This
month marks one year since Stephen Harper was elected with a majority mandate.
On 2 May, the Conservatives won a majority government with less than 40 per
cent of the popular vote. The 2011 election was certainly an exciting one, and
it has been viciously debated in the year since. The collapse of the Liberal
Party and the Bloc Québecois prompted much talk, particularly since neither
party leader managed to retain his seat in Parliament. The Conservatives won a
strong mandate despite the margin increasing by a mere 2 percentage points.
There has been a significant amount of discussion in the time since regarding
how our electoral system works, and certainly much attention toward the alleged
fraudulent behaviour of the Conservatives in the so-called Robocall scandal.
Iblogged about the spectacular events of 2 May last year, and that is not the
focus of this post. I intend, here, to provide a summary of the malicious and
misinformed policies of the Conservatives now that they have a majority
government.
Just
to set up the context properly, I will provide a basic explanation of how the
system works. Our parliamentary system fuses the power of the executive and the
legislative in the leader of the largest party in Parliament. Unlike in the
United States, where there are incessant checks and balances, preventing either
Congress or the President from getting anything done. The Canadian system gives
the Prime Minister free reign over the executive branch, regardless of whether
or not the largest party has more or less than half the seats in Parliament.
This means the since 2006, when the Conservatives were first elected, Harper
has been able to control government departments, such as the Ministry of
Defense, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Bank of Canada, and
Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Again, regardless of whether or not the
Prime Minister has a majority, the executive is always run solely by the
largest party.
What
has changed in the past year is that now the Conservatives are virtually
unchallenged in the legislative branch, Parliament. This not only strengthens
their ability to defend the policies they choose to implement in the executive
capacity, it also allows them full control over the creation of legislation.
Parliament can pass a law about essentially anything that falls under the
mandate of the federal government, so long as it is not deemed
unconstitutional.
All
this to say – the game has changed in the past year. It shows. Harper, who now
faces no real opposition, now has control over both the executive and the
legislative. He has the power to create laws and to change the policies of
government bureaux that affect the day-to-day lives of people across Canada and
the world. In the past year I have been keeping an eye out for examples of
Harper’s long train of abuses. There are many examples and I intend to outline
them below and give you some links to check out for more information.
First
and foremost, items surrounding the budget have been heated. While budget
season has passed, there is still much public attention concerning several
important initiatives of the Conservatives. The two that strike me (and most
Canadians) as most outrageous are the decision to buy F35 fighter jets and the
cancellation of the CDI. The issue of the fighter jets is more comical than
anything else. We are spending money that we don’t have on items that don’t
work and that we don’t need, Considering Harper’s viewpoint of fiscal
restraint, it seems very out of place that the party is supporting a multibillion
dollar deal that serves to hardly have any measurable benefit for Canadians.
Make no mistake – Harper’s rhetoric of “we only spend what we take in” is just
that, rhetoric. Case in point: a significantly less expensive programme, the
Co-operative Development Initiative, which helps to set up and sustain
co-operatives across Canada, was cut just months ago. You are probably
remarking that you haven’t heard anything about this. Well, that is because
Harper has failed to announce this – in fact, he quietly informed the sector (I
work for a co-op federation) and essentially made us the messengers. Again I
say, the Conservatives’ line of reasoning on so-called austerity is
doublespeak. Programmes which benefit large corporations, particularly in the energy
and technology sectors, tend to be supported, while smaller operations, green
industry, and social enterprise are attacked savagely.
Harper
is also attacking our civil liberties. The Internet Bill, which invades the
privacy of ordinary Canadians by both corporations and the state, is a
misguided policy trying to protect intellectual property rights on the web. In
reality, it provides sweeping powers to the powerful in society, much to the
detriment of ordinary citizens. In addition to attacking internet users (which
is a rather substantial proportion of the Canadian public), the Conservatives
have highlighted a few other groups that they are actively targeting. The Crime
Bill, which has thankfully been very controversial, is a misinformed solution to
fighting crime in our society. Rather than focusing on factors like inequality
or lack of access to resources, the government is seeking to fight crime by
labelling more Canadians as criminals, providing harsher sentences, and putting
them in privatised jails. Moreover, the Conservatives are seeking to make it
more challenging for offenders to reintegrate into society with such measures
as making it virtually impossible to get a pardon. The criminal justice system
will become a series of vast holding chambers, rather than cooperating
institutions that have a mandate to try to rehabilitate those who have offended
against society. But Harper doesn’t stop there - his attacks on Muslims have
been quite staggering. Last fall Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason
Kenny introduced new policies stipulating that all people (read: Muslim women)
must have their faces clearly visible during the oath. The justification for
this was, essentially, that the identity of the person swearing the oath must
be confirmed, but the ceremonies as they are conducted are entirely ceremonial
anyway.
The
last theme I will address here is the ridiculous war on science that the
conservatives are conducting. There are, broadly, two lenses through which to
view this. The first is socially – the Conservative party has continually prevented a
sex-positive discourse, most recently with pressure put on an Ottawa museum for
having “inappropriate” content – sex ed. The response from a Conservative MP
was that children should not be learning this information from a museum, rather
they should be getting their information from pornography. Nowhere in the ranks
of the Conservative Party is there an understanding that this reinforces verynegative practices and ideas in society regarding sexuality. The second lens,
which has been far more prominent, is economic. Predominately, I’m referring to
a series of ridiculous policies and positions around the intersection between
the environment and capital. Harper has clearly sided with “economic growth”
over sustainability. The best evidence is the two large pipelines that are
being promoted: the XL Pipeline and the Gateway Pipeline. Both of these
originate in the Tar Sands and export our country’s unethical oil to foreign
countries. The pipelines are one thing, but the defense of the Tar Sands is
even worse. The environmental and social damage is exceptionally evident, but
Harper refuses to give credit to climate change or even to the fact that the
oil industry is destructive. Harper has attacked researches that work for the government, threatening them with job losses to keep them in line. Tony Clement recently commented that he hopes that
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair will stop “dissing” the oil sands when he goes to
visit them. Rather than trying to promote both economic growth and the
environment, Harper is forcing Canada to pick just one. And anyone who
disagrees, or even refers to Northern Alberta as the Tar Sands, is labelled a terrorist. So science is being attacked full-tilt, meanwhile, the
pseudo-science of economics is being promoted, more specifically the neoliberal
model, which advances privatisation, deregulation, and liberalisation. These
policies, unsurprisingly, benefit those in society who have access to capital,
to the detriment of those who are poor.
Ultimately,
Harper is pitting Canadians against each other in more ways than one. The only
remedy is awareness and it is up to all parts of society to become aware of
these realities and stand up together. As Lincoln once said: “you can fool all
of the people some of the time, or some of the people all the time, but you
can’t fool everyone all the time”.
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