent and triumphant work of someone who likes martial authority, likes being photographed around people in uniform, likes dishing out punishment to anyone who crosses him, and wants to turn Canada into a giant yard-sale for the oligarchs who run things. The most repressive kingdom on Earth gets Canadian weapons and the Wheat Board. The nation with the world’s worst human rights record snares a long-term trade deal and Nexen. Even Tim’s is gone.

And have you noticed that there’s no war Stephen Harper doesn’t want to get in on, or foment? His stupefying habit of baiting Russian President Vladimir Putin is only the most recent example; Harper runs Canadian foreign policy as though it were a rumble in a parking lot. And now he has navigated the most undemocratic piece of legislation of his term — his legacy bill — through the democratic institutions he controls completely for another few months.

Justin Trudeau should have known better than support the bill. The NDP and the Green Party did .And the hacker collective Anonymous does, too:

C-51 is designed for the things Harper doesn’t like. He doesn’t like free speech. He doesn’t like protestors who take their convictions to the street. He doesn’t like public information getting out there without his approval — so he doesn’t like any displays of independence from scientists, journalists, bureaucrats or judges. He doesn’t like unions, or environmentalists, or opposition in any form. C-51 is made by and for a man who — like every dictator everywhere — thinks that his should be the last word on everything.

Those who stood up against this kind of state intrusion were the victims of Communism. And now, in the name of less intrusive government, Harper gives us Bill C-51. He is Canada's Ozymandias.

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

He Makes The Rules

                                                http://news.nationalpost.com/

Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault took the Harper government to court this week over the destruction of the long gun registry. Back when the government passed legislation to end the registry, she reminded Public Safety Minister Vic Toews that registry information was subject to Access to Information laws. And, therefore, there should be no rush to destroy that information.

But, on Tuesday, Stephen Harper admitted that the government ignored Legault and pressured the RCMP to destroy the records quickly. There is a paper trail to document that pressure. Steve Sullivan writes:

That includes emails that detail significant pressure on registry officials to destroy the information and destroy it quickly. Pierre Perron of the RCMP’s firearms programs wrote: “Just for the record, (the) minister’s office is putting a lot of pressure on me to destroy the records sooner.” Other officials referred to “pressure from senior RCMP to move up the delete date.” And another Canadian Firearms Program manager wrote: “Between you and me, someone will owe us lots of drinks at (the Prime Minister’s Office) if they want this to happen by end of August.”

And, just to make sure that the government will bear no legal responsibility for its actions, the budget bill contains a clause immunizing the RCMP from the legal consequences of carrying out the government's wishes. Tony Clement claims that this is all a tempest in a teapot. But changing laws retroactively is a big deal. The Harperites have written their own get out of jail free card.

It's clear that the prime minister believes, as he told his security detail, that he makes the rules. His contempt for the rule of law is absolutely stunning.

He Doesn't Practice It At Home

                                                  http://www.slideshare.net/

Eight hundred years ago this week, King John was forced to sign the Magna Charta.  But today, Errol Mendes writes, King Stephen is trying to place himself above the document which is the foundation of parliamentary democracy:

And yet, in the actions of the Harper government we see all too many instances of powerful people trying to set themselves above the law. How else can one read an attempt by the government to hide inside a massive omnibus budget bill a law that would retroactively invalidate an investigation into unlawful conduct by the RCMP — an attempt to re-write the application of the law in the past?

Harper's contempt for parliamentary democracy continues to mushroom:

What are we to think when the prime minister’s office, the highest in the land, colludes with supposedly independent members of the Senate in an attempt to alter an independent audit by an outside accounting firm of senators’ allegedly improper expenses?

When the federal government prohibits donations to political parties by corporations and trade unions with the aim of preventing big money from stealing elections — and then spends millions of dollars in public money on thinly-disguised political ads — can that be interpreted as anything but a gesture of contempt for the law?

When a government elected on a promise of accountability and transparency works to undermine every independent officer of Parliament charged with keeping the government open and transparent (the nuclear safety commissioner, the parliamentary budget officer, the chief military police complaints commissioner, the acting privacy commissioner and, most recently, the correctional investigator), is it exercising power on the people’s behalf, or merely to trash its enemies and settle scores?

