And You Have A...

...problem with that?

Harperization of Canada in full swing with majority, critics say

"Six months after the landmark election of a Conservative majority on May 2, which finally gave Prime Minister Stephen Harper a firm and unfettered grasp on the levers of power in Ottawa, critics claim the Harperization of Canada is in full swing. Over at Heritage, they note, history's on parade like never before. War of 1812 soldiers armed with muskets and bicentennial bayonets (to be followed soon by waves of First World War fighters a century after 1914) are widely seen to be chasing the blue-helmeted, Pearsonian peacekeeper from Canadians' collective imagination. And those back-to-work orders — once used sparingly as a legislative last resort — are now issued or threatened automatically. In the realm of Justice, meanwhile, there's been a juggernaut of tough-on-crime reforms revived from the last Parliament and — despite arguments from most experts that the changes are costly and unnecessary in an era of falling crime rates — promptly pushed toward passage. A royalist rebranding of the military has been carried out at National Defence, part of a governmentwide rekindling of Canada's ties with the monarchy. The flag, too, has been declared off-limits to meddling, patriotism-challenged landlords. And on the world stage, in both Foreign Affairs and Finance, there's a discernible new strut in Canada's stride — lockstep with Israel in the Middle East; a boot aimed squarely at the backsides of big banks in continental Europe."

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"And so the Conservatives, essentially unchecked by political rivals in Parliament, have spent the first 180 days of their majority mandate ticking boxes on an ambitious checklist of change. Scrap the Canadian Wheat Board: check. Begin the end of the long-gun registry: check. Initiate reforms to House of Commons seat counts: check. Award a $35-billion shipbuilding contract; kick the nastiest criminal imports out of Canada; and kick-start government wide cuts to save $4 billion in four years: check, check, check. But do the measures already implemented or set in motion in the half-year since May 2 amount to something more than the sum of the individual parts of the Conservative agenda? Is Canada undergoing a truly transformative shift in character and values — a root-and-branch supplanting of one kind of country for another? In short, are we witnessing the final eclipse of Trudeau's Canada and the rise of Harper Nation?"

And the lefties are crapping in their pants:

""At its heart, it's a government of the radical right that's carrying out its agenda and that's got its majority," interim Liberal leader Bob Rae told Postmedia News. "I really do think they're failing to understand there is a deep concern in the country about this pursuit of an ideological agenda. I think they need to continue to be aware of the very real risk they're taking with some of the basic loyalties and instincts of Canadians." He says the Conservative government's "willingness to throw collective bargaining out the window," the deep-sixing of the gun registry and the dismantling of the wheat board are examples of a hard-right agenda that "points the way to a real break with some of the common threads of the past." Rae described the wheat board in particular as an institution that — by pooling and protecting the market power of Western grain farmers from foreign-owned agri-giants — has served well as a Canada-wide "symbol of our collective capacity to do things together. "I think the Conservatives are making a classic mistake in the arrogance with which they express the confidence that everybody in the country secretly agrees with them," said Rae. Elizabeth May, the Green party's leader and first elected MP, cites the "militarization of metaphor" as the clearest, "most deliberate attempt" by Harper's majority government "to change how we see ourselves" as Canadians. "In the Conservative party election platform, there was more text and detail on plans to celebrate the bicentennial of the War of 1812 than there was on the climate issue," said May, a tone of incredulity in her voice. "This is going to be a very profound change, to have this notion that we are a 'warrior nation,' that we're tough on crime," she added, quickly noting how opposition members who question the Conservatives' crime reforms are routinely cast as "taking the side of criminals against victims" — much the same way that critics on the Afghan detainee issue were previously dismissed as Taliban sympathizers. "There's a consistent part of the discourse here that says Canadians are — at least this is how Stephen Harper's Conservatives would like us to see ourselves — as judgmental, as basically opposed to nuance, as allergic to complexity and prone to the kind of simple solutions that work on Fox News, but which aren't solutions at all," said May. "The messaging of the Harper Conservatives works to divide us, because that's the way it works to elect Conservatives.""

RTWT There's a lot of interesting commentary which tends to bolster my hunch that Canada is on the road to discarding it's Liberal (and liberal) past. Faster, please!