"Alarmed by the positive poll readings Martin garnered recently from his encounters with pre-voting-age Canadians who appear to enjoy the Prime Minister's company, Harper's handlers arranged a photo-op of their own at a Wallaceburg, Ont., rehab centre for children.<br>
But the Tory leader was miscast for the assignment. He watched silently, not knowing what to say to these kids. Until, that is, one of the finger-painting toddlers leaned toward his tailored suit.<br>
"Don't touch me," Harper said."
i think this article really sums many people's feelings toward mr harper. if the reform par...i mean the allian...uhh..."conservative" party wants to succeed in canada they've got to change everything about themselves, starting from the top. i don't envision this happening any time soon, but i won't be surprised if this is the beginning of the end for the conservative-reform alliance.
Since the link you provided is subscriber only, I opened it and paste it here so all can read it:
Too much anger to succeed
After 23 years in politics, Stephen Harper still has a penchant for marginalizing moderates within his Conservative caucus, ridiculing the patriotism of Liberal voters and working out his anger issues in public
DAVID OLIVE
Look at that face, that hateful face.
-Sam Rayburn, Democratic speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, watching a televised address by Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon somehow made it to the top of the greasy pole. It's helpful to take that view of history in trying to imagine Stephen Harper as the man who can lead a united right to the New Jerusalem.
As dysfunctional in his own way as the dethroned Stockwell Day, Harper has twice squandered the chance effortlessly gained by the sponsorship scandal to form a government. He is, Tory insiders began saying last week, girding for a third try this fall, hoping the potency of the Grewal tapes matches that of the Gomery revelations.
It, too, will likely fail.
In a nation that favours public figures who project a sunny optimism, Harper traffics more heavily in bile than any major political party leader since John Diefenbaker.
Harper regards Liberals of every description as "corrupt," and their precarious government, in all its grand and sundry aspects, "morally reprehensible." Those who fail to align with Harper's worldview he labels monsters, harlots and underworld figures.
Danny Williams, premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, learned his hard lesson last month. Williams might have anticipated a little gratitude for joining with his fellow (Tory) Atlantic Canada premiers in taking the risky step of endorsing the Harper Tories on the eve of the last election. Instead, Williams was treated to a sputum eruption.
Harper was outraged last month that Williams was pressuring Tory MPs on the Rock not to defeat the Martin government, in order to preserve the recent hard-won pact between St. John's and Ottawa on resource-revenue sharing.
"What's the next thing?" Harper exploded. "We're going to have a bunch of Mafia people working for the government because it might give Danny Williams money a week earlier?"
Who are these organized crime figures on the public payroll? Carolyn Bennett? Ken Dryden? Right-to-lifer Roger Gallaway?
A few weeks back, Harper had a message for the five million Canadians who voted Liberal last June. Their patriotism is suspect. Anyone casting a ballot for the Liberals, the Tory leader said in his Calgary redoubt, is "quite frankly imperilling the future of the country."
It's a rule in politics that few voters take kindly to being told they were duped. Some can't quite accept that the country, typically among the U.N.'s top five best places in which to live, has been governed these past dozen years entirely by refugees from the sewers.
Yet Harper presses on; he is smarter than the untutored masses. Polls be damned, he just knew this spring that Canadians were in immediate need of a second election in less than a year.
Harper also knows better than his own caucus, which last Wednesday heaped scorn on Gurmant Grewal, surreptitious recorder of conversations with high-level Grits, who has been excoriated by caucus colleagues — according to Canadian Press reports — for conducting himself dishonestly and robbing his party of the ethical high ground.
Oblivious to the mood in the room, Harper emerged from that session to defend Grewal's behaviour as his "legal right" — rather missing the point, as sometime Tory sympathizer John Ibbitson noted in The Globe and Mail, that the Grewal tapes "make the Tories look every bit as sleazy, dishonest, unethical, conniving, mendacious and just plain rotten as the Liberals."
But Harper, who appears at times to be channelling the New Testament, deals in absolutes.
Harper is no less certain of Grewal's good faith, in advance of probes into his conduct by the RCMP and Parliament's ethics commissioner, than he is of Grit perfidy despite the incomplete status of Justice Gomery's work.
"Gurmant had no intention of being bought," Harper declared last Wednesday — an assertion not supported by any portion of Grewal's tapes that that Tories have so far seen fit to release.
How much more dignified it would be for a leader of the Official Opposition to let lessers handle the scut work of character assassination — and there's no shortage of volunteers. Let Tory MP Jason Kenney accuse Martin of perjuring himself at the Gomery inquiry, for instance, and NDP backbencher Pat Martin describe the Liberals, in Commons debate last month, as "institutionally psychopathic."
