Harper History – Conclusion, Index

It is all but impossible to cover all the things that the Harper Regime has done to diminish our democratic institutions or the contempt that he has shown for democratic conventions in a few paragraphs. From the shutting down of parliament to suit his political purposes to instructing committee chairs on how to disrupt or delay proceedings, from not permitting any government employee or spokesman to say a word with express approval from his censors in the PMO, from his refusal to answer any but 'approved' questions from the press (and only three per carefully controlled 'photo opp” at that) to his gradual gutting of any meaningful oversight of government operations there are simply too many hits to summarize.


Nor have I covered, except in passing, the ideological misuse of public moneys under the banner of The Economic Action Plan whilst at the same time preaching fiscal restraint and instituting cuts to departments and programs in a highly selective manner. That said cuts were primarily focused upon womens programs, scientific endeavours and environmental protections and that expenditures were increased within the PMO, in particular for public 'advertising' should clearly indicate this regimes priorities. Add to this the cuts to the mandate for both Elections Canada and Statistics Canada but the increased funding for Revenue Canada to go after registered charities (but not rich tax evaders) who may have expressed a view contrary to the PMO issued spin and you begin to see how dangerous and frightening further unlimited control of our countries purse strings and Parliament by this regime would be.


In my Harper History Series I have over the last six months attempted to list the lowlights of this regime which particularly focus upon the hits to our democracy, I have made NO attempt to cover other areas in which, in my view, they have show disregard for the less than fortunate or financially challenged Canadians, nor have I spoken of foreign policy’s that have reduced our once highly respected country to a shadow of its former self in the eyes of all but one particular middle east regime. Or of the 'free trade' negotiations that would give foreign corporations the right to sue local governments who would give priority to Canadian employers in their contracts. To even attempt to touch upon these thing would require many hours a day simply to keep up with the ongoing disregard this lot has for all but the rich and powerful (and perhaps the gullible), I can only refer you to my series “The Harper History” (this being the last post in that endeavour) which attempts to list, in chronological order, those things that they have done to centralize power, minimize the influence of our elected representatives, eliminate oversight and keep the electorate from seeing what they are doing.


What has been done is bad enough, the manner of its being done and the ever increasing secrecy surrounding those decisions is far more troubling and when coupled with the abuse of parliamentary procedures, including the use of massive omnibus bills, it is clear that the Harper Regieme had no respect for our democracy but has been rapidly moving us towards a defacto dictatorship. Democracy is much more than having the ability to select your dictator every few years, let us take care to elect individuals who do not subscribe to that view.


To make it easier for those who care to wade through this depressing but alarming list I have combined all 11 posts in two long documents, one covering the regimes anti-democratic actions prior to the 2011 election ((19 pages - 7900 words) and one covering the period from 2011 to the present when they held a majority ( 27 pages - 10,230 words) which can be downloaded or viewed HERE and HERE or you can see all the post individually (in reverse order) by clicking on the 'Harper History' icon on the top right of this blog page.


What follows is an index to the various sections with a direct link to each. Please feel free to share or distribute these pages as you see fit, an acknowledgement of the source would be appreciated.

Harper History, Part 1 - The Early Years


Harper History, Part 2 – In Opposition
June 2004 – Jan 2006
Harper History, Part 3 - First Con Minority
Jan 2006 – Sept 2008

Harper History, Part 4 - Con Minority, Prorogued x2
Oct 2008 – Dec 2009,
Harper History, Part 5A - Information witheld , Omnibus Budget
Mar 2010 – June 2010
Harper History, Part 5B - G20, Census Axed, Contempt.
June 2010 – Mar 2011
Harper History, Part 6A - Con Majority - Election Fraud
Spring 2011 & Subsequent Fallout
Harper History, Part 6B – Budget Reintroduced - More Secrecy
May 2011 – summer 2012
Harper History, Part 7 – Suppressed Information – Advertising Overload
2012 – 2013
Harper History, Part 8 – Senate reform / suspensions, Election Act
2013 – 2014
Harper History, Part 9 – Omnibus budget, Anti-terrorist bill, Election call.
Summer 2014 – Aug 2nd 2015



At this point I can do no more than leave you with the following summation of Stephen Harper and his Regime and hope that my series has opened a few eyes.


