Harper: "You won't recognize Canada when I'm through with it,"

A cynical view of Conservative politics and voters

January 2014 marks eight full years of power for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, years filled with sweeping attacks on a host of things that Canadians value dearly. He and his Conservative government have damaged or weakened Canada's health-care system, social welfare programs, women's equality and human rights initiatives, First Nations rights, environmental protection, science and evidence-based policies, our international reputation as peacekeepers, and our very democracy.

Although much has been written about these injuries and losses, most of it has been from left-leaning news sources and commentators, such as rabble, labour unions, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and a handful of more progressive mainstream media. Even Harper's 2006 boast: "You won't recognize Canada when I'm through with it," which I had assumed was infamous and well-known, appears almost exclusively on progressive blogs, or website comments and letters to the editor. The average Canadian probably has no idea Harper even said that!

Why isn't there more widespread awareness and opposition to how Harper is transforming Canada to conform to his narrow ideological agenda? That agenda seems to largely consist of promoting war, maximizing oil profits, creating a corporate oligarchy, and muzzling any real or potential critics, among other sins.

Opposition parties do a pretty good job in Parliament trying to hold the government's feet to the fire, in spite of being hamstrung by the current majority government. However, most people don't watch CPAC. We can point some fingers at the failures of the mainstream media of course, because of the concentration of media in a few corporate hands, the decline of traditional investigative journalism, and a media culture that fawns over power and has lost sight of its true masters -- the common people (the rabble!).

But the media has also been hamstrung. We've been living under the most secretive government in Canada's history, according to a 2012 vote by members of the Canadian Association of Journalists. They chided the federal government for keeping information out of public hands, avoiding questions at media events, and restricting media access to contentious information. At the time, the group's president Hugo Rodrigues said: "The death grip on information has long frustrated journalists in this country, but it may now be reaching a point where the public at large is not only empathetic, but shares it."

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