rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

‘The Harper government is sordid not only in its means but also its ends’

by rabble staff

Carl Rosenberg sent in this editorial on the election from Outlook: Canada’s Progressive Jewish Magazine.

This election will take place after almost three years of one of the most regressive governments in Canada’s recent history. The circumstances under which Harper called it show the depths of authoritarianism and duplicity which his government has reached, even judging by the not always inspiring standards of Canadian politics. Contrary to Harper’s excuse, parliament was not “dysfunctional” but was simply not “functioning” completely to his advantage. He and his team made it “dysfunctional” by sabotaging parliamentary investigations into spending improprieties in the 2006 election and other potential scandals, then cut them short altogether by calling an election in violation of his own legislation imposing fixed election dates. Harper probably also wants to go to the polls before the U.S. election, to avoid the possibility that an Obama victory will create a liberal shift in the political mood in North America as a whole, making Harper’s government even more of a reactionary anachronism.

Harper’s contempt for democracy has been demonstrated from the outset by the now-infamous defection of David Emerson, engineered by Harper, among other dubious appointments; the muzzling of cabinet ministers and civil servants; smearing critics with accusations of disloyalty; restrictions on press access; the systematic blocking of access to government documents; the closure of the public database of access-to-information requests; the attempted censorship of the Arar report; and the suppression of internal documents revealing torture of detainees in Afghanistan during the prisoner-transfer scandal. It is a record unmatched in Canada, at least by any one government, since the Duplessis era in Quebec.

The Harper government is sordid not only in its means but also its ends—cutting funding to women’s groups and the arts; tax cuts favouring the wealthy and depleting public funds that could be used for social spending and health care; the destruction of the Kelowna Accord; undermining effective action on global warming; support for the Israeli occupation; and committing Canada to a long military occupation in Afghanistan (which Harper now promises to end under the spur of the election campaign). Canada under Harper has been utterly submissive to Bush’s imperial policies—ironically, policies which are now being widely challenged in the U.S. This has been shown in many ways, from Harper’s support for the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” (SPP) scheme for further “integration” of the U.S. and Canada; to the deportation of U.S. war resisters, in spite of a motion—albeit non-binding—supported by a majority of MPs in favour of war resisters’ being allowed to stay in Canada; to Harper’s complicity in the continued detention and mistreatment of Omar Khadr, making Canada the last Western power with one of its citizens still a prisoner in Guantanamo.
It is likely that this election will result in another Conservative minority government.

Of course, the Liberals do not have a glowing record—they also waged war against the poor on behalf of the wealthy and powerful, and led us into Afghanistan. But a Liberal minority government, unlike a Conservative one, would at least make it possible for the NDP to gain some concessions on various issues. But whether the Liberals or Conservatives form the next government, Canadians will still have to resist the general political trend which Harper exemplifies—the combination of regressive social policies, submission to U.S. imperial policies and its “war on terrorism,” and infringement of democratic freedoms which has led the U.S. itself, and much of the rest of the world with it, to disaster.