8th
Time to get out of the comfort zone
By Dave Coles
It is a cold shower on the morning of the election. Like most of you, I didn’t spend my summer focusing on Stephen Harper. Now I find out that Canadians are “getting comfortable” with Harper and that he is close to a majority.
It is wake-up time, folks. Get out of the comfort zone.
How is it that after all we know of the Reform Party-Conservative Party, and with all we know about Stephen Harper and his right wing agenda that we now face the imminent danger of Conservative majority rule?
Clearly, Dion and the Liberals are mostly responsible because they are such a lousy opposition. But I think that progressives in English Canada and Quebec must also recognize that we have allowed Canadians to become too comfortable with Harper and his party.
Both Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe have said that they will now make Harper and his policies the target of the campaign. I could not be more pleased. However, my view is that it will be difficult to do that unless there is a different kind of passionate, straight talk about life and death issues that make people very uncomfortable.
After the bloodiest month for Canadians since the start of the Afghanistan war, a clear yes or no to that disastrous war has to be foremost of those issues. But from climate change to health care, Canadians need to see Harper’s core social values laid bare.
My guess is that downtown Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver have Stephen Harper more or less figured out. The battleground will be the industrial heartlands of the country where manufacturing jobs have been decimated. Among them are 32,000 forest industry workers who have lost their jobs during the last two years of the Harper government. They aren’t interested much in policy debates; they want to know who is on their side.
It may be that it is unions, women’s groups and environmentalists that are in the best position to shake Canadians out of their comfort zone with Stephen Harper, and we don’t have any time to waste.
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