All news is shrouded in opinions.
Yes, it is what it is, and what it is is an extremist call for abandoning Kyoto and questioning the basic veracity of fundamental climate science, even using a quote from one of the reprehensible campaigns of the Competitive Enterprise Institute pushing the notion that “CO2 is good for you”, as if climate scientists were all conspiratorial dumbasses. And what he wrote before he was Prime Minister is extremely relevant because he wrote it in his capacity as party leader just a few years before he did become PM, and it clearly displays his extremist anti-science ideology.
It’s formally “the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” but is often referred to informally as an accord, treaty, or agreement, as in this photo caption [Canada’s environment minister, Peter Kent, announces that Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto accord](Canada’s environment minister, Peter Kent, announces that Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto accord). As for being a “sad joke”, none of the other 192 signatories thought so when Canada – normally a congenial international partner in environmental and humanitarian policy – uncharacteristically abandoned them all and pulled out of the treaty. As for the effect of pulling out of Kyoto, see below.
Oh, really? The facts would appear to disagree with you. Article from the Guardian:
Oh Canada: the government’s broad assault on the environment
Prime minister Stephen Harper’s government has been weakening Canada’s environmental regulations and slashing funds for oversight and research - while promoting aggressive resource development
(and, I might add, prohibiting climate scientists and other federal researchers involved in even remotely climate-related issues from speaking to the public, as already noted – an unprecedented act of scientific censorship contrary to the public interest and a perfect example of Harper’s rigid totalitarian-like control of all information.)
Globe and Mail report on Canada’s environmental protection ranking:
Canada dead last in ranking for environmental protection (report from 2013)
Canada has fallen behind in a global ranking on international development initiatives and ranks last when it comes to environmental protection.
… Canada dropped from 12th place last year and did far worse in the environmental protection category, where it ranked 27th. Every other country made progress in this area except Canada, the centre said in a report on the rankings.
Canada “has the dubious honor of being the only CDI country with an environment score which has gone down since we first calculated the CDI [in 2003],” the report said. “This reflects rising fossil fuel production and its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only treaty governing the emissions of heat-trapping gasses. Canada has dropped below the U.S. into bottom place on the environment component.”
… The major reasons for Canada’s poor showing, he said, were pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol and having one of the highest levels of greenhouse gas production per capita.
Of course one can always find an OECD report that says Canada has been making good progress, but sadly, it’s from 2004, before Harper inflicted himself on the nation. How things change, eh?
Thank you for that wall of cut and paste text. I see it is a direct copy from the website http://pm.gc.ca.
Next time, why don’t you just post “Stephen Harper thinks that Stephen Harper has done a great job”? Seriously dude. This is just a joke.
For specifics, Let’s just start with the first three, shall we?
- GST cuts (from 7% to 5%)
- Widely panned by pretty much every economist as a very poor economic plan, and helped lead us to his 180 BILLION dollars in deficits.
These cuts were populist garbage, and were done to win him an election, not to help this country.
- Numerous Free Trade agreements (especially with the EU)
- You are aware that we do not have a free trade agreement with the EU at this time, right? It is still in negotiation, it has not been approved, and still needs to be voted on by the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament.
Harper, of course, made a big noise about this a while ago, and likes to PRETEND that this agreement has been signed.
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- Concluding, signing or bringing into force 10 foreign investment promotion and protection agreements (FIPAs), including with Nigeria, Benin and Tanzania; more than any previous year.
- WOW! Investment promotion with the country of Benin! That’s impressive! I guess the leftie press is keeping that one hidden, right?
Give me a freaking break. The rest of the list is also full of inaccuracies and pathetic little bits of crappola. Harper’s accomplishments are pathetic at best, damaging at worst.
This is just sad. It is reminiscent of Sarah Palin, and her moaning about the “Lame Stream Media”.
The National Post and the Globe and Mail both supported Harper for the past two election cycles. In writing. The media in this country are large corporate entities, who cannot by any stretch of the imagination, be called “outrageously biased”. This is, to put it quite simply, nutty.
You seem to think that anyone who does not continuously sing the praises of Mr. Harper is “outrageously biased”. Anyone who may offer ANY critique of him is “one of those lefties.”
Well guess what? 75% of the country does not like him or his party. By definition, 75% of the country are not “lefties”
You, sir, are the very picture of a partisan, who will not admit to any fault in His Leader, even when it is staring you right in the face.
