Hating Harper - Canada's Prime Minister

The Public Service Alliance of Canada has started a campaign called “Harper Hates Us”. As a former marketing guy, I thought it was quite clever.. They’ve had little badges made up for union members to wear to work and even hired a small plane to fly around the nation’s capital with a big Harper Hates Us sign behind it. Of course, the RCMP took a dim view of that for some reason and ordered the plane down.

That’s annoying. Canada is a country that knows that Stephen Harper is the root cause of all of our problems and we should have the right to express our angst and displeasure.

It’s not for nothing that Canada’s Prime Minister has been one of the most unpopular politicians in recent memory, or at least, one of the most vilified. Almost from the day he first tossed his hat into the ring for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Stephen Harper has been the object of justifiable ridicule, rancor and demonization.

It’s not difficult to understand why.

It started right after he was first elected. Thank God for the unbiased Canadian media who were quick to point out what a cold fish the man is. They devoted more than a few days to commenting on how he was so cold, he actually shook hands with his son when the PM dropped him off on the fist day of school. Thanks to the media, we weren't fooled by the story that it was his son who asked the PM not to hug or kiss him goodbye in front of the media cameras.

Unlike his predecessor, Paul Martin who slashed health care transfer payments to the provinces, Stephen Harper not only reversed those cuts, he had the unmitigated gall to provide stable funding increases for the next eight years. Can you believe the temerity of the man? It was clearly a blatant ploy to get votes and obviously a reckless thing to do during these times of global economic uncertainty but fortunately, the provincial premiers weren't fooled. They were quick to condemn the Prime Minister, no doubt out of nostalgia for the good old days under Paul Martin's cuts during the strong global economy of the 90s.

In his first term in office, despite having only a minority government, Prime Minister Harper kept the five major promises he made during the election campaign. Unbelievable! Canada is a country that is used to its politicians lying to them. We depend on it now. It’s small wonder so many were outraged by this redneck from Alberta showing some integrity. If you can’t count on your politicians to be consistently dishonest, how can you decide where to cast your next ballot?

He was the first prime minister in Canada to introduce and have passed, a motion recognizing Quebec not only as a distinct society but as a nation within a nation. The Quebec electorate rightly refused to be taken in by his action which they had been demanding for decades and refused to vote for his party in the subsequent election. Good for them! They stood on principle and voted against Harper because he cut some funding to the arts in the rest of Canada during the global economic meltdown in 2008. Quebecers weren’t going to be fooled by silly things like reality or economic responsibility. They voted for the NDP, who presented them with candidates almost nobody, including the NDP had ever heard of (please excuse the dangling preposition but this has all just really upset me).

During the 2006 Election, the Liberals accused Stephen Harper of wanting to impose martial law and put troops on the streets of Canadian cities if elected. Being the only party that actually ever did impose marital law, you could trust that the Liberals knew what they were talking about but, once again, Prime Minister Harper failed to deliver.

He didn’t put troops in the streets, he didn’t declare martial law; he didn’t even get all that wound up about the Occupy movement. No wonder he is so unpopular. He can’t even get oppression right. It's enough to make you wonder how he can continue to pretend he's the fascist that Canadians know  he dying to be.

Fortunately we got to blame him for the police actions during the G8/G20 meetings in Toronto even though it was actually the Liberal Premier of Ontario who enacted emergency police powers legislation and it was the municipal and provincial police who were involved in all of the allegations of police brutality.

Thank God the Prime Minister has done some things which confirm our beliefs. He prorogued Parliament which even though it is perfectly legal and constitutional, was seen for what it was; a deliberate attempt to prevent the opposition parties from defeating the government and forcing an election. Of course, the prime minister had already announced he would introduce his new budget in 60 days and that would give the opposition ample opportunity to kill the government but it was very undemocratic to use a legal process to delay the non-confidence vote until after the budget was actually introduced.

We are used to the back room deals and dirty tricks that usually allow minority governments to avoid being defeated. We're seeing some of that in Ontario today thanks to more cheap moves by Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, a premier you can count on to be consistent with what we expect from our politicians.

Ultimately the government was defeated and an election called. It didn't work out quite the way the opposition promised, Mr. Harper was reelected and this time with a majority government. Now we are stuck with this guy for at least three more years. It’s very distressing that so many Canadians have been taken in by this guy and voted him a majority. It's even more annoying that he is the first prime minister n decades to have seats in every province and territory in Canada. Clearly there are a lot of people out there who need to give their heads a shake.

What were they thinking?

Oh sure, Canada now has the strongest economy in the G-7 but so what!