But Harper insists on working out his anger issues in public, whether it's kicking chairs backstage at Tory events or shoving photographers out of camera range. Or labelling NDP Leader Jack Layton a slut for backing a slightly amended budget that increases spending by less than 1 per cent.
As they say, the fish rots from the head. Within a few days, John Reynolds, Tory campaign manager and prominent B.C. MP, was saying all Liberals "are whores. I don't like to call them that, because there are probably some whores who are nice people."
In the last election Harper let stand a Tory press release that called Paul Martin a supporter of child pornography.
No surprise, then, that Harper has not rebuked Saskatoon Tory MP Maurice Vellacott's description of turncoat Belinda Stronach. ("Some people prostitute themselves for different costs or different prices. She sold out for a cabinet position.")
`In a nation that favours public figures who project a sunny optimism, Harper traffics more heavily in bile than any major political party leader since John Diefenbaker.'
Harper is not in tune with his caucus, having marginalized moderates like Stronach and Peter MacKay, who went public with his own misgivings about an early election the same day, May 4, as his then-girlfriend did. Not one but three erstwhile contenders for the Alliance or Conservative leadership — Keith Martin, Scott Brison and Stronach — have been driven into the Grit fold.
"Join your own team, Stephen!" exhorts full-time Tory apologist Don Martin.
But after 23 years in politics, Harper is not a work in progress.
Harper still is in thrall to the armchair ideologues at the University of Calgary with whom he first fell in as a student there, a group currently headed by Tory chief strategist Tom Flanagan.
From the comfort of that ivory tower, history professor David Bercuson recently despaired of Central Canadian Tories who lacked the "blood lust" for an early election; while his colleague Barry Cooper dismissed Harper's supposed policy shift to the centre.
"I don't think he's changed his views," Cooper told Maclean's. "It's really a matter of packaging so you can be acceptable to people in Ontario who have a problem with Westerners."
Harper has flitted among five political parties (he was a Trudeau Liberal in his teens), and has flip-flopped on so many unpopular stands — from the Kyoto accord to the Iraq war — that the Grits and Tories are now scarcely distinguishable on policy. Harper is authentic, however, in his contempt for a centralized federalism that actually has worked pretty well for 138 years. After his electoral setback last summer, Harper wallowed in regional victimhood.
"The philosophy of the Liberal party is get the rest, screw the West," he complained last July.
"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country," Harper wrote in December 2000. In a little-noticed addendum to his widely criticized 2002 observation that Atlantic Canada tolerates "a culture of defeat," Harper also observed that "in parts of the Prairies" there is evidence of "the kind of can't-do attitude (that) is a problem in this country."
Just three years after counselling Ralph Klein in 2001 to mount a staged withdrawal from Confederation, Harper was still so obsessed with loosening the ties that bind the nation that he mused that Canada might benefit from emulating the chronically disputatious factions of the Belgian federation and the strife-torn Basque and Catalan regions of Spain.
That Harper's more recent project to topple Martin allied him with a Commons rump that advocates an extreme form of regional autonomy is hardly out of character — either for Harper or the Tories, who with disastrous results cohabitated with Quebec nationalists in the 1980s.
Correspondent Clifford Krauss of The New York Times last month recorded the unwitting irony of Paul Martin's timing in celebrating the narrow survival of his government on May 19 with a renewed vow to "set the standard by which other nations judge themselves."
As it happens, though, only the Prime Minister was attempting that night to address both a scandal and other matters of import, in his speech about the Gomery inquiry and his plans for job creation, aboriginal justice and advances in child care, urban renewal and the environment, among other issues.
Harper spoke that night only of scandal, and of his impatience to inflict more wounds on the Grits.
Martin was speaking to the nation, Harper to his strategists.
Accordingly, the latest polls find Tory support at 27 per cent nationally, below the party's 29.6 per cent showing in the last election — itself the Tories' worst performance since R.B. Bennett's drubbing in the Depression year of 1935.
Alarmed by the positive poll readings Martin garnered recently from his encounters with pre-voting-age Canadians who appear to enjoy the Prime Minister's company, Harper's handlers arranged a photo-op of their own at a Wallaceburg, Ont., rehab centre for children.
But the Tory leader was miscast for the assignment. He watched silently, not knowing what to say to these kids. Until, that is, one of the finger-painting toddlers leaned toward his tailored suit.
"Don't touch me," Harper said.
Okay. So what are you doing here?
Thanks for reposting, SINC, and thanks Miguel for posting it in the first place.
I believe that Harper's biggest obstacle to winning is not so much policy as public relations. The way the numbers fall, you cannot win without strong support east of the prairies. And Harper preaches to his western choir.