All those “Nice Hair though” ads may have backfired on the Conservatives - it seems the swing away from Conservatives is the Liberal gain, with the NDP holding steady
I didn’t entertain voting for Trudeau at all… until I saw those American style attack ads. They really rubbed me the wrong way and I probably will vote Liberal now.
Hmm . . . I’d never heard of Benin before. Ignorance fought. 
They are the only thing that makes me want to vote Liberal, just for spite. (I’ll almost certainly vote NDP.)
I don’t see much fault in the Prime Minister; it’s true.
Look at the media outlash against the Conservatives for being actually responsible for the deaths of two young Syrian children 4,000 miles away that had absolutely nothing to do with Canada. The family had never even applied to Canada for refugee status and yet almost every news outlet was somehow blaming Canada for this. It’s despicable.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
If you don’t see much fault in Harper then you haven’t read or fully appreciated the content of the last several dozen posts here and all the supporting cites, not to mention the events all around you. Harper could be transplanted to Texas as a sidekick to Rick Perry or Ted Cruz and fit right in, no questions asked.
As you might guess I have mixed feelings about the whole refugee fiasco, and I do think it’s rather hypocritical that one symbolic picture of that little boy is seen as grounds for a complete revamp of immigration policy that until then everyone seemed to implicitly accept.
But, as usual, with the Harper cabal there’s always more than meets the eye. I’m reminded of this CBC Radio interview with Chris Alexander in 2014 about the status of the Syrian refugee program. I remember listening to it in the car and being astounded by the way in which Alexander completely evaded the questions and essentially gave total non-answers.
One more or less got the impression that the status of the Syrian refugee program was that there wasn’t one. This was the infamous interview in which Alexander hung up on the CBC interviewer. Very classy – and fits the arrogant, secretive, lying culture of the Harper cabal to a tee. If they only could have they would have defunded the entire CBC right there on the spot. Who needs an uppity national broadcaster asking uncomfortable questions?
I’m somewhat amazed at the dichotomy of opinions actually. It really is fascinating how some people can think that the Prime Minister is performing exceptionally well, while others despise him.
Seriously, from a sociological perspective it is very interesting.
I apologize for my (almost warning) rant earlier.
All of my friends in the Ottawa region are totally Conservative supporters, as am I obviously.
So, who is right and who is wrong? I hope you can see that it’s not possible to answer this question. Given margin of error the polls say its about one third for each party. (It fluctuates.)
Canada wll be fine regardless of which party wins the election.
I get pissed off when some people here call the Prime Minister: Dear Leader, Harpo, Der Leader, and lots of other denigrating names. I don’t appreciate that. He’s been a wonderful Prime Minister for the last 10 years and has successfully guided us through the worst recession in 90 years.
All my friends are NOT Harper supporters, and many hate him with a passion. This includes not just scientists and educators but business executives and entrepreneurs. So the only conclusion we get out of that is that we tend to associate with like-minded people.
Maybe instead of casting the question in terms of right and wrong, we should look at it from the standpoint that Harper is the incumbent and currently leads a majority government. And you claim he’s been a “wonderful” PM. Yet it looks like he’s not only going to lose the majority, he’s very likely to be turfed out of power altogether. This in spite of being a ten-year incumbent and each of the other major party leaders being new and untested, one of them exceptionally young, and the other leading a party that has never before held power federally.
Harper’s opponents, IOW, have significant traditional disadvantages, and it would take some really amazing political spin here to conclude anything other than that Canadians just don’t like Harper, and that “anything but Harper” is becoming a groundswell. Maybe it’s the fact that polls have shown that many don’t trust him as far as they could throw him. Maybe more Canadians are starting to recognize some of the facts that I posted here. So spin it how you like, but at best Harper might win a very slim minority, or more likely might not even form the official opposition – in which case I suspect he’ll probably resign. Your guy. The “wonderful” one. Make of it what you will.
Do you live in the GTA? Serious question.
This is a phenomenon that will also tend to warp your view of the world. If you convince yourself a politician is either flawless or the next Hitler, you may wish to consider the possibility that you are not truly making a full and honest assessment of the facts.
Justin Trudeau is only three years younger now than Stephen Harper was when he was elected Prime Minister.
