We campaigned on this new Canadian reality. Not on a dream or a fantasy or a slogan, but on the reality of this great country rising—a country founded on great principles—a courageous warrior, a compassionate neighbour, a confident partner—and under a strong, stable, national, majority, Conservative government—the best country in the world.
—STEPHEN HARPER, 20111
The King of England stood on a balcony in Westminster, just outside the city of London, and braced himself against the cold. It was a raw January day in 1649, the crowd was noisy, and only a few people could hear him. But there was a man near the king who was writing everything down. Within a few hours, the king’s speech was on the streets in the primitive newspapers of the time.
It was not the sort of rant that Justin Trudeau or even Stephen Harper would come up with, and it certainly was not the work of a Barack Obama. King Charles I wasn’t running for anything. In fact, his career was quickly winding down. The words he spoke were his own, not those of a speechwriter. They’re sort of dense and Shakespearean, but after you read them once or twice, you’ll get the drift.
“And truly I desire [the people’s] liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever, but I must tell you, that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government that is pertaining to them,” the king said.
“A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.” He finished up, turned, knelt down, prayed for a moment, and a chap named Brandon took one swing of an axe and chopped off his head.
Few politicians are as upfront in their contempt of democracy, and fewer still have the opportunity to speak with the honesty that’s available to a sentient person who knows he won’t have to worry about that evening’s dinner because he’ll be shorter by a head. But Charles I was a man of his times, and of our times, too: trashing the press, proroguing Parliament, getting very heavy with people who disagreed. Few modern politicians will come out and say the people really have no business being involved in government. A few more will echo the king’s assertion that governments exist only to protect people’s property and keep taxes down. But not that many are willing to stick their necks that far out to make a point.
Just over two hundred years later, the Americans fought their own Civil War. This one was about crushing secessionist states that had broken up the country because they believed their slave economy was in jeopardy. But this war was, in fact, about something else, about the thing that lies in the heart of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the speech he made at the dedication of the cemetery for the men killed in the decisive battle of the Civil War. Everyone’s heard of that short speech—it wasn’t much longer than poor Charles’s last words—but few people have read it carefully. The address starts with a little history lesson and a very slight side-swipe at the slavery issue. Then it gets down to business: the blood of the Union troops at Gettysburg was spilled so that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from this earth.
People reading the speech always put the emphasis on the “of, by, for” words. But the real meat of the phrase is in the last six words. In 1863, the United States was the most revolutionary country on Earth. It was the only major power that was anything resembling a real democracy. And it seemed likely to be the last one, an experiment that failed. France had thrice tried to create a democracy between 1789 and 1863 and their revolutions went badly. One ended up bathed in blood. All were undermined by public revulsion and ended with a return to monarchy. Britain was emerging as a democratic state, but few men had the right to vote. Power lay in the hands of aristocrats and industrialists and, among them, “democracy” was a word that was spat out, a euphemism for mob rule. (Nineteenth-century British mobs were quite dangerous things indeed.)
Canada was a little further along, but most politicians gagged at the idea of true democracy. Antidemocratic feeling ran strong among members of Canada’s elites, many of them descendants of monarchist refugees from the American Revolution. They feared the political power of French-Canadians and the Irish who were streaming into the country, and many remembered the Rebellions of 1837–1838. Canada had legislatures elected by male property owners, but the country was dominated by colonial officials, railway builders, bankers and lawyers who not only ran the country but also controlled its newspapers.
At the time of the Civil War, the great empires and small countries of Europe were all monarchies. Revolutionaries in Central and South America had overthrown their Spanish colonial masters and had tried to create democracies. All had failed. There were no democracies in Africa. Or Asia. Or, for that matter, in the Confederacy.
Democracy was an anomaly until the end of World War I. Going into it, the great powers consisted of four imperial monarchies (Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Japan), two democracies (France and the United States), a new junta trying to secularize an Islamic state (Turkey), and a parliamentary monarchy that was well on its way to being a democracy but that maintained the power of the landed wealthy (Britain). Most of the rest of the world’s countries were military dictatorships, ludicrously small monarchies (the Tsar of Bulgaria comes to mind), colonies or satellite nations of the larger powers. Canada was both a colony and an emerging democracy. By the end of the war, democracy or systems resembling it had been foisted on most of the new European countries created by the Treaty of Versailles and on the enemy Central Powers. The postwar deal of 1919 was a rush forward for democracy in Europe, though many of the people who lived in nations created at Versailles would not get much of a chance to live in a real multi-party, pluralistic state for another seventy years.
