What I Can't Stand About Harper

A few BC Libs have gotten together to exchange ideas about the LPC, the CPC and, of course, Stephen Harper. In search of consensus, each of us set out just what it is we most dislike about Stephen Harper. It's a neat exercise that does wonders to focus the mind.

Here are some of my thoughts on why I don't like Stephen Harper:

"My partner put it best. She doesn't like Harper because he doesn't like us. Harper's comments going back a decade reveal his contempt for the Canadian people and our social values. Harper is outside our values in a place more likely to be inhabited by right-wing ideologues, would-be Republicans. At a purely personal level I believe he has set himself up against me and against my country. Harper doesn't want to serve and build Canada. He wants to transform it by shifting it far to the right following the same method that has worked in the United States.

I don't like Harper because I find him parochial. His preference is for wholesale devolution, a rejigging of our confederation and a Balkanization of the nation.

I dislike Harper because he flies false flags and employs ruse to effect fundamental change. Take the GST cuts. Harper didn't cut the GST for economic stimulus. In fact economists were nearly universal in holding economic stimulus would better be achieved by direct cuts in income taxes. What Harper was really doing, without being honest about it, was defunding the government. Doing that, covertly, is, in my view utterly subversive.

The world is now entering an era that promises great upheaval - socially, politically, economically - and Canada, while relatively blessed, won't be immune. Yet our central government has been rendered impotent to act quickly and powerfully should that need arise. It has been deprived of its fiscal strength and that has been a deliberate but unspoken policy of the Harper cons.

I see in Stephen Harper a man guided by a narrow, mechanical ideology who pursues objectives but without any clear or compelling vision. He's a glorified clerk. His lack of vision is reflected in a common failing of our time among the political classes - an utter indifference to posterity.

The times that are upon us mandate that we incorporate posterity into all our decision-making. What's good for us in five years is important but not if it requires neglecting or impairing the welfare of the country for generations to follow. That surely must be the nub of the entire climate change dilemma. Looked at in the span of an election cycle, it's vastly different than when taken on a generational scale.

Harper's goals are immediate and that makes his focus small and devoid of the inconvenience of vision. It gives rise to that "bull in the china shop" decision making where immediate results eclipse long-term consequences. The Tar Sands development to lever Canada into an "energy superpower" reflects that way of thinking.

Our society, our nation, our world are facing long-term challenges that can't be met by short-term thinking. It needs vision with an eye to posterity to begin developing long-term, effective responses - both remedial and adaptive.

The coming three decades will usher in enormous problems of a global dimension. Taken collectively they're unprecedented in scale and impact. Global warming, desertification, overpopulation, resource depletion, freshwater exhaustion, species extinction, the arrival of peak oil. Society is going to undergo change, the nation is going to undergo change, the global community is going to undergo change, often unpleasant and threatening and ultimately unavoidable. It's going to take strong social cohesion and clear vision-based consensus to find and implement the very best responses, short and long-term, to these challenges. Put another way, this will require leadership totally at odds with the corporate management style of movement conservatives."

And that, in brief, is what I can't stand about Stephen Harper. He's stuck in a rigid and atrophied ideology that does not serve this country well, even in the short run, and will certainly harm it in the long run.

So, do you dislike Stephen Harper? Is there something about him you can't stand? If so, why not take a few minutes, go to your blog and put your thoughts down in writing for the rest of us to share?