The Government are merely trustees for the public.
—SIR JOHN A. MACDONALD
American historian Richard Hofstadter, who chronicled the evolution of America’s imperial presidency, once wrote: “Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.” The Reform Party’s promises—made in Legion halls in small-town Canada a generation ago—of open government, public participation and political accountability, are now long dead. After nine years of Harper government, the old Western populist ideal of politicians who represent the people and fear their wrath is just a relic of another age. Reformers wanted to drive the money-changers from the Temple, but the government that they helped create will now break denarii into sesterces for pretty much anyone who comes along. Government is now bigger than ever. Thousands of lobbyists are welcomed into the offices of politicians and senior bureaucrats. And, most frightening, the people are being driven from the political system.
Stephen Harper ran in 2006 on a promise of accountability. The windows of Ottawa would be thrown open and fresh air would flow through the halls of power. Government would be returned to the people. The revolving door between Parliament Hill and the high-rises of the lobbyists would be closed. An independent parliamentary budget officer would tell people what was really happening to their money. Corporate and union money would be kept out of politics. Even though Harper had promised to make an Accountability Act his first order of business, but instead had appointed his Quebec campaign manager to the Senate, in the early years Canadians still had every right to believe Harper would deliver on his promises.
Canadians are still waiting. A truly accountable government provides the people with the information they need to make informed choices and to assess the quality of their representation. This government did not show any respect for the populists who laid the foundation for its rise to power. This is not a Reform Party government. It’s not a conservative government. It is a government that exists to sustain itself, shill for the oil patch, make trade deals that are often not in Canada’s interests, break unions and, above all else, get re-elected.
This breed of Conservatives talks a lot about tradition, yet at the same time attacks institutions that have evolved for hundreds of years. They talk about accountability, but prevent journalists, MPs and officers of Parliament from carefully examining laws. They hide scientific evidence or prevent it from being gathered. They talk a good fight about the military and try to rebrand the country as a warrior nation, but leave war veterans struggling to get medical help and to pay their bills.
Many Canadians—and people living in most other Western countries—believe governments and the economy will just move along nicely in the hands of the political and economic elites. Judging by dismal voter turnouts, plummeting memberships in political parties, and wretched media viewing and reading numbers, democracy is, at best, on automatic pilot. History shows institutions and political systems collapse when they become corrupt and decayed. They can also die from sheer lack of interest. Once these institutions are corrupted and delegitimized, the rest of society will follow. People who live in democracies had better put some sweat equity into them, or the system won’t be around forever. It’s chauvinism bordering on racism to believe that we are somehow special, that our system of government can survive when so many other attempts at democracy throughout the world have failed.
What’s coming out of Ottawa today is not conservatism. It’s something revolutionary. Conservatives normally defend the legitimacy of established government. They don’t believe agents of the state should paw through the mail, whether on paper or in Internet discussion groups. They believe scientists should be able to talk to people, especially when the scientists are paid by the people, and that research brings enlightenment and prosperity. They believe in law and order, and do not attack the courts or circumvent election laws.
This book opened with the execution of Charles I. He was an ineffective, somewhat duplicitous ruler, but at least he was honest when he expressed his views on democracy. These days, every politician claims to believe in democracy, but rarely has real government of the people been so threatened. Parliament, the institution that called Charles to account and took off his head, has become a place of mock debate staged for television cameras. Its members rarely show up to scrutinize the laws that are passed by the House of Commons. Our representatives are barely more than public relations staffers of political parties.
It’s time for MPs to push back. First, they can show up for debates. Second, they can demand Parliament spend the money to make committees work. That means creating committees that have, like their counterparts in Washington, at least one lawyer and one researcher permanently assigned to them full-time. For committees like Finance, a team of forensic accountants should be working full-time on budgets and estimates so that MPs can ask informed questions that will help them understand how the government taxes and spends. Committee counsel should be allowed to examine witnesses, work with committee members to subpoena witnesses, and examine draft legislation. Too often, MPs have missed opportunities to ask probing questions and to demand witnesses show up and give honest testimony.
We should expect the government, if it’s serious about getting control of national spending, to spend the money to raid the accounting firms of this country for the best auditors and efficiency experts. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. I’ve spent twenty years on Parliament Hill, and I’m not impressed by the general quality of public sector management. I’ve seen many government departments with morale so low that nothing gets done. I’ve also seen well-run departments and agencies. Efficiencies can be used to improve services or reduce taxes. No party should support waste simply because reform of public administration and public accounting is difficult and makes enemies.
We can’t go to Parliament and watch all its debates, or analyze the workings of the vast federal bureaucracy, so we count on journalists to do that for us. Our media is being shredded by a revolution in communications that shows no sign of slowing. Many—though not all—of the surviving journalists have reacted by ignoring the dull workings of representative government and have turned inward, trying to be insiders covering politics as some kind of sport. Rarely have journalists been held in lower public esteem.
The Harper government has used the media’s problems against it. It is almost impossible for journalists to get meaningful information from this government. The Harper regime operates in secrecy, showing its contempt for the news media every day. It has started to try to replace the media with its own TV network, 24 Seven, and has provoked fights with reporters to raise campaign contributions from Tory supporters.
It has stifled research and gagged scientists as a way of killing meaningful public debate on science-based issues. Western civilization is built on the success of its science, especially discoveries that challenged the dogmas of the ruling elites. You have to reach pretty far back in Western history to find the kind of attack on science that’s been waged by the Harper administration—or deep into the hills of the U.S. Bible Belt, where the Tea Party movement is waging a similar battle. Harper’s team has played with history by reshaping the country’s major museums and slashing the funding for the country’s archives in order to change the way Canadians see their past and their country’s role in the world. Relying on public ignorance to ram through government policies is a poor way to run a country.