After World War II, democracy would get another boost, not just in Europe (outside the Soviet occupation zones) but also in the Third World, where Britain tried, with temporary and minimal success, to create Westminster systems in its old colonies.
No one could have known at the time of the Civil War that democracy would eventually take root in some of the world’s great countries. In many ways, Lincoln, when he stood on the platform at Gettysburg, was very much alone as the leader of what he feared was the world’s last democracy. Democracy—real involvement by the people in their government, which they, as citizens, rather than subjects, own—is not the default system of government, even in the West. It’s something that takes great struggle to create and has to be nurtured, preserved, and, in dire times, fought for. As we’ve seen in the misfire of the “Arab Spring” of 2010, elections are, in and of themselves, not democracy. Faith in democracy needs to be deep and wide in society. It cannot survive without the rule of law—which, itself, requires honest courts, enforceable agreements, and fair treatment of accused criminals—along with an inquisitive, independent press and a solid, accessible system of public education. State religions undermine democracy because they enforce intellectual and social conformity. So do tribalism and class warfare. People need the freedom to be able to do business together in corporations, but they also need the liberty to work together to form trade unions. Any country that has a huge gap between the wealthy and the poor is so wracked with systemic inequality that the political voice of the impoverished is too weak to be heard.
The fear of being the last, failed steward of democracy drove Lincoln through the Civil War. Like Vladimir Lenin during the years when the Communists were losing the Russian Civil War and the world’s first Marxist state was at risk of being smothered at birth, Lincoln became ruthless. Believing freedom could not, on its own, save democracy, he did not back away from censoring the press. At one point, he even considered jailing the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, who was a diehard pro-slavery, states-rights man. In the end, once the rebellion had been crushed, Lincoln planned to quickly restore state legislatures in Dixie and to bring congressmen from the Confederate states to the newly finished Capitol, but his murder left that work to others. Government of the people, by the people, for the people had been, as much as possible in nineteenth-century America, saved from extinction partly through the use of police-state tactics.
Lincoln ended his life with a bullet in the brain, but the idea of democracy as a practical system of government survived both the war and Lincoln. Public support and the political will for real democracy has ebbed and flowed, but the target was always there.
DEMOCRACY HAS MANY FLAWS, including the obvious fact that it requires an exhausting and frustrating amount of generosity for people to listen to each other and to prevent the strong from dominating the weak. Still, despite the demands it makes on the citizenry, it is the system of government that offers people more freedom than any other. In fact, democracy simply can’t work unless people have a deeply ingrained sense of the value of liberty, not only for their own thoughts, speech, and religion, but also for those they disagree with. It’s worth it, not just for the happiness that comes with freedom, but also because democracy and freedom pay off economically. Liberty of conscience unleashes all kinds of creativity and inquiry, along with economic opportunity and social mobility. That’s one of the reasons why democracies tend to be so wealthy. When things get tough, many people give up on democracy and embrace totalitarianism, believing fascist institutions are somehow more effective and efficient. If they were, we’d all be speaking German.
