Canadian Dimension Magazine, May/June 2006 Issue

Council of Canadians Chair Maude Barlow has described Stephen Harper as “the staunchest right-wing ideologue ever to occupy the Office of Prime Minister.” Not surprisingly, Harper’s dark-blue Tory cabinet looks rather like George W. Bush’s Canadian dream team, with its stamp of social conservatism and punitive predilections, as well as its enthusiasm for deep integration with the U.S., for plumping the military and for all the mantras of neoliberal policy: free trade, privatization, castrating the public sector. Here’s an unrepentantly selective profile of several key players.

From Harris to Harper

They may be cool to combating climate change, but it seems the Harper government has an environmental bent after all, at least when it comes to cabinet appointments: three members of Harper’s lean, mean cabinet team have been recycled from the regime of former Ontario premier Mike Harris.

Canada’s new Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, will be remembered as the member of the Harris government who advised jailing the homeless as an act of compassion. “Living on the streets is not an option,” he said. “Call it tough love if you will. It will be illegal to live on the street, it will be illegal to live in public places and in the parks.” His respect for Aboriginal people appears to be on a par with his tenderness toward the homeless. In 1992, he urged the Canadian government to stop wasting money on the federal bureaucracy that only serves the health-care needs of Aboriginal peoples in order to increase provincial health-care funding destined for “real people in real towns.”

Under Harris, Flaherty held sundry positions as deputy premier, finance minister, labour minister and attorney general. Widely regarded as a law-and-order champion, he advocated a tough stance on crime, including support for the death penalty. Flaherty is one of nine ministers who are declared opponents of abortion. As Ontario’s finance minister, he advocated tax credits for parents with children at private schools, and proposed allowing private schools to follow whatever curriculum they pleased. Flaherty bragged about balancing the budget in 2001-02, but failed to do so. Ultimately, the Harris government left Ontario’s finances in an underwhelming mess when it was finally ejected from office in 2003.

Flaherty’s priorities as federal finance minister include balancing the budget, reducing corporate taxes and lowering the GST by one per cent. He will also make good on the Tory plan to bury the Liberals’ $5 billion childcare deal with the provinces in favour of a $1,200-a-year allowance for every child under age six.

The appointment of Tony Clement as Health Minister confirms the new government’s intention to promote and support private health care delivery across the country. Dubbed “Two-Tier Tony” during his stint as Ontario’s health minister under Harris and then Ernie Eves, Clement boasts a perfect New Blue Tory pedigree: although not regarded as an arch social conservative, he was one of the chief architects of Harris’ so-called Common Sense Revolution. Founding president of the Canadian Alliance, and a key player in the “Unite the Right” campaign, Clement lost his bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party to Stephen Harper in 2004.

Privatization of the health-care system was the order of the day under Harris, who greatly expanded for-profit delivery of laboratory services, homecare, long-term care and cancer treatment, and approved the building of two for-profit hospitals. Complaints about the deterioration of patient care and working conditions proliferated. During the Ontario SARS crisis, which revealed a dangerous nursing shortage, Clement claimed to be surprised that so many nurses had been casualized and were working part-time in several different hospitals to make ends meet. Hard to swallow from a big gun in the government that cut 10,000 nursing jobs shortly after it came to power, leaving Ontario with the second fewest nurses per capita in Canada.

As federal health minister, Clement, an avowed admirer of Margaret Thatcher, will be in charge of delivering on the Tory “wait-time guarantee” promise, which has been criticized as a ploy to use the unacceptable delays in health-care service provision engendered by excessive cuts in health-care spending to promote privatization.

A relative newcomer to federal politics, John Baird, Canada’s new head of the Treasury Board, presided over the youth wing of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party in the late 1980s. He joined the Harris cabinet a decade later as minister of community and social services. In this capacity, Baird spearheaded a wholesale assault on Ontario’s welfare system, implementing a workfare program, launching an attack on allegedly widespread welfare fraud, urging mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients and, in the words of the Toronto Star’s Jim Coyle, “doing his utmost … to incite fear and loathing of the poor.”

In his new capacity as Treasury Board president, Baird is responsible for financial management and for the federal public service. Although the Liberals are predicting extensive cuts to government jobs, Baird has affirmed that his government will rein in spending growth at most departments, but has no plans for “major reductions” in the public service.

