Let's Make a Deal

What worries me whenever I see a poll suggesting that the Harper Cons might be toppled in 2015 is how far off that day is and what impetus that gives Harper to finish his dirty deeds.

Long have I suspected that Harper has calculated that, like a sneak thief, his days are numbered and thus knows that he has to get his agenda finished, if at all possible, within a single majority term in office.

First and foremost that means completing the CPC Triad - the Conservative Party of Canada, the Calgary Petroleum Club and the Communist Party of China - linking the Athabasca Tar Sands to Beijing via the Northern Gateway pipeline/supertanker trade route.

Harper has been working overtime to expedite that.   He has hammered out a Canada-China trade deal that leaves this country, its provinces and its people at China's mercy.   He has gutted our fisheries and navigation protections along the West Coast.   He's shuttering our Coast Guard stations.  He has exterminated entire departments at Fisheries & Oceans that were responsible for monitoring fish stocks and our coastal waters ecology.  He has uprooted the West Coast emergency oil spill response centre and relocated it to Quebec.  He has even assigned the pipeline operator, Enbridge, with a senior liaison section of the Department of Fisheries & Oceans.   He has streamlined gutted the environmental assessment regime.   He has villified as disloyal Canadians determined to safeguard our coast against his chicanery.   He has created a secret police agency comprising the RCMP, Calgary and Edmonton police and even our national spy agency, CSIS, to spy on pipeline opponents.

These are not the actions of someone who is anything but intent on forcing the Northern Gateway straight down our throats and very quickly.

There's not much the Libs and NDP can do to thwart Harper.  Harper has a majority and rules by fiat.   But that doesn't mean they get a pass on this either.

If Harper and Enbridge and China are to be stopped, it's going to take civil disobedience - ordinary, law-abiding citizens crossing the line, breaking the law, as many times as need be.   And since we'll have to do what the Libs and NDP can't, we need their undertaking, their promise that, once Harper is swept back into the gutter he came from, they will expunge all criminal records for non-violent civil disobedience in resisting the Northern Gateway.

So Tommy and Justin, what's it going to be?   Let's make a deal.