Anyway, I don’t think this is an “in spite of,” I think it’s a because. Canada has a fairly long history now of parties holding on to power for at least a few elections; with the exception of the brief fling with Joe Clark and return to PET, when was the last time had an honest-to-God one-term government in Canada? 1930. Canadians like to elect governments (at a federal level) and leave them there for at least a few terms. They’ve been doing for basically the whole life of anyone reading this thread.
IMHO, governments are elected for good reasons and turfed for good reasons. In 2006 it was good for Canada that the Liberals be turfed and the Tories elected. The country needed to get rid of the Liberals, who were hopelessly without purpose or direction and led by a dreadful Prime Minister (hell of a Finance Minister but he was Peter Principled to the top) and there was considerable value at that time in history in having a government with broader support from across all parts of Canada.
Now, it’s time for the Tories to be turfed. Like the Liberals before them, they clearly don’t have any sort of direction or agenda anymore besides “hey, let’s get elected.”
I neither like nor despise Harper, because I have examined the facts in as objective a manner as possible and concluded he’s meh. An astonishing number of the criticisms of him are either insanely exaggerated or false, but I can find lots of legitimate criticism just looking at the facts. He was a good Prime Minister at first but he’s done little of consequence in his last term and is failing at things his government claims to be good at, the most notable being the mismanagement of our national defence. We could use a fresh government with some kind of vision. It is distressing that neither opposition party has a particularly noteworthy vision, but I’ll take just “Fresh.”
Your position that he should go because he’s not leading in the polls is, obviously, a circular argument; “he should lose because he’s losing.” Logically, then, you would agree the Conservatives definitely deserved to win the 2011 election, and everyone who voted for a different party was wrong? If not, you have to admit to some extent you’re not a strict populist and that just because a lot of people think something does not make it true. I again point to the fact that it was held as Gospel truth by million of Canadians that a Harper government would make abortion a crime, make gay marriage a crime, start executing people and so on and so forth, and none of it happened. The “hidden agenda” narrative was wrong (and I said at the time it was wrong, and you can look that up.) So in fact those people were simply, flatly wrong, wrong by the millions, just as millions of people who today think Thomas Mulcair is going to turn Canada into the USSR are obviously going to be wrong and ten minutes of honest reflection and examination of the facts would make a person realize how silly it is, just as it would have in 2006. Hell, it happens everywhere; look at how many Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim. More Americans think that than there are Canadians in the whole world. Does that mean there is credence to the idea? No; it’s wrong. Ignorance is not a point of view. The other day some National Post columnist said Bernie Sanders was a “Communist.” That is idiotic, *and it doesn’t matter how many people believe it. *
Harper, IMHO, shouldn’t be Prime Minister anymore because the facts and the probabilities say we could use a new Prime Minister. And eventually, we’ll need to dump that guy, too.
Really, that’s a “serious” question? Is there something in the water that makes people dislike Harper? How does this address any of the points I made, either in the prior post or any of the ones preceding?
Meanwhile here’s another story on how Harper’s campaign continues to disintegrate. It’s from Neil Macdonald, who’s written some good columns lately on both US and Canadian politics. I don’t know if Neil lives in the GTA, but I suppose we ought to check that out, in case it’s tainting his viewpoint! 
In any case, Harper’s loyal minions, conditioned to hate the media and presumably fed a diet of raw meat and kept on a short leash, continue to exhibit their vulgar crassness at campaign events. These dipshits are publicly proclaiming that the tragedy of the drowned Syrian boy was no different than a suburban backyard pool accident, and that the media are all “lying pieces of shit”. The Harper cabal: classy as always.
That wasn’t my point. My point was simply that most Canadians obviously disagree that Harper was as great a PM as Leaffan makes him out to be. Let’s face it, the Liberals have had a disastrous time trying to get a decent leader (I predicted that both Dion and Ignatieff would be utter failures) and while Trudeau may not be chronologically all that young, he looks and acts and is inexperienced, while the NDP have never held federal power. Harper is coming in to this election from a majority government, and in these circumstances if he had done any kind of decent job he’d be steamrolling all over the competition.
I agree with some aspects of your analysis. A party that’s been in power too long becomes complacent and ineffective and there’s some aspect of that here. But I think there’s more going on than that.