But our democracy needs work. Canadians have to start feeling as though the government of their country belongs to them. There’s a big difference between the constitutions of the United States and Canada. Most obvious, the American Bill of Rights gives unequivocal protection to many rights, while the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is rigged with escape hatches and loaded with weasel words that allow governments to suspend or subvert the rights of citizens. But more importantly, the American constitution starts with the words “We the People of the United States …” while Canada’s begins with the less eloquent “Whereas the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have expressed their Desire to be federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom; And whereas such a Union would conduce to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the Interests of the British Empire …”
Canada’s sovereignty rests in the Crown. In the United States, the people are sovereign, and, on all sides of the political divide, Americans have the firm belief that they, as citizens, own their country. Canada, like Britain, is a country of subjects. Perhaps we are less so than we were a few generations ago, but the deference to authority and the class structure of the nineteenth-century colony continues to be a strong part of Canada’s political, economic and even media culture. We do have elections, but voter turnout is dismal. Once we install a new regime, usually to punish the last bunch of rogues, most Canadians feel that the country is in the hands of the winners until the next election. Preston Manning’s Reform Party did try to float populist American ideas like recall petitions to remove odious politicians, but those policies evaporated when that party became a contender for power.2
The ideology of democracy, so taken for granted in places that have benefited from it, is in trouble, not just in Canada, but in most Western countries. The use of corporate communications strategy to hide public information, the development of retail politics, the invention of intrusive technology and the defanging of media and other governmental watchdogs have become normal. Respect for courts and the justice system is being undermined, both from outside and from within. A new kind of controlling, arrogant and often vindictive government has emerged since the 1980s and is getting more emboldened and entrenched. It is not simply a neo-conservative creation. It’s loose in Barack Obama’s Washington, where “hope” and “change” did not involve the rolling back of the post-9/11 security state and the opening up of government to scrutiny and criticism. The reporters in Obama’s White House are treated with the same contempt that Harper holds for the Parliamentary Press Gallery and are subject to the same kinds of controls. The U.S. political system is probably even more dysfunctional than ours.
And if anyone thinks a new regime in Canada, whether a different Conservative prime minister or an NDP or a Liberal government, will roll back this revolution, they’re dreaming. If this way of governing becomes entrenched, no prime minister will change it. Harper has built a system that is so favourable to the party in power and so easy to operate that it would take a lot of energy and determination to dismantle it.
Here in Canada, Stephen Harper, like Jean Chrétien before him, relishes the idea of being a “G7 world leader.” Because Canada was invited to join the annual summit of world economic powers—in 1975 France got to bring Italy to the table, so U.S. president Gerald Ford insisted his country should bring Canada—Ottawa strangely sees itself as a capital rivaling Paris, London and Tokyo, and the people who run it have developed a swagger that seems somewhat ridiculous. Really, although it’s a great place to live, Ottawa’s a rather backwater capital of a very decentralized state where power over important issues like education, health care and social services lies with the provinces.
Harper, like Richard Nixon, seems determined to record every moment of his time in power. Nixon said he bugged the White House to create a truthful record for historians. Harper’s movements are diligently recorded for propaganda reasons. Fifty years ago, prime ministers simply went about their business with just a handful of aides and political allies. Now Harper’s retinue, which moves around the city in a presidential-style motorcade, includes both still and video photographers. Their work is distributed to friendly media and appears on the Internet “program” 24 Seven. In the fall of 2014, the federal government advertised for a new videographer for the propaganda machine. The job paid about $100,000 a year, but the videographer had to be willing to work every day and night of the year.
The fetish for recording each moment can make things awkward. In 2013, when Prime Minister Harper took his teenage son Ben to the Centre Block’s very informal fifth floor cafeteria for a burger, the Harpers were accompanied by at least four skittish, bulky men with wires in their ears and a photographer who snapped almost every second of that magic moment. Much eye-rolling ensued. It must have been strange for the high-schooler who is, by all accounts, a pretty down-to-earth kid. It certainly was for those of us who sat eating our lunches and watching. The situation became comical as the security people filled the tiny cafeteria and eyeballed the journalists, MPs, office workers and political staffers who sat at the rows of tables. There was no reason why the two Harpers could not have quietly walked into the room, without the photographer, and sat down for lunch. But, in true Stephen Harper style, father and son huddled in a secluded corner of the room, protected by prime ministerial staffers, armed heavies and the photographer.
Everything about the prime minister’s world is lavish. Alison Redford was forced out of the premier’s office in Alberta partly because she spent $45,000 of public money to go, with some of her entourage, to Nelson Mandela’s funeral. But Stephen Harper couldn’t throw stones. He spent the same amount to go to New York in 2011, where he took in a baseball game and a Broadway show. He also spent $1 million of taxpayers’ money to ship a limousine and an SUV to India for a summit in 2012, India somehow being short of luxury vehicles for visiting VIPs. And the cost of the prime minister’s security detail had reached $19.6 million in 2014, about double the cost when Harper took power.3
If you think the motorcades and the metal detectors are the brainchild of the security staff, and that Harper has no say in how it works, think again. The prime minister is the boss, and if he really thought the head of his RCMP security team was pushing him around, that cop would, within a few weeks, be showing store clerks in Iqaluit how to spot fake toonies. He likes this. He likes this far too much.