Law and Order

When B.C. Conservative MP Randy White talked openly about using the “notwithstanding clause” to override Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the issue of same-sex marriage, he was regarded as a loose cannon. His views, however, are shared by people who now occupy some of the most powerful political positions in the country. While the Tories claim to support the Charter, many also harbour the belief that it is a tool of judicial activism used by radical judges to subvert traditional values. At the same time, they are looking forward to a little judicial intervention of their own, should they succeed in their bid to amend the Charter to include the ownership of private property.

On questions of crime and punishment, the Harper cabinet partakes of the decidedly un-Christian attitudes of the religious Right, with its distinctly Old Testament eye-for-an-eye, vengeance-is-mine ethos. No trepidations among this lot about casting the first stone — or, if they have their wish, the first throw of the switch. What their tough-on-crime discourse, with its oft-cited statistics on the significantly higher rate of violent crime today than 25 years ago, omits to mention is that violent crime actually declined in Canada in the decade from 1994 to 2004, as did property crime, which shows that draconian measures do not correspond to reducing crime rates.

Acceding to the post of Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Prepare-dness is one of the Harper troop’s most notorious social conservatives and Christian fundamen-talists, Stockwell Day. In 1998, the former Pentecostal pastor declared: “I believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God and every word in it, cover to cover, is true.” Perhaps in hiscurrent role Day will endeavour to prepare us for that ultimate disaster — Armageddon.

Day rose to prominence in the latter half of the 1980s as a member of Alberta premier Ralph Klein’s Conservative government. Elected for four consecutive terms, he held a number of portfolios including labour, social services and treasurer. In the latter capacity, he introduced a system of flat-rate taxation, and stated that he dreamed of ultimately abolishing income tax in Alberta. Elected leader of the Canadian Alliance Party in 2000, Day was dogged by controversies in connection with his religious and social views. For example, he backed a fellow MLA’s effort to have John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men banned from Alberta schools on the grounds of profanity. In the next Alliance leadership contest, he lost to Stephen Harper.

As minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, Day is in charge of the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Canada Firearms Centre, the Correctional Service of Canada and the National Parole Board. He is the minister responsible for delivering on the Conservative Party’s promises to dismantle the $1 billion federal gun registry and create armed border patrols. A national I.D. card is also on Day’s agenda.

Before jumping to the federal political arena, Canada’s new Minister of Justice and Attorney General Vic Toews (pronounced “Taves”) had a career as a provincial politician in Manitoba, serving in the Progressive Conservative government of Gary Filmon, first as minister of labour (1995) and then as minister of justice (1997). He made the move to federal politics in the new millennium, becoming active in the “Unite the Right” movement and running successfully for the Canadian Alliance.

As justice critic from 2001 to 2005, Toews was well known, among other things, for his concerns about the Charter subverting the democratic process by enabling the judiciary to usurp moral and cultural decision-making power. With this logic, he advocated the use of the “notwithstanding clause” by governments to overturn court decisions, a position that runs counter to his professed commitment to the rule of law, under which the courts are the final arbiters of the Constitution. He has warned against what he sees as “a consistent pattern of equality rights prevailing over the rights of religious freedom and conscience.”

A staunch social conservative, the new guardian of human rights in Canada has been particularly vocal in his hostility to the gay community. He loudly opposed Bill C-250 (2003), the private member’s bill introduced by Svend Robinson, which sought to make sexual orientation a protected category under Canada’s hate-crime legislation. Toews accused Robinson of putting “the jackboot of fascism on the necks of our people with Bill C-250.” During the 2004 election, he called for the law to be repealed. He supports the Conservative Party’s commitment to a free vote on same-sex marriage in an attempt to gut Bill C-38 (legalizing gay marriage) by restoring the traditional definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

A long-time advocate of stricter sentencing for drug dealers and violent criminals, Toews has announced that the priorities for his ministry include tougher sentencing for gun crimes, dropping the gun registry and raising the age of consent for sexual activity from 14 to 16 (with a close-in-age exemption to target the law at child predators).

Former director of the Alberta Association of Broadcasters, Monte Solberg has sat in the House of Commons since the 1990s, first for the Reform Party, then for the Canadian Alliance and, since 2004, for the Conservatives. His recent appointment as Minister of Citizenship and Immigration comes as little surprise in light of his and his party’s grousing about increasing numbers of “unskilled” refugee claimants and non-status residents coming to Canada and the resulting collective “drain” on Canada’s immigration and welfare systems. While Solberg maintains that the governing Conservatives will continue to support family-reunification measures and introduce new legislation to ease the adoption of foreign children by Canadian families, he is determined to tie newcomers’ entrance rights to an as-yet-undefined set of targeted labour-skill requirements, as opposed to claims associated with at-risk removals on compassionate and humanitarian grounds. This, together with Conservative ambitions to renew the Anti-Terrorism Act and to increase the number of security certificate detentions issued annually — corresponding with increased racial profiling of Arab and/or Muslim non-status residents — has led to an outcry by several refugee-rights advocates, including the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), who fear an expansion of police-state politics under the new Conservative government.

