Look, This Is Beyond Undemocratic, It's Tyrannical. Now, Please, Tell Your Political Representatives to Say "Enough"!

We had a coup
for this?

You own Canada's public service.   You pay for it with your tax dollars.  It is not like some chauffeured limo we give the prime minister.  It does not belong to Stephen Harper.  It exists to serve the country and you.  If he appropriates it, harnesses it in a yoke to do his bidding, he is stealing what belongs to the citizenry in any legitimate democracy.

There, now do you get it?

Even the Montreal Gazette gets it.   They've figured out that a genuine tyrant has abused his office to gag the public service to advance his own political agenda:

"The Harper government has tightened the muzzle on federal scientists, going so far as to control when and what they can say about floods at the end of the last ice age.


Natural Resources Canada scientists were told this spring they need “pre-approval” from Minister Christian Paradis’ office to speak with national and international journalists. Their “media lines” also need ministerial approval, say documents obtained by Postmedia News through access-to-information legislation.


The documents say the “new” rules went into force in March and reveal how they apply to not only to contentious issues including the oilsands, but benign subjects such as floods that occurred 13,000 years ago.


They also give a glimpse of how Canadians are being cut off from scientists whose work is financed by taxpayers, critics say, and is often of significant public interest — be it about fish stocks, genetically modified crops or mercury pollution in the Athabasca River.


“It’s Orwellian,” says Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at University of Victoria. The public, he says, has a right to know what federal scientists are discovering and learning.

So exactly where is that gutless wonder who pretends to be heir to the Liberal tradition when the democratic rights of the Canadian people are being so blatantly trampelled?   The beer'n burger season has run its course.   This poseur should have been all over this abusive usurpation of unconstitutional power long ago but, as far as I can tell, he's played mute.

“Departmental officials speaking on behalf of the department are to consult the minister’s office in preparing responses,” Joanisse says. “While this may have been misinterpreted as being a new policy, it has been in place for years.”


The documents show several communications managers, policy advisers, political staff and senior officials were involved drafting and vetting “media lines.” 

And Harper gets away with it thanks to a hapessly impotent opposition leader.  When did the Liberal Party sink this low?   If Ignatieff can't figure out that his job is to defend Canadian democracy against the excesses of Stephen Harper, you Liberals had better spell it out for him.   And, by the way, screw arts funding.