Harper continues to spin and ride out his what should be his embarrassments – Guergis/Jaffer, Afghan torture cover up etc - while aggressively carrying out his American neo-con copycat agenda. As usual he bypasses Parliament, packing ‘independent” government agencies with his nominees, working on the bureaucratic level with other countries so as to bypass any big national debates, cutting funding to any group with whose policies he may not agree: anyone not always pro-Israeli, feminists, day care, gays, pro-choice, environmentalists especially those critical of the tar sands and more. It’s interesting that like all Conservatives, Harper is critical of ‘big government’ spending, but is happy to throw funding (your and my tax dollars)to his own favourite groups and spend on the military.
For some time, I have pointed out that Harper has been pulling Canada far to the Right even without the support of the majority. It’s getting pretty blatant now. The National Rifle Association (NRA, the all powerful gun lobby in the USA, is now funding campaigns in Canada designed to get rid of gun registration.
A new book called The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada details Harper’s links with the Religious Right. Author Mari McDonald comments, “All my worries about having to prove my case that this government is intent on cultivating the social conservative constituency in this country were nothing to worry about. They were doing it so openly that you could hardly keep up with the headlines...I think we should be vigilant. We have to decide what kind of country we want to live in. We have to stay on top of these issues because this is a government wedded to secrecy...This government has chosen a strategy that risks changing the Canada that most of us have agreed we want to live in and the tolerance we have built”.
I and others have issued similar warnings for some time but Canadians seem asleep or are cocooned in their own lives, hoping that will be enough to protect them. It won’t . The reality is that we have created a Global Village. We are all interconnected; we have become a corporate-run society that is reinforced by technological innovation. Power and wealth have shifted upwards to a very small percentage of the population. Democracy is being rapidly undermined... as several authors, journalists and academics are beginning to point out.