And what better way to round out the law-and-order postings in the new Cabinet than the appointment of a defense-industry lobbyist as Minister of National Defense? Gordon O’Connor is a retired Brigadier General who served in the military for 33 years. In civilian life, prior to becoming an MP in 2004, he was a senior associate at PR firm Hill & Knowlton Canada and was a registered lobbyist representing defense contractors like Airbus Military, United Defense, General Dynamics Canada, Atlas Elektronic GmbH, Raytheon Canada and BAE Systems. Harper, who denounced the relations between lobbyists and the Martin government, has presumably been persuaded of the wisdom in the view expressed by the National Post’s Douglas Bland that the test of being free of the appearance of conflict of interest should not be applied “too rigorously.”

Warm to revisiting the issue of ballistic-missile defence, O’Connor supports increased military spending. Go figure. The Conservatives pledged to increase spending on the armed forces by $5.3 billion over five years, over and above the $12.8 billion increase over five years provided for in the 2005 Liberal budget. As critics have pointed out, this would bring military spending to its highest level in real dollars since the Second World War.

About widespread Canadian opposition to military involvement in Afghanistan, O’Connor commented that Canadians just don’t get it: “We have to help the world and help NATO and the UN deal with terrorism … it’s up to us now to try to educate the population as to why we’re there.” Perhaps there will be something in his bloated budget for efforts to enlighten the benighted Canadian public.

Emersonian Democracy

What do you do when you think a political party is “blatantly opportunistic, partisan and misleading the Canadian people”? Why — join it, of course. That’s what former Liberal industry minister David Emerson did two weeks after being elected, crossing the floor into a Conservative cabinet position as International Trade Minister — this in spite of the scant support (18.8 per cent) for the Tories among his constituents. Before being elected in 2004, Emerson was president and CEO of softwood-lumber giant Canfor Corporation. Under the Liberals, he had crafted a multi-billion dollar softwood-lumber deal, which had not been finalized prior to the 2006 election. His turncoat tactics have elicited a furious response, with support mounting for a law to require defecting MPs to step down and run in a by-election. Even though they vilified Belinda Stronach for jumping ship to the Liberals eight months earlier, the Tories defended Emerson’s double-dealing.

Dealing another injury to democracy — even by his own standards — Harper also appointed Montreal lawyer and businessan Michael Fortier, an unelected Conservative Party organizer who will be named to the Senate, as Minister of Public Works and Government Services. During the campaign Harper stated, “To become a Minister, you have to be elected.” So many tergiversations, so little time….

Foreign Affairs

Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay has the distinction of having been the last leader of Canada’s old Progressive Conservative party, prior to carrying it into the 2003 merger with the Canadian Alliance — the formation Mackay had previously declared anathema, saying he would sooner quit politics than join it. In proceeding with the fusion, he also reneged on a written agreement with PC leadership rival David Orchard, which included an interdiction on merging the parties in exchange for Orchard’s support.

As foreign affairs minister, Mackay has promised to maintain Canada’s traditional role in the UN, but to take “a more decisive position.” What, in practice, does this mean? Perhaps there’s a clue in the fact that Mackay issued the statement just after Canada had voted against a resolution condemning Israel for its treatment of Palestinian women — the same resolution on which it abstained last year.

When it comes to backing U.S. belligerence, Mackay has not yet been quite as outspoken as Harper, who, together with Stockwell Day, wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal condemning Canada’s failure to support the invasion of Iraq. However, Mackay is anxious to repair the damage to U.S.-Canada relations, which he sees as resulting from Canada’s decision to abstain from the Coalition of the Willing.

Interestingly, Mackay did not choose Washington as the destination of his first official trip abroad. Instead he went to London, where he told reporters that Canada may have lost its focus in trying to “do too much” and be “all things to all people.” He also said he did not foresee Canada taking on a more active military role in Iraq.

What can we expect with this lot at the helm of our government? As long as the Conservatives remain a minority, their hand will be stayed to a considerable degree, giving the 60-odd per cent of Canadians who did not vote for them no immediate cause for alarm. But this quick review of their individual records suggests there is every reason to stand on guard.

This article was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 and is filed under Canadian Dimension Magazine, Canadian Issues and Politics, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.