I never seriously believed that Harper would bring us American-style social conservatism on abortion or gay rights, because he’s a political pragmatist. But it’s undeniable that there are a bunch of lunatic backbenchers in his own party who want to do just that. And the reality is that Harper is an extremist and there really has been a hidden agenda. A lot of it was quite literally hidden in those 11 gigantic thousand-page omnibus bills, chipping away at our civil liberties, rolling back environmental protections, promoting an oil economy while silencing federal scientists, and doing all those other things I documented in previous posts. And all the while creating a malignant political culture of control, secrecy, and deception.
I think our argument here is whether Harper’s downfall is due to lack of substantive accomplishments or whether it’s due to a growing recognition that he’s actually been damaging in many of those ways I cited earlier. I think it’s both, but the latter is certainly very real.
He recently moved back to Canada after a couple of decades abroad.
There are quite a few reasons why 75% of Canadians currently do not want the Conservative Party back in power. Many of them do revolve around Harper, since he has made himself into “The Party of One”. Who else is the focal point?
Here are some of my reasons:
- Economy - actually, this one gets a “meh” from me. I cannot really understand how some think Harper did such a wonderful job here. He inherited a really good financial system before the recession. 12 surpluses in a row. Excellent banking regulations (which Harper himself wanted to make more like the US’s - what a bad idea) He had instituted a deficit before the recession though… this was a bad idea. The GST cut was really, REALLY the wrong way to go, and was done only for political, not economic reasons. And thank God we were in a minority situation then - the opposition basically forced him to spend, which did help us get out of recession.
So no real credit to Harper here, but I guess he could have done worse. He certainly could have done better. So “meh”
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The dominance of the PMO. The PMO has been getting larger and more influential since PET. Harper took this and made it worse. Much worse. The PMO is now effectively the government. It used to be that backbenchers had no say, and cabinet made all the decisions. Now the PMO tells cabinet what to do. And the unaccountable PMO seems to be a bunch of unethical, unelected partisans, who operate outside of any normal rulebook. The Duffy bribe affair was only one example of what they do.
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The Senate (and other Harper appointments). Harper took a dysfunctional, useless senate and actually made it worse. I didn’t think this would be even possible, but there you go. Harper promised to do SOMEthing to fix the senate. He didn’t even try. Finally, when the SCC told him he could not do it unilaterally, he just threw his hands in the air, rather than actually talking to the provinces. He didn’t even make an attempt.
And look at who he appointed: He turned the chamber from a mostly useless institution into a fund raising arm of the party, reporting to … guess who? The PMO. -
Treatment of science and the environment.
This has been the most hostile government I have ever seen in terms of how science is treated in this country. Harper does not seem to know what science is… he seems to confuse it with technical engineering. Funding cuts are just the tip of the iceberg here. And on this front, I speak from personal experience. -
Tax law.
I really, really hate boutique tax credits, no matter who is using them. Harper has expanded these beyond reason. And they are all targeted to “his base”. They have little to do with policy that is designed to do something to help our country. They are transparent vote-getting devices. Yes, others have done this before; Like many other things, Harper has taken this bad idea to a new level. We now have a tax credit to buy skates for God’s sake. And Harper is proposing another one so we can get a new granite countertop for the kitchen. This is just lunacy. And it goes against everything that his party used to stand for. -
Omnibus bills.
Yet another area where Harper took a very bad idea and made it worse. When in opposition,Harper railed against omnibus bills. Now, that’s entirely how he governs. Was it necessary that he jam a law into the latest budget bill that retroactively made it legal for the RCMP to destroy evidence? No, no really, but that’s just how Harper rolls now. Again, take a very bad, undemocratic idea that other parties have abused… and make it worse. -
Negative political ads - all the time
The day after Trudeau was elected Liberal leader, the negative ads about him from the CPC started up. They implied he was “effeminate”. They used every negative stereotype in the books. On TV, Radio and in print. They used taxpayer money to send these ads to constituents. And we were years away from an election. They mocked his hair. (and still do), like playground children.
I have yet to see an ad during this campaign that says what the Conservatives are FOR. It’s all negative, all the time. It’s an unprecedented level of nasty.
Again, others in the past have used negative advertising. Harper has taken a bad idea and ramped it up to huge levels.
Bottom line; It’s like he has taken every bad political idea of the past 50 years (including those he used to rail against) and simply multiplied them by a factor of 5.
Euph. Pol., that exquisitely expressed my assessment of the situation. Thank you.