Harper and his courtiers spend a lot of time worrying about enemies in the media, universities, bureaucracy, courts, First Nations and even in churches and soup kitchens. And, of course, there are the enemies sitting on the other side of the House of Commons.
Gone were the days of grudging professional respect and sometimes real friendship among Members of Parliament. The House of Commons stumbles toward irrelevance during the Harper regime and the ever more toxic atmosphere and vicious partisanship has worked its way down into the House committees, where most of Parliament’s real work gets done.
Whatever people say about former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, by the time his political career crashed he understood the danger of separating the people’s representatives into “us” and “them,” and then trashing the “thems” as unpatriotic, evil, stupid and corrupt. “The opposition performs an adversarial function critical to democracy itself,” Ignatieff said in a speech at Stanford University in October 2012. “Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law.”4
IN HARPER’S WORLD, politics is a game. The informal Calgary School of economists and political scientists headquartered at the University of Calgary (echoing the Chicago School of right-wing academics at the University of Chicago) has a world view built on the market economy economics of Friedrich Hayek and the political modelling concepts of William H. Riker, a games theorist. Riker, who died in 1993, believed politics can be mapped out and manipulated in the same way as any other human activity, including economic behaviour. Riker was one of the crafters of “positive political theory,” which he explained in his 1962 book The Theory of Political Coalitions. In this world, ideology doesn’t matter very much, since the game is one of manipulation. All people are participants in the political game, making rational choices from the options that are placed before them. Riker, a political scientist, thought and wrote like an economist, breaking his theories down to mathematical models and games that change and upset the equilibrium in society and within institutions.
So politics, like all games, can have predictable endings. Politics, Riker’s followers believe, is matter of “natural selection” of issues. Most mainstream politicians simply debate within accepted ranges of values and economic options. Political entrepreneurs look for issues and ideas that are, at first sight, marginal. They keep working those issues. Most won’t catch on but some will. The idea is to create new cleavages and splits in society and among voters. They can be along regional, social, economic, religious or linguistic lines. If the politician succeeds in developing enough of those “outsider” issues and wins over enough groups, a new, winning coalition can be created. Riker coined the term “heresthetic” (from the Greek word to divide, which also gave rise to the term “heresy”) to describe politicians who try to create new political fault lines to develop constituencies, and, eventually, new coalitions with enough financial and political clout to get them into power.
That’s why politicians usually debated within what most people saw as “Canadian values” until the early 1990s, when the Reform Party, with Stephen Harper as one of its chief policy architects, came along. Since then, you’ve heard little about “Canadian values” and a lot about more talk of enemies, domestic and foreign, along with nationalist sloganeering. Riker said majority rule creates, at best, a rare and fragile equilibrium. A politician who upsets and remakes it can win the game. “Disequilibrium, or the potential that the status quo be upset, is the characteristic feature of politics,” Riker said in one paper. So, in plainer English, you can win by debating what everyone else is talking about, or you can shake up the whole system and re-make it, generating enough followers to, basically, have a revolution. It helps if you have a much better grasp of information than everyone else.5
In the past, politicians could be adversaries in civil debates without being enemies. They could reject each other’s arguments without attacking their opponents as people. They could debate facts and lines of logic with vigour and humour, without the vicious, artless mockery and, more and more, outright profanity that’s heard in the House of Commons today. They could quibble over their interests without attacking their opponents’ patriotism. Canada’s Parliament has never been an academy of selfless scholars tirelessly reflecting on the public good. Six years after Confederation, a journalist wrote: “At Ottawa, little enough is done in the way of practical legislation for the country, but the struggle of parties is carried on vigorously, with a shrill accompaniment of organs on both sides.”6 Still, there was a sense of collegiality, perhaps inspired by the fact that Ottawa was a forlorn place and the city was awash in booze.