Mr. Harper laughs off these abuses as picayune obstacles that get in the way of the greater good. Mendes warns:

That’s how it starts. When a government’s abuse of power is laughed off as a “loophole”, a mere detail, we’re watching the foundations being laid for arbitrary government — for government operating outside the rule of law. The kind of government the Magna Charta was supposed to free us from.

The man who preaches the virtues of democracy around the world doesn't practise it at home.

When The Leaving Was Good

As Stephen Harper seeks his fourth mandate, Geoff Stevens writes that he knows neither love nor respect:

This will be difficult, I know, but try to imagine you are Stephen Harper.

You are prime minister of Canada. You are approaching your 10th anniversary in that high position. You have won three consecutive general elections and are looking to make it four in a row on Oct. 19. With your majority in Parliament, you have more power and control today than an American president. You rank among the most successful political leaders in Canadian history.

Yet something is wrong.

Success does not translate into affection and admiration. You are successful, but you are not loved. Schoolchildren do not squeal with delight when they see you. Their fathers do not hoist them on their shoulders for a better view. Their mothers do not rush home to tell neighbours they have touched the garment of the prime minister of Canada. For all the sense of moment you generate, you might be an ordinary MP or a school trustee. 

Harper's success, ironically, has been fuelled by his ability to make enemies. And, ten years in, he has made a lot of them:

You have already assembled an impressive enemies list for the election campaign. Heading the list is the chief justice of Canada and her infuriating Supreme Court. The court keeps saying "no" to you. "No" to mandatory minimum prison sentences, "no" to appointing supreme court judges who don't meet eligibility requirements, "no" to abolishing or reforming the Senate without provincial consent, "no" to federal anti-prostitution laws, "no" to banning doctor-assisted suicide and, most recently, "no" to your government's efforts to stamp out the medical use of marijuana.

You upped the ante in your war with the court last week when your health minister, Rona Ambrose, declaring that she was "outraged" by that ruling, accused the court of steering young people toward marijuana use, just like, she said, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau who proposes decriminalizing possession of pot.

An election that pits the government against the Supreme Court would be an appalling precedent. But it's not as though Harper doesn't have other enemies to choose among. There's also the Senate — his own Senate — which cannot control the wastrels in its membership. There are all those terrorists in our midst who must be put down by Bill C-51, the new anti-terrorism law. There are those annoying scientists and environmentalists who keep insisting climate change is real.

And there is Vladimir Putin. Bashing Putin must be good domestic politics, because Harper was back in Europe again last week, stamping his foot and demanding the Russian leader get out of Ukraine. If Putin noticed, he has not responded, but he will have other opportunities to yield to Harper's demand before the polls close here on Oct. 19. 

What it all adds up to, Stevens writes, is that Harper's back is against the wall. One wonders if he occasionally thinks that he should have left when the leaving was good.

 

So Far They Have Gotten Away Scot Free

                                                http://www.blueprintofwe.com/

The RCMP have charged Mike Duffy with thirty-one offences. But, Michael Harris writes, the PMO should be on trial, not Duffy:

It is the nagging doubt that Duffy’s day in court is a “show trial” that feeds the idea that the Senate itself is the real problem. The leadership in the Senate looks hypocritical, self-aggrandizing, and screamingly at odds with any known concept of equal justice.

For starters, both the Government Leader in the Senate and the Senate Speaker made Auditor General Michael Ferguson’s bad apple list.

And it's their connections to the PMO that really should leave a bad taste in citizens' mouths:

That rattling sound the attentive can hear from the Duffy trial is more bones in the Senate closet soon to be on display. The PMO was directly and intimately involved in undercutting the independence of a supposedly independent parliamentary institution, got Senate reports changed, and interfered in a forensic audit being done for the Senate by Deloitte.

When the Senate had a chance to show its independence and integrity, it slunk away from getting to the bottom of these gross, institutional invasions.

Even though the PMO dispatched Senator Irving Gerstein to ask a buddy at Deloitte if the audit could be stopped if Duffy paid back his disputed housing expenses, the Conservative majority on the Senate’s Internal Economy Committee didn’t act. They refused to demand testimony from Senator Gerstein or the insider he turned to at Deloitte, Michael Runia. To this day, no one can explain how the PMO got the Deloitte audit weeks before it was delivered to a Senate committee.

It's clear that the majority in our House of Sober Second Thought is owned lock, stock and barrel by the PMO. The people in that office are behind the Duffy story. And, so far, they have got away scot free.