“Since he has taken hold of the Prime Minister’s crown, a rot has infected our Parliamentary democracy. This offends and fills me with disquietude. It should you, as well. As an elected member of parliament and as prime minister, he has defiled the office he holds, tainting the reputation of Canada and, with the assist of loud, angry, offensive, and ignorant conservative MPs, subverted and made a mockery of our electoral process. Though cited for contempt of Parliament, Harper has remained unscathed, unrepentant and the public largely indifferent. That he has a base of support as large as it is astounds me. How can so many be so blind, so indifferent, so…so dumb? “
Frank A. Pelaschuk in Harper: The Beast




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Electoral Reform in our Future?

With all parties except the Cons promising electoral reform and with what appears to be a lot of support for such a change we must look at exactly what is being promised to help us chose our next government in what looks like will be a minority government. Both the system and the manner of its inception vary from party to party, Mulclair would impose his choice of voting system upon us, Trudeau would have an all party committee study the options and make recommendations as would the Greens.


Specifically under the NDP’s preferred MMP system (a voter) first ticks which candidate she wishes to become the local constituency MP (in a First Past the Post selection method) —as voters currently do. But she then has a second vote. On the ballot, they then turn to a regional list of names (selected by the Partys) presented for election by the party where they can then decide to tick the party name alone (and thereby accept the existing order of the names on the list) or tick the name of a person on the list whom she wants to see go to the House of Commons ahead of others on the list.


The Liberals prefer, but are not necessary promising, a Preferential Ballot system wherein you place the local candidates in order of preference and you second and subsequent choices are taken into account in selecting your MP. The Greens say they will determine the form of proportional representation best suited to Canada through extensive public consultation by an all-party committee.


Whilst many citizens support “proportional representation” there is far from agreement as to what system would be best for Canada, indeed I wonder how many citizens really understand the wide array of systems available under this heading and how each of them actually works. Many will have heard of Mixed Member Proportional or Party List, Preferential Ballot, also known as Alternative Vote and Single Transferable Vote (similar to AV but with multi-seat constituencies) but may not realize that each of these systems have numerous ways in which they are implemented within these broad categories. The MMP in particular in addition to voting directly for the Party of you choice can present you with a list of individuals ranging from a number of 'district' candidates to lists of candidates from across the country chosen by the party, it all depends upon the way in which the 'proportional' bit is implemented.


It is insufficient to say I support this or that voting system with out knowing the exact details of the proposed implementation. Having previously supported a form of MMP I now, after studying the systems and considering the implications for several years, lean towards the Preferential Ballot system wherein you place the local candidates in order of preference and you second and subsequent choices are taken into account in selecting your MP. This still keeps all the candidates representing your riding, allows you to vote for perhaps the candidate you prefer as #1 and the candidate for the party you like as #2 (or visa versa) and even if you do not get your first choice you may well get your second
Additionally it would seem to make those dreaded polls which have become so influential because of first past the post wins all, both locally and nationally, all but useless or at least much less reliable which is probably a good thing.


Some say that AV is not truly a proportional system as it does not take into account the overall popular vote in selecting the PARTY that receives power, I would suggest that by taking into account folks second and third votes (should they wish to make such) there would be far less citizens opposed to the result. It retains true local representation and does not present voters with a list of candidates who do not live in their local riding and are uncountable to them. Let us not forget that with the diverse population counts across our country true government by proportional representation would leave some areas with hardly any say in their own federal representation.


I do hope we will get the chance to select one of the more progressive systems in the next couple of years or at a minimum that all such choices be thoroughly discussed and considered before implementation. It will not be an easy process but let us at least approach it with our eyes open and a full understanding of the various alternatives. Personalty I am increasing concerned with the practicalities of an MMP system and would prefer, at least initially, the much more simple preferential vote or AV, no matter which “proportional” system is adopted the allocation of the balloting will be more complex and results will take longer to be known unless ballots are tabulated by machine and computerized.




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Ottawa’s war on data

Macleans recently published an article outlining the failure of the Harper regime to not only collect information on the true state of Canada's citys, towns and villages and economy but failure to KEEP historical data. Whilst touting better access to information by digatalizing information and 'centralizing' and combining various websites the precise opposite has been happening. Much historical information both in print and online has been destroyed in the name of 'efficiency' and 'cost savings' to the point where authors of scientific, social and financial papers cannot even access their own work let alone find new data to counter or confirm assertions by the various political spinmasters.