The gags placed on public watchdogs of all sorts are frightening to anyone who believes in democracy and liberty. The concentration of power at the Centre under the control of a single leader smacks of fascism. Add to that this government’s fetish for military grandeur, its contempt for democratic institutions and its attack-dog-style campaigns against its perceived enemies, including the courts, and it’s plain we’re on the road to a new kind of Canada, one that very few of us will enjoy.
Pollster Allan Gregg is one conservative who took the measure of the Harper regime and decided it was bad for the country. He had been one of Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney’s insiders, and he first started worrying about Harper in July 2010, when the government announced its decision to kill the mandatory long-form census. Gregg, who heads the Harris/Decima market research and polling company, uses census material in his work. In a Toronto Star article, Gregg said: “I knew how important these data were to policy analysts. How could a government forsake the census’s valuable insights—and the chance to make good public policy—under the pretense that rights were somehow violated by asking Canadians how many bathrooms were in their home?”
Gregg looked at the nineteen thousand federal jobs scheduled to be cut in the 2012 federal budget and realized they weren’t going to be across-the-board layoffs or jobs that would not be filled when people quit or retired. They were precisely targeted at “researchers, statisticians, scientists and other organizations who might use data to contradict a government which believed that evidence and rational compromise are not the tools of enlightened public policy, but barriers to the pursuit of an agenda based on ideology over reason.” It was clear to Gregg that, whether in the debate to get rid of the Canadian Wheat Board or to send potheads to jail, the Harper government did not want facts to get in the way of policy. Ridding public debate of facts ensured they would not be thrown back at the government. Hiding behind walls of secrecy then ensured that, in those rare times when debate was based on reason instead of emotion, all of the ammunition would be in the government’s hands, and it could choose which to use—or misuse.1
Gregg lashed out at Harper, saying his government is “ceasing to use evidence, facts and science as the basis to guide policy.” Instead, it has retreated “into dogma, fear and partisan advantage to steer the ship of state.” Gregg wrote:
Understanding the world or explaining phenomena, through superstition, dogma, and orthodoxy—instead of facts and reason—invariably leads to some very ugly and uncivilized behavior. The reason for this is fairly straightforward—namely beliefs that are rooted in superstitions, dogma and orthodoxy are not sustainable … sooner or later their veracity will be tested by the facts and evidence. Those who need these beliefs to sustain their interests and power therefore must enforce them at the point of a sword or remove those who might prove them to be untrue.
Like many conservatives, Gregg wonders what this is all about. Why the war on science? Why make laws based on faith instead of reason, govern guided by dogma and turn the clock back? Why the love of monarchy, the revival of the old British ranks in the military, the hype about colonial wars? Why the self-loathing about so much of Canada and its past, including its generations of service as a peacekeeper and peacemaker? Why try to recreate a class structure in which a handful of people run the country and everyone else shuts up and does what they’re told, or faces the massive powers of the state to spy, investigate and lay charges?
Maybe it’s a yearning for a world that’s past, a world of happy, middle-class, white people living their lives free of the worries of racial and cultural diversity. Maybe it’s a desire to hear the last of climate change, genetically modified crops, nanosilver, oilsands pollution and all of the other nasty things out there that have cropped up since Harper was a boy growing up in suburban Toronto in the 1960s. Harper seems to offer national pride, strong leadership in a dangerous world, simple answers to complex questions. Those who don’t support the Centre are simply troublemakers and opportunists who are trying to suck the happiness from Canadians.
It’s an illusion. The world is a complicated place. Its problems, at least in this country, can only be solved by people discussing and debating the country’s issues, just as we always have. Democratic institutions are more effective and efficient than fascism. People who live in functioning democracies are safer, wealthier and happier than people who live in any other political system. We need to work hard to rebuild our democracy. We can start by giving the messengers a helping hand, dusting them off, and getting them back on their feet. When they’re attacked, we need to stand behind them. And when people try to kill them, we need to make sure the messengers survive and thrive.
First, vote. Second, when a political party or a politician shows strong signs that they’re willing to reverse antidemocratic trends, give them some money and volunteer your time. You’ll find the political class has been very generous to itself when it wrote the laws about income tax deductions for political contributions. Third, show up to all-candidates’ meetings at election time, and if, as is the trend these days, there are no meetings in your riding, bird-dog your local candidate on social media and demand answers to your questions. Quite simply, be a pain in the ass if you don’t get the answers you need. And if you do like what you hear, join a political party and become active at the local and, if possible, national level. Our system still relies on political parties to craft policies, find candidates and raise money. If no one gets involved, all of this work will fall into the laps of professional strategists, most of whom are also lobbyists.
Support the groups that are under attack by this government. There are many ways to do that, and some are quite inexpensive. Volunteer, write letters, give social media support to the causes you like. Do you oppose the Keystone pipeline? Fine. Make your voice heard. Do you believe the North American continent should be self-sufficient in what Ezra Levant calls ethical oil? Great. Speak up. No one should be shut out of the debate on public issues.
And don’t wait for a saviour. The present dysfunctional system will be very hard to fix, and the attacks on democracy won’t be reversed unless whichever party forms the next government is pressured to do so. Yes, Stephen Harper has harnessed the system to suit his own agenda and personality. But public support for democratic institutions and watchdogs was crumbling before Harper was elected, and the decay won’t end until politicians feel the pressure to make it stop. To make national leaders hand power back to elected representatives and to the people requires a revolution in the way politicians and the people they represent think about the running of their country. We won’t get it back until we stop thinking and talking about what “they” are doing to the country and ask ourselves what “we” are doing.