Columnist Ray Rivers re-charges his batteries in New Zealand; adds his comments to a Globe and Mail editorial.

By Staff

December 30, 2014

BURLINGTON, ON

The Globe and Mail editorial of December 27, 2014 sums up the year and the ongoing performance of our Prime Minister.  We saw that editorial as significant enough to re-print it.

Columnist Ray Rivers on sabbatical enjoying a beach in New Zealand – that is really green grass in the background.

Our regular political columnist, Ray Rivers, is currently on a short two month sabbatical and will be writing once every two weeks.  He wanted to comment on this editorial.  His remarks are shown in a different typeface,

From the Globe and Mail: I can’t even get my friends to like me,” Stephen Harper said this year. A joke, obviously, delivered during a moving eulogy for his close friend and political ally Jim Flaherty in April. But more than a joke, too.
The Prime Minister has never been the cuddliest of humans; he was once photographed shaking his young son’s hand as he dropped him off at school.

It is a mistake for us to believe Canadian’s falling support for Mr. Harper is about his personality. He is an introvert, which is not his fault. His trailing Trudeau in the polls has more to do with most Canadians feeling we are going in the wrong direction and could be doing better. It is more about his policies (than his personality) which are divisive – pitting the west against the east, a cynical foreign policy based on ethnocentric values, and stale economic policies which are serving to widen the wealth gap among Canadians.

That formality can be a strength in crises. After the two attacks on Canadian soldiers in October, Mr. Harper’s natural gravitas was reassuring to Canadians. It even gave his party a noticeable bump in the polls in November.
But the ring of truth in Mr. Harper’s quip reverberates less because of his solemn demeanour than it does because of the unyielding way he plays political hardball. The Prime Minister is not someone you want as a friend, politically-speaking, and much less someone you’d want as an enemy.

Not a friend and not an enemy – what does that leave us with? There are times when his demeanour makes us admire him, as in his response post the Parliament Hill fiasco. But then his lack of breadth of vision leaves us to wonder if he gets it at all. Somehow It doesn’t sink into his think skull that the shooting is the kind of thing that should be expected when you abolish the long gun registry, or jump into a war. Oh and Mr. tough guy hid in a closet during the incident, mimicking his own ‘Bush-like’ 911 courage.

He fights ruthlessly and without remorse. He dumps inconvenient allies, sows division with abandon, treats Parliament with contempt and works 24/7 to control what Canadians know and hear about him, usually through the hearty application of muzzles and misdirection.

I’d agree that he governs in an autocratic manner and is control-freak possessed, banning public contact with the public service, for example. Sometimes I wonder if he has not been understudying Mr. Putin. And his lack of loyalty to those who did his dirty work does not wear well on him. I’d add Duffy, Wright, Wallin to that list.

That’s not news, and nor is it all that peculiar to one politician. But, in 2014, the Prime Minister’s bloody-mindedness began to feel like a liability. With him as leader, the party has consistently trailed Justin Trudeau’s kinder, gentler Liberals in the polls in spite of the country’s relatively stable economy. If the Conservatives under Mr. Harper lose the general election next fall, this year may be remembered as the one when Canadians, including members of the Conservative Party, decided their leader’s ruthlessness was no longer worth the cost.

If Harper loses it will be because Canadians want a fresh face and a fresh approach to governing – out with the old divisiveness and back to some core Canadian ‘liberal democratic values’ such as fairness (e.g. how the PM mis-treats Ontario and Quebec).

One of the more telling moments of 2014 came the day after an armed man had stormed Parliament and been killed within metres of a room where Mr. Harper was meeting with his caucus. The morning was marked by sadness and courage as MPs returned to the House of Commons in a display of solidarity; the Prime Minister spoke movingly about the symbolic importance of Parliament, and he even gamely walked across the floor to hug the Leader of the Opposition, Tom Mulcair, and Mr. Trudeau.

