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.
