When the federal Liberals governed
Canada, Albertans were often frustrated by what they saw as
pork-barrelling, a lack of transparency in government, few checks on
the prime minister’s powers, and the demonizing of people with
dissenting views. That’s why many Albertans were so thrilled in
2006 when the federal Conservatives took power under Stephen Harper.
It was an opportunity to clean up Ottawa, to introduce long-overdue
changes, and run things transparently.
Since taking office, the Harper
Conservatives have done very good work in a number of areas ranging
from immigration to the justice system to the military. However, in
many areas the Harper Conservatives have done many of the same things
they, and Albertans in general, criticized about the Liberal
governments.
In 1994, the Chretien Liberals
introduced an omnibus bill that not only implemented that year’s
budget, but changed several other laws at once. A young Harper
protested this, saying it prevented MPs from being able to vote on
the different elements of the bills and determine which ones were
worth supporting. In 2012, Harper’s government has already
introduced one huge omnibus bill that made many drastic changes, even
when many MPs admitted they hadn’t fully read it. Now, the fall
session of Parliament is set to introduce another big omnibus bill.
How are our MPs supposed to decide whether they can support all these
changes? Harper quite rightly pointed out the problems with omnibus
bills, so why is he doing the same thing now?
Another problem people had with the
Liberals was the way power tended to be centralized in the prime
minister’s office, taking it away from the MPs whose job it is to
keep the government on its toes. Since taking office, Harper has only
made the problem worse, refusing to tell MPs how much money various
projects are costing taxpayers, prevented parliamentary committees
from getting their work done, and unilaterally closed parliament for
no good reason. Cabinet ministers now have sweeping powers they never
did before, and they usually only exercise their powers with the
approval of the Prime Minister’s Office, which has few checks on
its own authority.
Albertans used to cringe whenever Jean
Chretien called an election at a time that suited the Liberals. One
of the first things the Harper Conservatives did after taking office
was to set fixed election dates. However, in 2008 Harper broke his
own law and called an election anyway, waiting less time than
Chretien ever did, even though there was no real reason to send
Canadians to the polls in the first place.
Albertans and Canadians in general were
angered by the amount of tax money that was pork-barrelled in Jean
Chretien’s home riding of Shawinigan, leading to the infamous
“Shawinigate” and other scandals. During the G8 conferences in
Ontario, more than $45 million was spent on a variety of projects in
cabinet minister Tony Clement’s riding. Many of these projects,
such as a $17-million community centre upgrade and a $100,000 gazebo,
had little or nothing to do with the conference.
Finally, Western Canadians also have
bitter memories of the way conservative politicians, and by extension
the people who supported them, were almost treated by many Liberals
as somehow ‘un-Canadian’ because of their views. However, the
Harper Conservatives are doing the same thing with their smear
campaigns against Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion and Michael
Ignatieff, or Conservative Sen. Mike Duffy’s claim that
environmental groups who oppose the Northern Gateway pipeline are
“un-Canadian.”
How can the federal Conservatives
justify these actions? Wasn’t one of the main reasons for the
creation of the Reform Party to put a stop to these things? What does
this mean, in the long term, for the health of Canadian democracy and
national unity? Whatever the answer is to this last question, so far
the signs don’t look good.
Originally published in The St
Albert Gazette under the title Federal
Conservatives Behaving Like Liberals Past
posted here with the permission of the author.
Jared Milne is a writer, researcher
and public servant living in St. Albert, Alberta. His major interests
including Canadian unity, nationalism and history, particularly
regarding how Canada's incredibly rich past has affected the present
we live in today.
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