On this, I defer to Margaret Atwood, who argues persuasively for Anything but a Harper majority.
Mr. Harper got elected by promising to consult, to be transparent, to be accountable, but he’s delivered the extreme opposite. He doesn’t consult with anybody but himself in the mirror; he has the most secretive government Canada has ever known; and his accountability consists of “If I make a mistake, you’re fired.” Real leaders know that the buck stops with them, but Mr. Harper is an amazing buck-passer. He won’t own up to his own stuff — such as his heartfelt support for the Iraq invasion — unless shoved up against the wall, and even then he mumbles.
Speaking as one who endured ten years in Australia under a Howard government, it concerns me greatly that Harper’s government appears so intimate with ex-Prime Minister John Howard’s camp. Back in the 2006 election, Harper was receiving advice form Brian Loughane, John Howard’s campaign director.
Further, it has now emerged that an overly-enthusiastic former speechwriter so indiscreetly lifted substantial portions of a John Howard speech for Harper, a speech that supported the incursion into Iraq by the US.
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A good political leader is able to inspire people to get behind their platform for change. But before this can happen, you actually have to have a platform for people to support.
Contrary to the Ipsos-Reid survey showing that 31% of respondents believe Harper won the debate (proving only that, proportionately, more Conservative supporters like to vote in online surveys), I didn’t see any clear winner. Political partisans tend to interpret political debate accoridng to their biases, meaning pretty much everyone will claim their side won.
What I did clearly see was that the Conservatives have no platform, that Harper’s plan consists basically in a patchwork of tax cuts, that Harper believes the economy is doing fine (it isn’t), and that Harper continues to embarrassingly pretend his government cares about the environment in any meaningful way. The only sensible thing Harper said was in regard to the need for a withdrawal deadline for Afghanistan.
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Leadership is something that is hard to define. But Stephen Harper is not a good leader. And it’s not just about any individual thing he’s done, it’s clear that his whole approach is in the wrong direction.
Here’s a case study on Stephen Harper’s leadership. Nova Scotia and the Maritimes are bleeding youth to Alberta and the oil patch. There is a lack of economic development here, and the jobs are there, so we go.
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Key to the Conservatives’ victory in the 2006 election was their promise to right the Liberals’ wrongs that emerged during the Gomery Commission into the sponsorship scandal. The Conservatives, so they claimed, would usher in an era of more accountable, democratic and transparent government.
The result, unfortunately, has been the emergence of a set of tactics more commonly seen in authoritarian countries than in liberal democracies such as Canada, and the erosion of core standards of accountable government.
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Am I the only one who is disgusted with the bullying tactics of Stephen Harper’s campaign? Scare tactics and nasty personal attacks are not evidence of leadership. Harsh, punitive, vengeful comments about young people are no substitute for public policy. Blue sweaters cannot hide a contempt for the ordinary citizen any more than hand-picked audiences of the faithful at photo ops can represent honest reactions of a cross section of the electorate. Mr. Harper seems unaware that he is running for Prime Minister of a democratic state not absolute ruler of a dictatorship. He frightens me.
A number of policy decisions undertaken by Stephen Harper’s federal conservatives demonstrate a wilful disregard for the use of evidence and research to inform policy, including the Conservatives’ approach to child care funding and their literacy funding cuts.
But most unforgivable among their systematic evidence-blindness is the approach they’ve taken to addressing climate change, another issue on which the Conservatives are out of touch with ordinary Canadians. On climate change Stephen Harper has forgone long-term, strategic thinking and planning in favour of a pattern of actions calculated to secure short-term, unsustainable gain.
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If you’re like me, you haven’t heard the words “Stephen Harper” and “vision” in the same sentence too often, except when the topic is Canada’s north.
Harper is no small-time politician: in addition to having been president of the National Citizens Coalition, a well-funded right-wing lobbying organization, in 2003 Harper was a co-founder of the federal Conservative Party and shortly thereafter became its leader. He is, according to the Conservative Party of Canada website, a “leader of competence and vision.”
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This website was created in response to the Conservative’s attack-site, notaleader.ca, which received a lot of attention over its childish and tasteless imaging of a puffin pooping of the shoulder of Liberal leader Stéphane Dion.
ReallyNotALeader aims to make plain the many ways in which Stephen Harper fails to live up to his own rhetoric: the central premise of this blog is that Canada deserves better a better leader than Stephen Harper. With this blog, I hope contribute to the efforts of many Canadians to raise the bar of professionalism for political debate and campaigning.
What constitutes real leadership is, of course, up for question. The Globe & Mail’s Rick Salutin argues persuasively that the traditional “strong” leader is not actually desirable in a democracy, echoing an observation from Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man that modern democracies tend to be run by administrators rather than “leaders” in some classic sense. Democratic citizens want leadership that is going to listen and adapt to their demands and concerns, not carelessly pursue preconceived policy goals.
But despite the inevitable disagreement over exactly what leadership is, there is a core set of traits or characteristics most people believe to be reflective of good leadership, and it is the purpose of this blog to explore those traits and, moreover, to show how Stephen Harper has consistently failed to embody them.
By appealing to a shared sense of what good political leadership looks like, I hope to foster a serious and informed debate over Stephen Harper’s merits as a leader, and the kind of leadership that Canada needs and deserves.