He has opened up trade with China and is in negotiations with Europe to expand free trade with the European Union. He leaves provincial matters to the provinces and does not interfere. The idiot actually believes in the Canadian Constitution as it is written and not as the premiers and former prime ministers wish it had been written. Ho hum!

He gave western farmers back the right to sell their wheat to whomever they want by abolishing the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly and has restored the Canadian military after decades of government neglect and budget cuts. Along the way he completed what everyone agrees was the most efficient and fair procurement process for the building of new ships that this country has ever seen. He even reached out to the family of the late Jack Layton, former leader of the New Democratic Party and offered them a state funeral for Mr. Layton, something totally out of the ordinary. Big deal!

None of that is important.

What is important is that he is very mean-spirited. He runs terrible ads against his political opponents (as opposed to the satirical ads they run about him) although he hasn’t quite reached the stage of former provincial NDP Leader Steven Lewis who used his eulogy at the state funeral for Jack Layton to publicly castigate the prime minister for his policies.

Clearly Prime Minister Harper lacks the class of the NDP.

He has been accused of various unethical breaches but once again isn’t very good at it. He lacks the skill of the Liberal Party who in the past 14 months have seen one of their senators sentenced to prison for misuse of government funds and had to fire a senior staffer for misuse of government resources to release personal information about a sitting cabinet minister. Recently they are are being unfairly attacked for  yet more political cheap tricks by taking advantage of one of their own senators who has dementia and who was declared mentally incompetent six months ago. Fortunately the mainstream media tend to downplay or rationalize this stuff so that they can keep the country properly focused on the nefarious intentions of Stephen Harper. No point in criticizing what is, we need to stay focused on criticizing what we want to believe may happen.

Unfortunately, Harper isn't cooperating (big surprise) because he isn't very good at being nefarious or even small-town cheap. As we all know, it takes Liberals to get that right.

He certainly can’t keep up with the NDP who used the death of their leader Jack Layton as a fund raising gimmick before he had even been buried (and for which they were rapped on the knuckles by Canada Revenue Agency for misuse of their political party tax status). The NDP were nailed last month for improper fundraising from the unions for which they were fined more than $300,000. Now that is beahviour we understand and can trust because we have seen it so often before.

Harper just doesn't get it. He is just too stubborn to actually stop and think about the possible shortcuts and ethical corners he should be cutting which only proves that he isn't a team player.

He has, for example, only managed to get into a wrangle with Elections Canada over the moving of campaign funds between the national and local election campaigns. It was called In and Out. One court found for Elections Canada, one for the Conservatives.

How typical! Harper’s biggest scandal was a question of interpretation of legislation on which even the courts couldn't agree. Instead of doing the proper Canadian political thing and fighting it all the way to the Supreme Court at taxpayer expense, he instructed his party to reach a settlement on the case and move on.

The bastard undercut months of opportunity for journalists and opposition politicians to rail and condemn. He really is insensitive to the needs of others.

There was still hope with Robocall, the scandal that would publicly prove once and for all that Stephen Harper and his party were dishonest, corrupt and unethical. Well, damn it! Elections Canada has gone and completely botched that investigation too. Not only were they unable to find any evidence of wrong doing by the Prime Minister or his party, they’ve had to admit that their lead investigator actually got some of his initial claims incorrect. That's just bloody annoying.

In the end, only one charge has been laid in Robocall and it was against the Liberals. It isn’t fair, I tell you. Stephen Harper is the enemy not the Liberals. He should have been charged even if he didn’t do anything wrong, not the Liberals even though they did once again.

We are a liberal country that is not happy unless we are unhappy. For decades we have been led by politicians that misled us, stole taxpayer money (Adscam), cut social program spending and balanced budgets by downloading expenses onto the provinces. We’ve had politicians that made promises like scrapping the GST only to continue it after being elected and which make grandiose gestures like signing the Kyoto Accord but who only showed up for the photo op but didn't bother following through on its implementation.

We have been led for decades by politicians who have consistently caved to the petulant demands of Quebec and other special interest at the expense of taxpayers and the undermining of basic and fundamental rights of some citizens. It was politics on which we could depend because it was so much easier to vote for someone with nice hair because there was nothing else to differentiate between them. They were all unethical but Harper’s gone and screwed that all up.

He is a prime minister who keeps his election promises, has piloted Canada through one of the worst economic crisis in decades and who has reduced unemployment. It’s small wonder he is so disliked.

If you can’t count on your politicians to lie to you and cheat the system like the Liberals have for years and the NDP are learning quickly to do who can you count on?

I have no difficulty understanding why the Prime Minister is so often trashed. He’s has turned Canadian politics upside down by actually believing he was supposed to do what he promised to do during the election.

What a moron!

The sooner we can get back to political leaders we can trust to lie to us, the happier most of us will be.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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