12 Sep My case against Stephen Harper

In August, Toronto-based Esquire columnist Stephen Marche wrote a New York Times op-ed excoriating Stephen Harper’s nine-year tenure as prime minister. This drew a rebuttal on The Atlantic’s website from the Canadian-born conservative pundit David Frum, who pooh-poohed Marche’s catalog of grievances as exaggerated, and the upset they inspire as delusional.

Yesterday, The Atlantic published my response:

Frum, a sometime advisor to the Conservative Party, expresses befuddlement at Marche’s failure to appreciate Harper’s calming grip on the Canadian tiller. Given Harper’s many offenses to the country’s long tradition of political and social liberalism, it’s hard to believe Frum’s mystification is sincere. He zeros in on minor examples of grievances against the prime minister as if they were the totality of the argument, then ridicules them as “micro-transgressions” unworthy of more than mild reproach—certainly not “how Francisco Franco got his start.”

One of the challenges of writing critically about Harper’s tenure as Prime Minister is that it’s hard to squeeze in all the crazy-making things he’s done, even in the generous space The Atlantic provided. I tried to assemble a comprehensive list, but as one commenter pointed out, I missed prorogation. Then there’s the tax audit targeted at environmental groups. No doubt there were others.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

[The government’s grudging response to the refugee crisis] only served to underscore the intense animosity Harper inspires among voters who believe he has diminished national attributes they cherish and the rest of the world admires: Canada’s time-honored posture of friendly (and occasionally not-so-friendly) independence from U.S. foreign policy, replaced by feckless, me-too saber-rattling; its once-proud role as lead supplier of UN peacekeepers, already hollowed out under previous Liberal governments, now replaced by frugal financial contributions to support troop deployments by poorer countries; a reputation among its leaders for courtesy and compromise, replaced by a disagreeable, winner-take-all attitude. Previous governments thrashed out major domestic issues at annual conferences featuring the prime minister and provincial premiers, but Harper has refused to attend any. Instead, he has picked unseemly fights with premiers who challenge his policies, once reportedly telling Danny Williams, who was premier of Newfoundland and Labrador at the time, “You’re not going to fuck with my country.”

You can read the whole piece here.