Now politics is seen as war by other means, with control of patronage and public spending as the prize. It’s fought by professional armies of marketers, pollsters, strategists and attack dogs. This makes politics an insider game, one with no place for the public, who have become sick of the noise. In places where politicians look on each other as enemies, “legislatures replace relevance with pure partisanship. Party discipline rules supreme, fraternization is frowned upon, negotiation and compromise are rarely practiced, and debate within the chamber becomes as venomously personal as it is politically meaningless,” former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff told an American audience.
And when political opponents—or any other group—are cast as enemies of the popular interest, it’s not much of a leap to label them as enemies of the people and enemies of the state. Ann Coulter, the American right-wing controversialist, has made a good living doing precisely that, peddling books attacking liberals, giving the books titles like Treason, Demonic, Guilty, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors. “Fascism took the fatal step from a politics of adversaries into a politics of enemies,” Ignatieff, still hurting from his own electoral beating, warned. “We are not there yet, but it is worth remembering that the fatal declension occurred in a democracy not so dissimilar to our own, in a society plagued by economic crisis, among a battered population looking for someone to blame.”
Democratic politics requires compromise, often a dirty business that can shock and horrify those of us who rarely find the need to hold our noses and make deals with people we don’t particularly like, don’t agree with, and want to see fail. It’s one of the skills that lawyers need, which partly explains why lawyers move so easily into political life. But today’s “politics as war” conjures up ingrained concepts of unconditional surrender, scorched earth, take-no-prisoners, and it divides outcomes into victory or defeat. The idea of compromise for the good of the public disappears pretty fast. High-functioning sociopaths flourish in this environment.
War talk, Ignatieff said, should be saved for real enemies. “We should focus martial energies where they are needed: [against] those adversaries who actively threaten the liberty of other peoples and our own. Towards those within our borders, however heatedly we may disagree, we should work from a simple persuasive, but saving, assumption: In the house of democracy there are no enemies.”
Ignatieff said democracy is threatened while money dominates politics. That needs to be curtailed with well-enforced laws. Parties have to loosen their grips on the nomination process so talented people who are unknown to the central leadership can come forward. Elected representatives have to be freed from party whips. Ignatieff had rarely worried about these problems when he held the whip as leader of the Liberal Party, but he was right.7
But Ignatieff’s visions aren’t shared in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in the ugly Langevin Block. Even Harper supporters have not been safe from their leader’s lust for control: Tom Flanagan, Harper’s political and academic mentor, was driven out when he wrote Harper’s Team in 2007 without approval from the boss. The prime minister had tried to talk Flanagan into killing the book, even though it has very little controversial material and puts Harper in a fairly good light. Flanagan later told author Lawrence Martin that Harper didn’t want Flanagan to write any book, no matter how supportive it might be.
Flanagan himself, in a 2007 interview, said the goal of Harper and the Tories was to change the very real perception among Canadians that Liberal governments are normal and Conservative administrations are just oddballs and flukes that are elected once in a while and last just long enough to maintain the pretense that Canada is a two-party democracy. “The Liberals had identified themselves as the party of government, people used to talk about the natural governing party and all this bullshit,” he told reporter Tim Naumetz of the Ottawa Citizen. “[Harper’s] got a definite communication strategy to associate the Conservative Party with government and make it seem normal to have a Conservative government after so many years in which the Liberals made it seem that no other party than the Liberals could govern. Conservative parties around the world tend to be successful when they can align themselves with the values of patriotism. That’s the norm, that the conservative party is the patriotic party.”8
And Flanagan has a point. Since the end of World War I, Conservative federal governments in Canada have been rare and relatively short-lived. Almost to the day when Harper was sworn in, conventional wisdom, especially among members of the Parliament Hill media, was that the Liberals, first under Jean Chrétien, then when led by Paul Martin, were mathematically certain to hold power for a very, very long time. Jeffrey Simpson, The Globe and Mail’s main Ottawa columnist and the authoritative voice of conventional wisdom for both the bureaucratic and media elites, even published a book, The Friendly Dictatorship, about the threat to democracy of the Liberals’ seemingly unbreakable lock on power. If he learned anything in the first years of the century, Harper discovered that every political party, including the Liberal Party of Canada—which ranks as one of the world’s great political success stories—can be humbled and even broken. There is no “forever” in politics.
