There is only one thing about the outcome of the May 2nd election
on which Mr. Ignatieff and Mr. Harper agree. It is that one of them
will be the Prime Minister of Canada. Mr. Layton, Mr. Duceppe and Ms.
May are not in the running to form a government. They can’t. It will be
either Mr. Ignatieff or Mr. Harper.
That is the choice, and it is a very clear – in fact, stark
choice. We will choose between openness or secrecy. Between listening
or refusing to listen. Between someone who respects Parliament or
someone who disdains it. Between things we can and will do now or
things that, (provided of course that everything goes well), we might
do in five or six years. Between someone who answers all questions from
Canadians, or someone who won’t accept any.
Between Mr. Harper who said “It’s past time the feds scrapped the
Canada Health Act”, or Mr. Ignatieff who said “ . . . we don’t want
user fees. We want universal, accessible, free-at-the-point-of-service
health care, paid out of general revenue. That’s just bottom line.
Otherwise we get two-tiered”.
Between buying jets or helping vets. Between real early childhood
learning and care or Saturday-night babysitting. Between respect for
our great institutions or contempt for them. Between helping families
or helping big corporations. Between the Canada that we think we have,
or the way in which Mr. Harper has already changed it.
Over the past few years Mr. Harper’s government has quietly
engineered so many changes that there are some ways in which our
country is barely recognizable. Many of us don’t yet realize the extent
of those changes, because many of them have been brought about very
carefully and gradually – almost imperceptibly in some cases.
This is diabolically clever. If these things had all been done at
once, there would have been loud protests and reactions. But moving
just one little brick at a time doesn’t cause much fuss – until you
realize that the whole house has been renovated. And we’ve hardly
noticed.
These are changes that are at the very heart of who and what
Canadians are. They are changes to the protections that used to exist
against the tyranny of the majority – or against a single-minded
my-way-or-the-highway autocrat. These changes are losses to our very
Canadian-ness. Let me remind you of some of them:
The Law Commission of Canada was created by an Act of Parliament
in 1997. It worked very well. It kept an eye in a sort-of avuncular
way, on necessary reforms of the law, including election law. The
Commission couldn’t actually change law; but it was very good at
letting governments and everybody else know when changes needed to be
made and why. It was our legal Jiminy Cricket, and it performed a
valuable service for Canada. The Commission was created by an Act of
Parliament, and any government wanting to shut it down should have been
up-front about it. It should have come to Parliament with a Bill to
rescind The Law Commission of Canada Act. That’s what any of our 21
previous Prime Ministers would have done.
But to Mr. Harper, Parliament is an inconvenience.
Somebody might ask “Why are you doing this?” But he didn’t want to go
through all that Parliamentary trouble; so, rather than proposing the
abolition of the Commission (a proposal about which there would have
been pretty fierce debate on all sides), they just eliminated all
funding for it in the federal budget. Governments can do that. Poof –
no Law Commission.
Nice and quiet. Just one little brick. Hardly noticed.
Then
there was the Court Challenges Programme, set up in 1994, which was
the means by which a bit of legal help could be provided to a private
individual or small organization who didn’t have a lot of money, and
who was taking on, or being taken on by, the Government of Canada. It
leveled the legal playing field a bit. It was a perfect example of
fundamental Canadian fairness.
By convincing a tough panel of judges of the reasonableness
of your cause, you could get a little help in paying for some lawyers
to go up against the phalanx of legal beagles that could always, and
forever, and at public expense, be brought to bear against you by the
State. In other words, if you weren’t rich, and if you were taking on
or being taken on by the Feds, you might have had a chance. But Mr.
Harper doesn’t like being questioned, let alone challenged. It’s so
inconvenient! Solution? Quietly announce that the Court Challenges
Programme is being, er, discontinued. Poof – no Court Challenges
Programme – no court challenges.
Hardly noticed.