And then, several hours later, the Harper government dumped another monstrous omnibus bill onto the Commons, an act knowingly contemptuous of the Parliament the Prime Minister had just praised as the lodestar of Canadian democracy.
Omnibus bills are designed to defeat Parliament’s oversight role. The thick bills allow majority governments to push through major policy changes with little debate by combining multiple unrelated issues into one over-sized turkey. They are an abuse of process; the Conservatives have tabled four since 2010, and the most recent was the second largest.
Mr. Harper was also a repeat offender in 2014 with regard to the dispatching of belligerent junior ministers and hapless parliamentary secretaries to defend problematic legislation in the House or derail Question Period. Pierre Poilievre’s smarmy sales job of the flawed Fair Elections Act and his subsequent climb-down in April were the low points of the year. Or would have been, had not Paul Calandra reduced himself to tears in September after a demeaning display of question-dodging on Mr. Harper’s behalf.

That is a good point, that while previous governments have employed omnibus bills to move milestone, ‘sea change’ policies, Harper appears to use the approach more cynically, to hide stuff. Former justice minister Trudeau used omnibus legislation to make Canada a world leader in social policy under the Pearson government – but it was consistent and transparent.

Both incidents embarrassed some Conservatives as much as they outraged opposition MPs.
This was also the year a former Conservative MP, Dean Del Mastro, was convicted of overspending his campaign limit and trying to cover it up, and a former party staffer, Michael Sona, was convicted in the robo-call scandal. Mr. Harper has distanced himself from both men and their actions, of course, as he did with his former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, who somehow believed it was appropriate to pay off the ineligible expenses of a Conservative senator in 2013. No one would dare say that the Prime Minister endorses unethical activities, but there are people in his party who think that anything goes.

And why wouldn’t they? Mr. Harper showed in 2014 that he will play with his elbows out even in the most inappropriate situation. That brings us to Beverly McLachlin, the respected Chief Justice of the Supreme Court whose integrity the Prime Minister deliberately impugned in an absurd and indefensible fashion. He raised a doubt about whether Ms. McLachlin had interfered with the appointment of a new judge, and was then exposed for being completely and knowingly wrong. His grievous misjudgment demonstrated once and for all that there is no Canadian institution he considers sacred if it stands in his way.

There is no excuse for Mr. Harper’s attempt to embarrass the senior justice of the country – in the end he only embarrassed himself. If he so lacks respect for our fundamental institutions – why should anyone respect him or his?

Other consequences of Mr. Harper’s antipathy to Parliament and to Canadian institutions in 2014 included but were not limited to two crime bills that were sent to the Senate containing serious errors, the use of taxpayer dollars on government advertising that happens to align with Conservative election promises, and a new prostitution law that is likely to fail a Charter challenge, and which police forces across the country have little intention of enforcing, thanks to the government’s refusal to listen to contrary opinions while the bill was in that former house of debate we know as Parliament.

It is remarkable that having seen the existing prostitution law thrown out by the courts as dangerous to the security of sex workers, his justice minister brings in a replacement which is even worse. A clear case of ideology trumping competence.

Ask Mr. Harper how it’s going after almost nine years in office and he – along with every single member of his party – will robotically respond that his government is continuing to fight for hard-working Canadian families and lowering their taxes. It’s a spiel that talks past his government’s many flaws. Mr. Harper is responsible for those flaws, which are mirror images of his own, and gets the credit for his party’s successes. Those include an economy that is not great but better than most, shrinking deficits, a real attempt to reform immigration and native education, tax cuts targeted at core constituencies and the effort to help defeat Islamic State in Iraq.

Not a bad record. The question in 2015 will be, Is it worth it? Or could someone else, inside or outside the party, achieve results on the same scale while respecting Parliament and setting a higher ethical standard?

No its not a bad record, except for all the deficiencies the G&M notes. Mr. Harper set out as PM to transform Canada, to make it a nation that more closely reflects his own values, some of which we agree with. And to some extent he has been successful in shaping attitudes and developing a following. How many followers we will only know after the next election, when we put to the real test whether his lagging poll numbers mean anything at all.

Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.