The stench of Harper’s zombies is becoming overpowering
Stephen Harper legislative monstrosities keep popping out of the ground like corpses in a zombie movie.
Harper invented the “future appointments” system as a way of governing for years beyond his mandate, tying the new government’s hands on the leadership of agencies like the National Energy Board. He and ministers like Lisa Raitt did it by “filling the pipeline” with Tory candidates for posts long before their existing appointments ran out.
Canadians also found out that Harper had transferred huge swaths of federally-owned pasture lands to the provinces — without the mandatory strategic environmental assessments put in place by former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
Then there were the specifics of all those cuts Harper made — and willfully concealed from the Parliamentary Budget Officer and, therefore, from Parliament. Treasury Board President Scott Brison published the formerly anonymous cuts.
One of them was particularly hypocritical. Despite all the florid protestations of support for the Canadian Armed Forces, the former PM was secretly pulling the rug out from under the military — exactly as he had done with veterans. In 2012, Harper cut $1.19 billion from DND’s budget. The current Liberal Defence Minister, Harjit Sajjan, shrugged and said, “What’s done is done.”
And now there is the ugliest zombie of them all — the F-35.
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