The article is a long one and clearly lays out how vulnerable we and our democracy are to to such historical revisionism and information suppression and I will not attempt to summarize it here but simply publish a few 'teasers from the piece and urge you to go read it all.



The Census
According to Sask Trends Monitor, the high non-response rate in the province resulted in “no socioeconomic statistics about the populations in about one-half of Saskatchewan communities.” Nationally, we’re missing similar data on 20 per cent of StatsCan’s 4,556 “census subdivisions,” making a fifth of Canada’s recognized communities statistical dead zones.

Lost Data
Physicist Raymond Hoff, who published more than 50 reports on air pollution in transport and toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes—including pioneering work on acid rain—at Environment Canada between 1975 and 1999, doesn’t seem to exist, either. “Nothing comes up when I type my name into the search engine on [Environment Canada’s] website,” says Hoff, now a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. Also gone are internal reports on the oil sands experiments of the 1970s. “That research was paid for by the taxpayer. Now, the people who need to protect Canada’s environment can’t get access.”

Destroyed Data
Protecting Canadians’ access to data is why Sam-Chin Li, a government information librarian at the University of Toronto, worked late into the night with colleagues in February 2013, frantically trying to archive the federal Aboriginal Canada portal before it disappeared on Feb. 12. The decision to kill the site, which had thousands of links to resources for Aboriginal people, had been announced quietly weeks before; the librarians had only days to train with web-harvesting software.

That Centralized website
The need for such efforts (to privately save data) has taken on new urgency since 2014, says Li, when some 1,500 websites were centralized into one, with more than 60 per cent of content shed. Now that reporting has switched from print to digital only, government information can be altered or deleted without notice, she says.


Accountability & decision making
Isla Jordan and Ulla de Stricker describe a country “without access to large parts of its institutional memory, and leaders without access to the information needed for strategic decision-making.” Toni Samek, a professor at the school of library and information studies at the University of Alberta, puts it more succinctly. Canada is facing a “national amnesia,” she says, a condition that will block its ability to keep government accountable, remember its past and plan its future.


Garbage in, garbage out
” Voluntary surveys also create biased data, says Sheikh: Response rates from the very rich, the very poor, rural areas, immigrants and Aboriginal communities tend to be far lower—so these groups are not well-represented. “People who do not respond well to a voluntary survey are the very people social policy tries to help,” he says. “So if you were to base policy on data received, you’d say, ‘Gee, we don’t have a poverty problem in this country.’ ”

Financial comparisons lost
Gordon expresses alarm that 20 years of data history between 1960 and 1980 vanished in 2012 due to changes in the way national accounts, GDP and other data were compiled: “It’s now impossible to have a clear picture of the Canadian economy since the Second World War,”

Operating in the dark
Government, too, is operating in the dark, as evidenced last year when StatsCan was unable to provide auditor general Michael Ferguson with job data during the contentious debate over proposed reforms of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. The Department of Finance was relying on data from the online classified service Kijiji to back its position.
As a result, economic decision-making is compromised, as a July ScotiaBank report points out. It claimed it would be “ill-advised” for the Bank of Canada to make rate-cut decisions based on StatsCan data, because it’s “stale”:

LOCKSS
The vanishing of Canada has created a counterinsurgency—scientists, researchers, economists, civil rights groups, librarians and artists marshalling resources and their own time to monitor, expose, protest and create a new literature of knowledge loss. Li, for one, has taken preservation of national records into private hands by spearheading an effort with universities across the country dubbed LOCKSS—“Lots of copies, keep stuff safe”—to archive federal websites, an exercise not unlike trapping fireflies in a jar: “Without that or a print record, there’s no way of tracking change.”


Bottom line, if you find data on a government website that reflects poorly on the Harper regime or positively on former non conservative governments save it for it may be gone tomorrow. If you want information on the environment, scientific research, the state of the economy past or present etc etc, you had best rely upon private sources, for much of the data on government websites is now unreliable or missing!


A tip of the hat to Montreal Simon for this one


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