With friends like Mr. Harper... [editorial]

So Canada, now do you see what kind of government we’ve been dealing with all these years?

Nasty, menacing and scheming, with a blind devotion to a political master, ideological enslavement, accuser-judge-jury-and-executioner, tyrannical, odious, abusers of power, intimidation, radical responses, double standards, duplicitous, fair processes denied at every turn, the kind of abuse one might attribute to Iran or Iraq or under the Putin regime of Russia.

This isn’t our characterization of the Harper government. This comes from the very insiders that were once very happy to walk in the Harper government’s reflected glory. The words come from Senators Mike Duffy, Patrick Brazeau and Pamela Wallin, who are in the fight of their lives to recover the shreds of their reputations, and against efforts to remove them from their posts in the Red Chamber, that place of ultimate privilege in which they toiled “for Canada” and where they have been accused of taking financial advantage.

Duffy was once described as the Conservative Party’s most valuable asset. Wallin was someone that Prime Minister Stephen Harper once quite liked, someone lauded for her work as a political pitbull on the PM’s behalf. Brazeau, the experiment gone wrong. This last month the senators, who once marched lockstep with the monster, are now surprised that its tail has whipped around to knock them off their feet. It’s illuminating to listen to their perspectives now that they are speaking from a less exalted position, and put those perspectives into the context of our world.

“If this chamber can take this extreme action with regard to a sitting Senator,” said Wallin about the effort to remove her, “imagine what it could do to an ordinary citizen who crosses the government of the day.”

Yes, let’s imagine that now please.

Ms. Wallin said a mouthful there, we’ll tell you. At least the bullets flying in the Senate that day were figurative. No one was pointing an actual rifle at her head while she was trying to raise her concerns. No one was using pepper spray to take her down, or have a snapping dog trained on her as she attempted to break through the Conservative bulwark to make her case.

October 2013 will go down in the history books as an explosive month. It didn’t matter where we looked there was incredibly important business to consider everywhere. In October, we commemorated the 250th anniversary of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which established our government to government relationship with the British Crown.

We were visited by the UN Special Rapporteur, who after a brief examination of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples here, on Oct. 15 flew home having determined that we were in a crisis situation in this country.

On Oct. 16, we heard from Governor General David Johnston in the speech from the Throne, who told us that it was Canada’s pioneers who forged a country where no country existed before, forgetting completely the pre-contact peoples, and describing a Canada that valued peace, using military might sparingly.

Then, on Oct. 17, some ugly bit of insanity was unleashed. The sudden and extreme use of force by Canada’s police at Rexton in New Brunswick tipped the scales in jaw-dropping lunacy.

The raid occurred after the people had been on the protest line for months, urging a dialogue on the very serious business of fracking, where real concerns from ordinary people had not been given a proper hearing and no other alternative forum to express their issues provided. That sounded familiar after hearing the complaints of Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau Oct. 22 and Oct. 23 describing their own government onslaught.

There was a process being carried out by political leaders in New Brunswick to end the impasse at Rexton; a blocked road. There was a negotiation going on in the province to find a peaceful resolution. There was to be a court hearing on an injunction against the protesters in only four days time.
Why then?

Abuse of power, intimidation, pandering to the Conservative base, fair processes denied at every turn.

“Harper has committed to tripling the expansion of the tarsands development, and he is suggesting that the economy of this country hangs in the balance,” said Union of BC Indian Chiefs President Stewart Phillip. “I think what’s going on in New Brunswick, and more importantly, the response to what’s going on, is sending a very clear signal that Harper will stop at nothing to ram these projects through and to crush any opposition to these projects, whether that opposition be political, legal or on the ground.”

The Senate scandal quickly knocked Rexton off the front pages, but the Senate scandal helps demonstrate to Canadians the determined ruthlessness of this government. It draws back the veil for all of Canada to see an example of what Aboriginal people have been saying for some time. It helps show the lengths to which this government will go to remove the people that stand in the way of what this government wants when it wants it.
Windspeaker