Scathing and accurate article on Harper in the New York Times

The Closing of the Canadian Mind

THE prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, has called an election for Oct. 19, but he doesn’t want anyone to talk about it.

He has chosen not to participate in the traditional series of debates on national television, confronting his opponents in quieter, less public venues, like the scholarly Munk Debates and CPAC, Canada’s equivalent of CSPAN. His own campaign events were subject to gag orders until a public outcry forced him to rescind the forced silence of his supporters.

Mr. Harper’s campaign for re-election has so far been utterly consistent with the personality trait that has defined his tenure as prime minister: his peculiar hatred for sharing information.

Americans have traditionally looked to Canada as a liberal haven, with gun control, universal health care and good public education.

But the nine and half years of Mr. Harper’s tenure have seen the slow-motion erosion of that reputation for open, responsible government. His stance has been a know-nothing conservatism, applied broadly and effectively. He has consistently limited the capacity of the public to understand what its government is doing, cloaking himself and his Conservative Party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance.

His relationship to the press is one of outright hostility. At his notoriously brief news conferences, his handlers vet every journalist, picking and choosing who can ask questions. In the usual give-and-take between press and politicians, the hurly-burly of any healthy democracy, he has simply removed the give.

READ MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/the-closing-of-the-canadian-mind.html

Thanks Ivan

Comment on the article found on FB

Editors’ Blog

It took the New York Times to bell the Harper cat

The campaigns were all abuzz over the weekend with details from Nigel Wright’s incredible testimony, but it was an article in the New York Times by Toronto writer Stephen Marche that has delivered the most devastating blow of the campaign to date to Conservative hopes. While they might be able to weather public disgust over the Duffy affair, or even the return to recession and deficits, it has to hurt when one of the biggest and most influential newspapers in the world call your decade of leadership “bland and purposeless” and that “Mr. Harper represents the politics of willful ignorance.” Even the most self-satisfied senior voter will find that hard to accept.