On Steven Harper and the Canadian Right
It seems strange that just as these here United States of America are waking up to the venality, mendacity, and sheer incompetence of the NeoConservative/Religious Right Axis currently running the Country (into the ground), Canada has elected a junior version of the same movement. Bush's "Mini-me", if you will.
Harper and the Alberta plastic hair brigade are using the Bush playbook: appeal to people's base instincts (fear, hatred, intolerance, and greed) by stressing law and order, inventing new threats to their safety to put more people under suspicion and into jail; pandering to authoritarian tendencies with militaristic displays and photo-op war exercises; using secrecy and informational discipline to stamp out dissenting voices and limit debate; and indirectly appealing to the evangelical movement by one-sidedly supporting the Zionist cause at the expense of Palestinians. Clearly, Canada is a more secular society and therefore the emotive religious issues used to great effect in the US are not available to the same degree - prayer in schools, the pledge of allegiance ("one country under God"). Similarly divisive issues are also well-used in the US which cannot be used in Canada: the burning of the flag amendment to the Constitution (!), and to a lesser extent, gay marriage (although this raises hackles in Canada, again, it is a more tolerant society). Worse, these emotional appeals are based on a paucity of fact, which is considered irrelevent to the issue: it is about pandering to people's prejudices (faith-based policymaking) rather than making rational decisions based on reasoned debate.
Nonetheless, these tactics, supported by a corporatist press with distressingly concentrated ownership (Izzie Asper's National Post, the brand flagship, is the print equivalent of Fox News - consistently propagating the corporatist line), have been successful in getting Harper & Co. into power, albeit minoritaire. And so they would stay, except for the prospect of a marriage of convenience with Quebec's Independentists, who Harper is actively, and apparently successfully courting. For them, it is a purely tactical move to advance their aim of an independent Quebec. Certainly most of the political perspectives and aims of the Alberta conservatives are antithetical to those of the Pequistes, who are unabashedly socialist in the French interventioniste tradition. Which is why the prospect of a majority Conservative government, elected with the necessary support of Quebec independentists, is so galling. The same marriage of convenience (or rather, alliance of whores) was successful in the eighties in producing the Mulroney government. The outcome was instructive: the Bloc Quebecois was formed, and became Quebec's voice in Ottawa, and the Conservative party dwindled to a pathetic rump, with not even enough seats to form an opposition, until it was rescued by the Alberta Alliance party. But the concessions to Quebec which were the political price for the marriage are still in place, and will always be so.
If the Harper minority government were to be a short-lived affair, punishment for the hubris and sense of entitlement which had become the hallmark of the entrenched Liberal government, all well and good. The worst parts of their agenda could never be implemented, and they might even do some good by shaking up the status quo. However, in a majority position, the Conservatives could and would wreak some serious damage to the Canadian body politic. They are being coy as to the depth of their true aims in order to lull people. But some there are some scary indicators: Harper's disavowing of the Kyoto protocols betrays the Conservatives' complete lack of respect for, or consciousness of, the importance of environmental policy; his pandering to GW Bush shows his willingness to sell out to US interests; the scandalous softwood lumber cave-in reinforces this; his actions on "law and order" issues, in the absence of any real growth in crime, show pandering to authoritarianism; and his support for lowering taxes and simultaneously cutting social programs such as universal daycare and healthcare betrays the Conservatives' true corporatist agenda.
Study, if you will, the complete mess the American body politic has become under the rule of Bush, and consider if you want the same thing in Canada. A majority Harper government is to me a shocking prospect.
Harper and the Alberta plastic hair brigade are using the Bush playbook: appeal to people's base instincts (fear, hatred, intolerance, and greed) by stressing law and order, inventing new threats to their safety to put more people under suspicion and into jail; pandering to authoritarian tendencies with militaristic displays and photo-op war exercises; using secrecy and informational discipline to stamp out dissenting voices and limit debate; and indirectly appealing to the evangelical movement by one-sidedly supporting the Zionist cause at the expense of Palestinians. Clearly, Canada is a more secular society and therefore the emotive religious issues used to great effect in the US are not available to the same degree - prayer in schools, the pledge of allegiance ("one country under God"). Similarly divisive issues are also well-used in the US which cannot be used in Canada: the burning of the flag amendment to the Constitution (!), and to a lesser extent, gay marriage (although this raises hackles in Canada, again, it is a more tolerant society). Worse, these emotional appeals are based on a paucity of fact, which is considered irrelevent to the issue: it is about pandering to people's prejudices (faith-based policymaking) rather than making rational decisions based on reasoned debate.
Nonetheless, these tactics, supported by a corporatist press with distressingly concentrated ownership (Izzie Asper's National Post, the brand flagship, is the print equivalent of Fox News - consistently propagating the corporatist line), have been successful in getting Harper & Co. into power, albeit minoritaire. And so they would stay, except for the prospect of a marriage of convenience with Quebec's Independentists, who Harper is actively, and apparently successfully courting. For them, it is a purely tactical move to advance their aim of an independent Quebec. Certainly most of the political perspectives and aims of the Alberta conservatives are antithetical to those of the Pequistes, who are unabashedly socialist in the French interventioniste tradition. Which is why the prospect of a majority Conservative government, elected with the necessary support of Quebec independentists, is so galling. The same marriage of convenience (or rather, alliance of whores) was successful in the eighties in producing the Mulroney government. The outcome was instructive: the Bloc Quebecois was formed, and became Quebec's voice in Ottawa, and the Conservative party dwindled to a pathetic rump, with not even enough seats to form an opposition, until it was rescued by the Alberta Alliance party. But the concessions to Quebec which were the political price for the marriage are still in place, and will always be so.
If the Harper minority government were to be a short-lived affair, punishment for the hubris and sense of entitlement which had become the hallmark of the entrenched Liberal government, all well and good. The worst parts of their agenda could never be implemented, and they might even do some good by shaking up the status quo. However, in a majority position, the Conservatives could and would wreak some serious damage to the Canadian body politic. They are being coy as to the depth of their true aims in order to lull people. But some there are some scary indicators: Harper's disavowing of the Kyoto protocols betrays the Conservatives' complete lack of respect for, or consciousness of, the importance of environmental policy; his pandering to GW Bush shows his willingness to sell out to US interests; the scandalous softwood lumber cave-in reinforces this; his actions on "law and order" issues, in the absence of any real growth in crime, show pandering to authoritarianism; and his support for lowering taxes and simultaneously cutting social programs such as universal daycare and healthcare betrays the Conservatives' true corporatist agenda.
Study, if you will, the complete mess the American body politic has become under the rule of Bush, and consider if you want the same thing in Canada. A majority Harper government is to me a shocking prospect.
posted by divadab | 10:40
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home