With the BQ nabbing 40-50 seats out of Quebec--which they've consistently done for the past 4 elections--it's only theoretically possible to win without support from Ontario. The secret to Chretien's success is that he consistently won all of Ontario and every non-BQ seat in Quebec, giving him roughly 120-130 seats out of 155 he needed for a majority.
There is a perception in Ontario that Harper is angry, vengeful and petty. His rabid, snarling bulldog-like stance towards the Liberals makes him seem just a wee bit unbalanced. He has done nothing to address this perception--in fact, he barely seems aware of it.
Technically, he can win without Ontario, but then he needs to win every non-Ontario and non-BQ seat in Canada. Alienating the Atlantic provinces doesn't help that.
It boggles my mind that Harper does not seem to have a political strategist on staff who can crunch the numbers for him and show him why he needs to move beyond his comfortable western powerbase and gather votes out east. Or make him see that the perception of him as a raving lunatic is not simply Liberal brainwashing--it's a very real perception that he needs to work to change. Screaming about Liberal corruption doesn't help him.
i think this article really sums many people's feelings toward mr harper. if the reform par...i mean the allian...uhh..."conservative" party wants to succeed in canada they've got to change everything about themselves, starting from the top. i don't envision this happening any time soon, but i won't be surprised if this is the beginning of the end for the conservative-reform alliance.
The Conservatives are one party and will be around for a very long time.
Harper is a very good leader. It's weird for me to see people criticize him for not being like a traditional politician. Look at what charismatic type politicians have brought us. The type of people with that personality are born and bred to lie and mislead. That's why they do so well in photo ops.
It's a relief to me to see a politician that is like an average Canadian. He lives in a regular house in a regular neigbourhood and uses our regular health care system. He is a lot like all of us. Can we say the same of Martin?
With the BQ nabbing 40-50 seats out of Quebec--which they've consistently done for the past 4 elections--it's only theoretically possible to win without support from Ontario.
There has been an interesting development in Quebec with Bernard Landry quitting the PQ.
With that vacancy many see Duceppe as the only leader popular in Quebec that could pull-off a separation vote. That would mean leaving the BQ to get into provincial politics.
Opinion on Harper's capabilities is divided. In his Western powerbase, he's seen as a good guy. In Ontario, he's seen as an angry and a loose cannon. However, to win, Harper needs more support in Ontario, and to gain support in Ontario, he needs to address this perception. The strategies that work for him to gain support in the West work against him in Ontario. The rancor he shows that plays well with his sympathetic powerbase simply make him look unreasonably obsessed here.
Like it or not, working with public perception is part of winning elections, and Harper is not doing a good job of it in the places where he needs to win more seats.
Based solely on anecdotal evidence, a lot of people in Ontario vote Liberal simply to keep Harper out. That says a lot for how poorly he is perceived here.
Simply saying he's a good guy in one breath and then so vigourously attacking the Liberals in the next does not make him seem reasonable and well-balanced. And I think the CPC would stand a much better chance of winning if they can come across as reasonable and thoughtful.
He may be a great leader and the best thing for Canada, but he just can't sell it east of the prairies.
There has been an interesting development in Quebec with Bernard Landry quitting the PQ.
With that vacancy many see Duceppe as the only leader popular in Quebec that could pull-off a separation vote. That would mean leaving the BQ to get into provincial politics.
ArtistSeries, I must admit that my knowledge of politics in Quebec is fuzzy at best--I'm very curious about how the mood for separatist movement changes the vote. If Duceppe goes provincial, then what happens to BQ seats federally? My guess is that if no strong leader replaces him, they would start losing seats.
That would change the game considerably.
Mind you, I don't see Harper selling well among Quebec either, so while the game may change, it's more likely to be in the Liberal's favour. Thoughts?
he mused that Canada might benefit from emulating the chronically disputatious factions of the Belgian federation
...and that was when I stopped taking Harper seriously. Perhaps there are positive lessons to be learned from Belgium, but there's no way the whole country can be held up as some shining example of a working bilingual republic. And that seemed to be what Harper was doing.
As for Duceppe leading the Bloc, I doubt it would affect their fortunes very much, since the Bloc and PQ are essentially the federal and provincial wings of the same party and to the extent that one has a strong leader, the other benefits. As long as people feel like casting anti-Federal protest votes, the Bloc will keep cleaning up, no matter who the leader is.
Sure, no limos for Mr. Harper? Where does he stay when he's in Ottawa? Who pays for that?
We pay for it. I have never had a problem with these positions receiving the odd perk, since they are elected officials that are doing a job that benefits our society. What I strongly object to are all the people sitting in patronage appointments living off the taxpayer dollar (e.g. the Senate and GG).
Linear Mode