THE CREATION OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY of Canada took more than a decade, and building it required the co-opting of the Reform Party, a 1980s populist reaction to the sleaze, deficit spending and regional compromises of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives. The people in Western Canada and rural and small-town Ontario who supported Reform often had legitimate beefs. Starting in the 1970s, Canada has been through a series of recessions that have hit farm country and small towns particularly hard. Cities, riding real estate booms fuelled by immigration, missed much of the pain. In many small communities, the tough recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s have never ended. Many factories that were shut never reopened. Well-paying jobs in mills, mines, and on railways never came back.
The split from the 1980s onwards between the prosperity of the cities—especially white-collar Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver—and the depopulation and poverty in the countryside and in the near-North opened up enmities and political opportunities that were far more effectively exploited by neo-conservatives. Young people abandoned rural and small-town Canada, causing anguish and bitterness for the parents they left behind. The aging of rural Canada was another factor that helped Reform grow and pick up parliamentary seats. At the same time, Christianity split between dying older denominations and flourishing fundamentalist churches, and Manning, a conservative Christian, was able to pull fellow evangelicals into his political crusade.
Manning’s greatest contribution to this country was actually a negative. He could have exploited Western separatist sympathies, but he didn’t. Instead, Reform would storm Babylon, muck out the mess in Ottawa, make everyone from every part of Canada equally important in Ottawa, get rid of careerist politicians and those who lied to get elected, and have MPs who really represented their constituents. If they let the people down, voters would be able to “recall” them and throw the bums out. It really was “reform” and much of it was, and still is, badly needed. Reform Party supporters—politically-aware people from small-town Canada who are not thrilled to see fundraising prowess and patronage take over the political system—should be just as horrified as anyone else with what’s happening in Ottawa.
Politics is run by professional strategists, pollsters and fundraisers who usually work for lobbying firms and sell their influence to the highest bidder between elections. The professionalization of politics, along with the Conservatives’ extreme message control, lack of accountability and almost complete ignoring of the “grassroots” until the party needs some money or some votes, runs opposite to what the Reform Party stood for in the early 1990s.
Now, former Reformers hold many of the levers of power. The West’s biggest economic worries have been taken care of. Alberta’s energy sector is safe from high taxation and tough regulations, and the government backs the pipelines that could take Alberta crude to world markets. Farmers don’t have to sell their grain to the Canadian Wheat Board. And, probably coincidentally, since not even Stephen Harper can dictate the price of crude, most of the West is booming on $100 oil.
(Harper, though, should reread the books of economist Harold Innis to see where this is going. In a nutshell, Innis, a brilliant University of Toronto economist, warned in 1956 that this country has, too often, relied on just one or two big resource industries and has paid heavily when the world stopped paying us the price we want.)
To win power, the party changed. Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm will be familiar with the storyline. These days, the Conservative Party of Canada bears a striking resemblance to the Mulroney-led party that Preston Manning destroyed. It’s hard to believe old Reformers ever expected to see their party defending Mulroney in the House of Commons for taking $300,000 in large bills from German arms dealer–lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, with the utterly lame response that the Liberals had skimmed millions through the sponsorship scandal. They never would have said, back when Manning was stumping Prairie villages, that Senate expense account padding wasn’t worth much public condemnation because the Ontario Liberals were engaged in a succession of scandals, as though one negates the other in some weird hierarchy of corruption.
So the message has to be controlled. The Harper government has set out to kill many messengers. The media is obviously one of them. And, while Harper’s war with journalists has generated some coverage and interest—though perhaps more among journalists than among other people—it’s a small and relatively easy part of his re-making of how Ottawa works. The Ottawa media had been withering for years, battered by the collapse of the news business. There are many other watchdogs in Ottawa, and Harper’s team went to work defanging them, along with anyone who made much noise about the changes imposed by the Harper government. They set out to make sure only a select few people knew how the country was being run, and to change the way Canadians think about Canada.
