It took long enough but our media are finally coming to realize that the Harper regime is no longer fit to govern. Andrew Coyne writes of a "government in collapse." Brian Stewart laments a government bereft of any shred of integrity, purposefully and persistently lying to Parliament and the Canadian people.
Harper may have eeked out a majority in the last election but it's plain that he has lost the moral right to govern our country and our people. The manner in which the F-35 adventure was perpetrated shows that Harper holds the country and the Canadian people in contempt. Isn't it time the Governor General intervened and dissolved Parliament?
11 comments:
System of government. Not the government. And it was the headline writer, not me.
I've been writing a letter to the GG every day for the last while now, asking him to call for a Royal Commission into the Robofraud scandal. So far, crickets.
If you peruse the C.V. of the current GG, it is obvious that he comes from and has spent a lifetime defending/promoting the interests of the corporate interests that the Harper Government© serves. This is why the former GG was replaced, in spite of the fact that Harper should have been grateful that she gave him a free pass on prorogation, whether this was due to her lack of understanding of her role, intimidation, or.....?
Stephen has his majority. The GG is powerless. She only acts on Harper's advice.
Everything happening to Canada has its roots in the will of the people. The people need to buck up and take responsibility. What the heck did they expect in re-electing Harper?
Our culture doesn't seem to want to voice the obvious fact. Instead the media promotes the idea of the populace being helpless naifs led astray by whoever is in charge. The people themselves are rarely at fault. This is one reason why, for example, in the US, republican congressional fortunes seem so bright. No voter wants to be told by anyone that THEY made a big mistake, that THEY are ultimately responsible, and that THEY are lying in the bed of shit they've willingly made.
Hear, hear crf.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
H. L. Mencken in A Little Book in C major (1916)
Great page on him here http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken
Sorry Chris but did we get a new GG? The last one I remember was the guy who was supposed to take SH off the hook on the Afghan scandal.
I'm going to stick with my views on the dissolution of Parliament. Today the Auditor General dropped the other shoe claiming, unequivocally, that Harper and his cabinet had to have had the real number before the last election but simply lied their asses off to filch their majority.
They did the same thing that Gordon Campbell pulled to get his final majority and that led to his resignation in disgrace.
There is a reason no heads are rolling over this and that's because the Auditor General is right. Harper can't fire someone for misleading him when he had the truth all along. The only people misled were the voting public duped by Harper and his party.
It was an electoral swindle, plain and simple. Not a lot different than stuffing ballot boxes. Same result. Any honourable prime minister would ask the GG to dissolve parliament. Harper,sadly, isn't burdened by that sort of integrity.
"It was an electoral swindle, plain and simple. Not a lot different than stuffing ballot boxes. Same result."
Oh, but it was so much more than just stuffing ballot boxes, it included out and out lies, out and in financing, misleading robo-calls perporting to be ECanada or live calls pulling all kinds of crap. Obviously the honourable option isn't even amongst the choices, this is Treason Steven Harper, after all!
I was going to correct my faux-pas about the sex of our GG, since I realized it immediately. But the error actually reveals something about how much I care about that office now. The GG is a nothing. If Harper is going to be removed, the pressure has to come from within the conservative caucus. Which I don't see happening, because they are also nothings. Do you see a Kevin Falcon-type figure in Harper's caucus? (Falcon's the likely next B.C. Liberal party leader.)
You're probably right about Harper duping his party and the public. But we're willing dupes. After all, the public willingly bought into the idea of Harper being an economic guru, and heaven forfend that the public possibly be wrong and admit its judgement was bad.
Another possibility is Harper invented a story for himself about the F-35 and refused to let actual reality, like its budget, and lack of signed contracts, even enter into his cabinet's collective mind. Dear Leader may really not have the known the program was a shambles.
Interesting point, Chris. Harper does have a track record of allowing his 'gut instincts' to prevail over facts on matters such as crime and imprisonment. There are clear indications that he allows his fundamentalist religious superstitions to inform his views on global warming and his hostility to science generally.
But in this case someone orchestrated an effort to mislead Parliament and the Canadian public with deliberate falsehoods. For Harper to do that somehow compulsively he would have to be genuinely deranged.
Two points:
First, don't blame the Canadian voters for an election that was probably fraudulent. We were all expecting another Harper minority - which would have been bad enough to be blameworthy. But I don't think the Canadian people have to wear the majority.
Second, Harper took advantage of the oldest conservative trick in the book: using emotion, rather than reason to attract votes: fear-based rhetoric on the unsophisticated, and pure greed at the top of the scale.
His omnibus crime bill proposal(which was not based in fact) got him certain voters. Getting a greedy "lower taxes" meme going got him others.
These tactics were new here - imported from the American right. It isn't fair to blame the voters for being duped.
Now, if it happens again, given what we have learned, then we have to take the rap.
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