The Coordination of Access to
Information Request System (CAIRS) was created (by a
Progressive-Conservative government) in 1989 so that departments of
government could harmonize their responses to access-to-information
requests that might need multi-departmental responses. It was
efficient; it made sure that in most cases the left hand knew what the
right hand was doing, or at least what they were saying; and it helped
keep government open and accountable. Well, if you’re running a
closed-door government, that’s not a good idea, is it? So, as a
Treasury Board official explained to the Canadian Press, CAIRS was
killed by the Harper government because “extensive” consultations
showed it wasn’t valued by government departments. I guess that means
that the extensive consultations were all with government departments.
Wait! Wasn’t there anybody else with whom to extensively consult?
Wasn’t there some other purpose and use for CAIRS? Didn’t it have
something to do with openness and accountability? I guess not. Robert
Makichuk, speaking for Mr. Harper’s government, explained that
“valuable resources currently being used to maintain CAIRS would be
better used in the collection and analysis of improved statistical
reporting”.
Right. In other words, CAIRS was an inconvenience to the
government. So poof – it’s disappeared. And, except for investigative
reporters and other people who might (horrors!) ask questions, its loss
is hardly noticed.
And the bridge too far for me: Cutting the
already-utterly-inadequate funding for the exposure of Canadian art and
artists in other countries. That funding was, by any comparison,
already laughably miniscule. Mr. Harper says that “ordinary” Canadians
don’t support the arts. He’s wrong. And his is now the only government
of any significant country in the world that clearly just doesn’t get
it.
All these changes were done quietly, cleverly, and under the
radar. No fuss. No outcry. Just one little brick at a time. But in
these and other ways, our Canadian house is no longer the kind of place
it once was. Nobody minds good renovations. Nobody even minds tearing
something down, as long as we put up something better in its place.
That’s not what has happened.
Mr. Harper fired the head of the Canadian Wheat Board because he
was doing his job properly. He removed the head of the Canadian Nuclear
Safety Commission because she wanted to make sure that the Chalk River
nuclear reactor was safe.
Hardly noticed.
There are many more things that were
hardly noticed: Cuts to funding for the Status of Women, Adult Learning
and Literacy, Environmental Programs, museums funding, and more. All
quietly, just one brick at a time.
Hardly noticed.
As to campaign promises, everybody in
sight on every side is guilty of breaking those. Except the Federal NDP
of course, who haven’t yet had the opportunity. (It’s very easy to make
promises that you know you will not likely have to keep).
But the government promised to end wait times in health care.
They didn’t. They promised to end, once and for all, the whining of
some provinces about the non-existent “fiscal imbalance”. They didn’t.
They said they had brought final resolution to the softwood lumber
problem with the U.S. They haven’t. They promised to create thousands
of new child-care spaces in Canada. They haven’t. They promised not to
tax income trusts (“We will NEVER do that!” they said). They taxed
them. They promised to lower your income tax.
They raised it.
They said they had a good
“made-in-Canada” plan to meet our obligations on climate change. They
don’t. Mr. Harper has said plainly that whatever the Americans do is
what we’ll do too.
They campaign on a platform of transparency and accountability;
but they’re now trying to discredit the Parliamentary Budget Officer
that they created, because he’s trying to do the job that they gave
him. Mr. Harper said that our form of government, evolved over
centuries from the 900-year-old British Westminster tradition, was all
wrong. We had to have fixed election dates, because otherwise,
democratic principles would be trampled. ”Fixed election dates”, he
said, “stop leaders from trying to manipulate the calendar. They level
the playing field for all parties”.
So Parliament (remember them?) at Mr. Harper’s insistence, passed a
law requiring fixed election dates, which Mr. Harper promptly broke.
Somebody
once said that we get the kind of government we deserve. What did we
do to deserve Mr. Harper? He once said that we should all “Stand Up for
Canada”. Well, let’s do that. We just have to decide whether the
present version of Canada is the one that we’ll stand up for. Or stand
for.
Thank you
Tommy Banks