First, there was Parliament, an institution, like the media, that has seen better days and has needed serious reform for a long time. Somewhere between Preston Manning’s 1980s barn-burners on democracy, made to audiences in rural Alberta and Saskatchewan, and the Harper government’s decision to slap time limits on debate of most important bills, someone at the top didn’t get the message that MPs are supposed to be more than voting puppets.
The reputations of legislators had already been undercut by neo-cons, who’ve pretty much erased the concept of “representative” from the public mind and replaced it with “politician.” This type of propaganda was expressed in Ontario quite blatantly by the Progressive Conservative government of neo-con darling Mike Harris. His bill to erode local democracy and replace small community councils with less responsive amalgamated city administrations was called the Fewer Municipal Politicians Act, 1999. People might have looked at it differently if it was called the Reduced Representation Act or the Kiss Local Democracy Goodbye Act. (The Harper government has come up with the same triumphal kinds of names for laws, which are discussed in Chapter 11.)
There are federal watchdogs who make sure the government doesn’t waste money. There are others who protect people’s civil rights. Still more watchdogs advocate on behalf of veterans. Some consult with environmental scientists and engineers to decide whether or not a pipeline can be built safely. Others inspect our food so we don’t get poisoned. One group is supposed to make sure the government’s spies do not pry into the lives of law-abiding people.
Some of them were never, before Harper’s regime went after them, seen as watchdogs at all. For example, very few people ten years ago would have added environmental scientists to any list of people who might be considered dangers to the state. Now, in Harper’s Ottawa, they’re kept isolated and gagged and, if possible, are turfed from their jobs. Their labs are shut down and their research libraries shuttered. Everyone within the government’s grasp is barred from speaking publicly in case they say something that might inconvenience or embarrass the regime. The national institutions paid for by Canadians are to speak with just one voice, and it is linked to the mind of Stephen Harper, an introverted former computer nerd with a master’s degree in economics and no real experience in the world of business or professions. He had never managed anything in his life, other than a small and secretive pressure group called the National Citizens Coalition, before winning the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, and, within a few years, the premiership of Canada.
A lot of this controlling, targeting and, when need arises, attacking, is done to make life easier at “the Centre”—the Prime Minister’s Office, which is the political department run by Stephen Harper, and the Privy Council Office, the supposedly somewhat objective and brainy group that advises all ministers on policy and finds ways for the public service to carry out the decisions of the cabinet. Both of these agencies are now the personal tools of Stephen Harper, and he uses them with great enthusiasm to enforce his will throughout the government.
Years ago, ministers actually headed government departments. Now they are figureheads, and they can’t hire or fire their deputy ministers, who are the real bosses of the bureaucracy, or get rid of the chiefs of staff that run the political side of ministerial offices. The deputies and the chiefs of staff owe their jobs to the prime minister. So government departments aren’t really answerable to elected MPs serving as cabinet ministers, and the ministers are no longer answerable to Parliament. The days when ministers would quit, and possibly end their political careers, because of major blunders or corruption in their departments are now far in the past. And it makes sense, in some strange way. Why, the ministers think, would you accept blame for something that really is out of your control, especially when the prime minister gets the credit when things go well?
SO WHAT’S THE POINT of the Harper government? Like the men who were the previous two tenants of 24 Sussex, it’s difficult to see what great, driving impulse motivates this prime minister. Some prime ministers come into office with goals, like John A. Macdonald’s nation-building, Pierre Trudeau’s constitution and Brian Mulroney’s desire to defuse, or, at least, re-channel Quebec nationalism and forge stronger ties with the United States. Harper’s critics used to accuse him of having a hidden political agenda to remake the social fabric of Canada and get rid of abortion rights, non-white immigration and other things that didn’t sit well with rural Canada and many Christian fundamentalists. They were wrong.
Harper has refused to go anywhere near the abortion issue. The racial makeup of immigrants to this country has not changed and the number of people coming to Canada has stayed impressively high, even during recession years when the Harper government could easily have argued that reducing immigration would protect Canadian workers from competition. The “hidden agenda,” for the most part, has stayed hidden, and, unless Harper radically changes his government priorities, he’ll be taking that phantom hidden agenda with him when he leaves.
