There’s a reason
Harper did what he did
Perceptions by
Gerry Warner
Now that
the election tumult has faded, the signs gathered up and the pundits like yours
truly punted, it’s time for some sober reflection on this week’s most
incredible election.
Surely few can deny that it wasn’t so much the
Conservative government that was deep-sixed as it was Stephen Harper.
In fact, if it wasn’t for Harper’s hostile and authoritarian
personality, the Conservatives may have eked out another slim victory and former
MP David Wilks may have remained the Kootenay-Columbia MP instead of MP-elect
Wayne Stetski. But Stetski was smart enough to run harder against Harper than he did against Wilks
leaving Wilks
with the onerous task of defending the undefendable. Stetski also benefited
from the boundary changes to the constituency and a lot of strategic votes that
may have instead gone to the highly respected Green candidate, Bill Green.
But let’s get back to the unlamented Harper.
In an ironic and almost surrealistic way, I actually
feel sympathy for the former PM because I think he was one of the rarest of
human beings – a political idiot savant.
Now before you march me off to the nearest funny farm,
let me explain. Harper was actually an incredibly smart politician and a strong
leader with a laser-like ability to engage in
politics strategically to his benefit and the destruction of his
opponents. Not long after the disastrous 1993 election when the once-mighty
Progressive Conservatives were reduced to two seats, Harper began his strategic
campaign to “Unite the Right” and melded the feuding factions of the Canadian
right into a powerful movement that took the word “progressive” out of the
Progressive Conservative Party and replaced it with a hard-nosed Conservative
Party that took no prisoners and embraced so-called “conservative values” such
as limited government, individual responsibility, law and order, gun-friendly, pro-military,
pro-business (the bigger, the better) unabashed patriotism and hostility
towards climate change science or any science for that matter.
It was a volatile mixture, but it worked very well in
the West, especially Alberta. It also worked well in rural Canada and
eventually caught on in suburban Ontario and the suburban belts around most
major Canadian cities. In the election of 2011, it gave Harper a majority, but
a majority that proved to be his undoing. Why? Because that’s when Canadians
began to realize Harper’s idiot savant nature.
Yes, he was a skilled politician, a genius of a
politician, but what was he as a human being? Remember early on the famous
picture of him stiff-armed as he shook the hand of his young son as he dropped
him off for school. Not a hug, not a smile. Only a hand shake for his boy to
remember in class all day. I personally witnessed this when Harper visited
Cranbrook and again stood stiffly for at least a half-an-hour as several school
classes and local citizens were marched into his presence and he deigned to
allow them to have their picture taken beside him. But not a word; not a
greeting. Only a frozen smile and not a hair out of place.
Was he shy? There was certainly nothing shy about the
way he eviscerated his political opponents like Stephan Dion and Michael
Ignatieff, who he reduced to personal caricatures in two previous elections and
the way he tried to make a “boy” out of 43-year-old Trudeau by implying he
“wasn’t ready” for the job. What about Nigel Wright, his closest political aide
and confident? Depending on who you believe, Harper either callously threw him
under the bus to protect himself or has been lying through his teeth through
the entire Duffy affair.
Then there was Omar Khadr, a child soldier all of
15-years-old when his Al Qaeda
father dragged him off to war in Afghanistan and he
allegedly killed an American soldier who was trying to kill him. Harper did
everything is his power to keep the Muslim teenager locked up in the Guantanamo
gulag forever until the judicial system rightfully freed him and brought him
back to Canada.
Harper ran the Conservative Party like President Putin
runs Russia and shamelessly
used racially-tinged, wedge politics to inflame
Canadians against Muslim new citizens wanting to wear the niqab in a country
whose Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of religion.
But now he’s gone and Canada is free to again be one
of the most tolerant, generous and peace-loving countries in the world and a
country with a heart as wide as a prairie sky.
That’s what we lost under Stephen Harper. Thank God,
we’ve got it back.
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