Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Let's just call it Harperville for the time being

Woe Canada. My home, if not native, land. It seems I'm not alone in my displeasure and discomfort wrought by the shenanigans of Canada's current prime minister.
opinion_maxedout1

Woe Canada. My home, if not native, land.

It seems I'm not alone in my displeasure and discomfort wrought by the shenanigans of Canada's current prime minister. Even a growing number of the approximately two-fifths of voters who selected the Conservatives are suffering post-purchase dissonance.

Die-hard, "small-c" conservatives are pissed off that Little Stevie isn't really a conservative after all. Real conservatives believe in smaller government. Little Stevie, while paying lip service to smaller government, has increased the federal public service — not including uniformed military or police personnel — by somewhere in the neighbourhood of 33,000 employees since taking power in 2006. His recent announcement of cuts, particularly targeting those who challenge or disagree with his points of view on such things as climate change and the desirability of imperiling west coast fisheries with oil tankers in treacherous waters, are a drop in the proverbial bucket.

Real conservatives are fiscally conservative. Little Stevie inherited a budget running surpluses for the first time in collective memory and imprudently cut the GST, despite the singular lack of anyone agitating for him to do so. That move, along with increased spending, a burgeoning civil service and an unfortunate lack of foresight in seeing the coming economic shitstorm, especially for one versed in the arcane discipline of economics, turned surpluses to deficits quicker than you could say "prorogue parliament."

Real conservatives believe in what they believe in and they believe they're right in believing that way. I apologize for that sentence but you know what I mean. Real conservatives will fight openly for what they believe in. Little Stevie is Big Sneaky. If there's something he believes in — or something he wants to do — and pesky things like fact-based science disagrees or gets in his way, he won't ignore it or argue against it in the marketplace of ideas. If those temeritous scientists are employed or funded by the federal government, he'll fire them, silence them or dissolve their funding in a sneaky budgetary maneuver. No one disagrees with Little Stevie and gets away with it. His football, his rules.

Real conservatives have some respect for our form of government, however imperfect it may be. They know, in their stony, cold hearts, it's the last bastion of hope... especially when they're out of power, as they inevitably will be. Little Stevie has nothing but contempt for parliament. So obviously he's been found, well, in contempt of parliament. But parliament's just a nuisance and obstacle to doing what he wants. If it gets in the way, he'll prorogue it. If it wants information the rules say it's entitled to, he'll thumb his nose at it. And that was when he ran a minority government.

And so I say woe Canada. Now as much as I believe the gruesome scene playing out in Ottawa is severely black and white, I'm certain not everything Little Stevie's done is misguided or in bad taste. So I'll take this opportunity to list his accomplishments, of which all Canadians, regardless of political stripe, can be proud. They include: (1)... I'll get back to you on that.

Sadly, there is no hope. No recourse, no appeal, no light at the end of the tunnel. Canada is, for the foreseeable future, in the firm grasp of Little Stevie's vision of the twisted dystopia he's quickly creating. Not Canada as most Canadians would describe it or desire it, let's just call it Harperville for the time being. We are all destined to be Harpervillians because, again sadly, there is no countervailing political party.

The official opposition, the NDP, is opposition in name only. They surged to the number two spot nationally because (1) Jack Layton was a charming scoundrel and (2) Quebec voters are stupid. I really don't think I have to defend that second proposition but feel free to dispute it if you honestly believe it overstates the case.

There used to be another political party, I think they were called Liberals, but they seem to have disappeared up their own arse.

Question: who is the leader of the federal Liberal Party? Answer: trick question, there isn't one. If you answered Bob Rae, give your head a shake. Bob is interim leader. If he decides to actually run for leader, he'll have to vacate that position and a new interim leader will be chosen. If Bob chooses to run, we might as well all just give up. By the time the next election rolls around, Bob will be old enough to be thinking about winding down his RRSPs. But even at that advanced age, nobody will let anybody else forget he's not really a Liberal and he did run(sic) Ontario once upon a very sad time.

But we don't really have to worry about that. While the Liberal party's national board of directors is talking amongst themselves this week about exactly when to hold a vote for a new Liberal leader, no one needs to get out their daytimer just yet. It's not likely to happen until this time next year.

For another year, the Liberal Party will be a whisper and a memory. It will be a party in name only, one with no leader, no platform, no principles and nothing for the faithful or the skeptical to believe in.

It would be easy to say, "So what." In fact, I'll say it. So what? A strong case could be made the Liberal Party hasn't had a leader since Jean Chrétien decided to teach Paul Martin what the Chinese meant when they warned about the dangers of getting what we always wanted. Martin, Dion and Iggy were like a hat trick of bad jokes getting worse with the retelling.

There is no current opposition to Little Stevie's PCs and there is none on the horizon. Our arcane form of parliamentary government can't really exist without an opposition and in its absence, Baby Doc Harper is free to be the tinpot dictator he always dreamed of being. Meanwhile, we lose, Canada loses, the future loses and people — the ones who actually make up the country and, theoretically, the government — are reduced to playing secondary roles of handservants and bootlicks to the ascendant Economy. All hail the late, great humanity....

Yes, we deserve better. We deserve grownups who will govern in the best interests of the country, not the country club. We deserve leaders with open minds who will listen to, not silence, those who honestly disagree with them, who will consider the merits of opposing positions. We deserve leaders with greater vision than a steroidal version of Canada's traditional role as natural resource milch cow.

We deserve it. But we're not going to get it any time soon. Woe Canada.