The Real Barbarian Threat to Canada

Shifty Steve wants to outlaw barbaric practices in Canada. A lot of Canadian voters casting ballots for the Liberals, New Democrats or Greens want exactly the same thing.

The Guardian's 'True North' correspondent, Martin Lukacs, nails it:

The threat of barbarism is grave, insidious and far-reaching. Those responsible are a small group nurturing a foreign-inspired ideology on Canadian soil. They pore over rigid doctrines in cloistered rooms. They scheme to impose their values, attractive only to a minority, on the majority of Canadian people. They have carefully veiled their true selves but their agenda is unmistakable: to erase the country’s achievements in security and fairness.

This threat comes not from a handful of niqab-wearing Muslim women. It has always come from Canada’s Conservative party. Their imported neoconservative ideology, baked into homegrown resentment toward the federal state, has never been palatable to a country with progressive ambitions. They have risen to power through other means: money and economic clout; a deep network of right-wing media and think tanks that have shaped policy options; and an unreformed electoral system that has allowed a party with only a quarter of the electorate’s support to rule unhindered.

Lukacs points to Harper's real constituency:

What welfare Harper has denied Canadians he has not spared the tar sands barons. His great fixation has been to elevate them to unparalleled influence, turning the state into a servant of their industry: granting them billions in handouts, the chance to write legislation, and the use of state officials as spies, spin-masters and overseas salesmen. This new character of the state has disfigured the environment beyond just the climate-torching tar sands: from the razing of the boreal forest to the opening of the Great Lakes to privatization, from the extension of oil prospecting in the Arctic to the refusal to list our most endangered species.

...Stephen Harper may have changed the character of the Canadian state. He has not changed the character of its people. Stifled and suffering under his policies, an overwhelming majority clearly want a new direction. While reversing the damage he has inflicted will require time, a reformed electoral system and the growth of popular movements, it must start by the removal of his government. Vote strategically or vote with your conscience, but vote Harper out.

On 19 October, Canadians will have their chance to combat a home-grown threat – a threat posed not by veiled women, but by the dismembering of their country. When a regime so utterly ransacks its own lands and people, can we stop describing it as the governing of a nation? It is more akin to a barbarian invasion.