That’s not to say there hasn’t been a Harper revolution. It exists, but, except for environmentalists, few people saw where it would break out. First, to a frightening degree, the prime minister has tried to muzzle and delegitimize criticism. That’s been done quietly and incrementally, with few people, especially outside Ottawa, noticing. Taken in the bits and pieces that you see in the news, it all seems like insider talk. In fact, it’s really the biggest assault on liberty and democracy since Pierre Trudeau imposed the War Measures Act, but, unlike Trudeau’s emergency law supposedly aimed at terrorists, these changes are meant to permanently change the way this country is governed and will keep Canadians very far removed from the government that they supposedly own.
Harper is also intent on changing the way Canadians see their own country. He once said Canadians would not recognize the country after he was finished with it, and he’s done a lot to make sure that they do see it in a different light: as an energy and resource superpower instead of a country of factories and businesses, as a “warrior nation” instead of a peacekeeper, as an Arctic nation instead of clusters of cities along the American border, as a country of self-reliant entrepreneurs instead of a nation that shares among its people and its regions.
To remake Canada into that kind of country, he had to change the way Canadians think about themselves, their country and the way they are governed. He had to lobotomize a large part of the country’s cultural memory by trashing archives and remaking museums. He had to end Canada’s “Third Way” diplomacy and pride in peacekeeping and replace it with an almost ridiculous big-stick diplomacy and sabre rattling in places like the Middle East and Ukraine. He had to limit public debate by preventing the people from being able to argue knowledgeably about important issues like the safety of the oilsands and climate change. He had to keep federal experts, who still command the public’s respect, from saying anything he doesn’t want to hear. He had to delegitimize the political role of his critics by maligning the motives of journalists, opposition politicians and activists of every stripe.
He had to run election campaigns that are just a series of staged events, with media allowed to film him but not to ask questions and ordinary Canadians kept far away. He had to hold cabinet meetings at secret times and in hidden locations, and make sure reporters don’t get many chances to question ministers. When ministers are cornered, he demanded they repeat talking points, no matter how incredibly stupid they may sound.
He had to deny that the scrutiny of journalists has any role or value to democracy and to the governance of Canada. And he had to facilitate the creation of arm’s-length sycophantic attack media, both mainstream and on the Internet, to handle low-road messaging, float trial balloons and appeal to the most prejudiced and nasty opinions of his base, without much regard for honesty, fairness or civility.
He had to get rid of objective data from the census and from scientists so no one can challenge his narratives on crime, the environmental damage caused by resource exploitation, the extent of climate change or anything else that’s complex. He had to follow the Republican Party’s blueprint to create bogus think-tanks and pressure groups, some fronted by convicted criminals, to push for “ethical oil,” demand tax cuts that cripple governments, and trash his “enemies”—including, in his world, Aboriginal organizations, students, journalists, opposition politicians, pacifists and scientists. When that didn’t work, he sent the federal tax department in to threaten the charitable status of the organizations that he doesn’t like.
He had to destroy Parliament’s ability to scrutinize new laws and the way the government taxes and spends. He had to cloak decision-making in secrecy. He had to spend billions to beef up intelligence agencies and get rid of meaningful oversight, to the point of hiring an alleged criminal and arms lobbyist to be the public’s watchdog of the domestic spy agency CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service).
And he always stays on the attack. The election campaign must never stop. People must be diverted by the struggle for power and should not spend time and energy examining how they’re actually governed.
The people who create and enforce his will must be utterly loyal and, very often, ruthless. They have to be willing to kill the messengers so that only one message—his—will be heard. In the end, if all goes his way, the government and the country itself will belong to a clique of professional political insiders who serve at Stephen Harper’s pleasure, and to their friends in the business world.
If Harper succeeds, he’ll have created a new, undemocratic way of ruling Canada. It will be easy for him or his successors to rule, with sham elections maintaining the myth that democracy is the same thing as regular elections. And there won’t be much anyone can do about what has happened so far unless people inside and outside of Parliament push back. We’re not about to start holding our rulers to the same kind of account that Charles I faced when he tried to trash the rights of Parliament so long ago. That is, unless people demand better from everyone in Ottawa who plays a role in our democracy.