Stephen Harper is REALLY not a leader

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.

Harper attempts to muzzle the press

“It’s no secret that Stephen Harper and journalists are about as bad a combo as Maple Leaf meats and a Sunday picnic” begins an article from Surrey’s The Now, and posted on Canada.com, which details how a Conservative MP was escorted away by RCMP from a Stephen Harper rally before reporters were given the opportunity to ask questions.

Rather than being an isolated event, this has become par for the course for Harper who, in 2006, announced that he would no longer give press conferences for national media, choosing rather to speak only with local media. Speaking to a local London reporter, he explained that “unfortunately the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government.” Or, removing the doublespeak: the national press was asking real, difficult questions, rather than just looking to scribble down our finely tuned messages and go write them up as we wanted.

Harper muzzles his own scientist civil servants…

Before the Conservatives’ Environment Canada media-relations-protocol (PDF) was issued in 2007,

a reporter could phone an Environment Canada expert, ask a question and get an answer - in the same conversation and the same business day. Now, under this new-and-improved policy, the reporter phones the expert, who immediately hangs up and goes searching for his or her boss. Both then forward the reporter’s question - no matter how inane - to Media Relations in Ottawa, which then designs “quick, accurate and … consistent” messages that can then be broadcast to reporters all across the country. (desmogblog)

This is clearly a regression from a well-functioning, transparent and democratic arrangement to a more controlling, unaccountable and authoritarian one. And even more strangely, it is a movement away from supposedly Conservative values that emphasize non-interference by government, and the reduction rather than inane increase in bureaucratic red tape. In the words of climate expert Andrew Weaver, who has first-hand experience with the Harper government’s disdain for scientific knowledge, “It’s absolutely Orwellian what’s going on here in science in Canada.”

…even when they’re acting as private citizens

In 2006, not long after Stephen Harper had promoted his Accountability Act legislation as a measure to secure protection for civil servants whistle-blowers, as he was about to present to the National Press Club on the science behind his new novel, Hotter Than Hell, Environment Canada scientist Mark Tushingham was censored by the Environment Minister’s office , and told he could not address the audience. Leaving aside the notion that any sort of censorship of this form is morally and political reprehensible, this book was written by Mr. Tushingham the private citizen, not Mr. Tushingham the government employee. For the Conservatives to disregard this line, first drawn by Kant in his seminal What is Enlightenment? , is to disgregard a key tenet of liberal democracy and to legitimate further advances of governmental control over citizens’ ability to exercise their freedom of speech.

Such encroachments upon the freedom of the press, and on the intellectual and academic freedom of both government employees and private citizens, is entirely unconscionable, is completely at odds with the Conservatives’ stated vision of a “free and independent” Canada, and has no place in a democracy.