Mr. Harper got elected by promising to consult, to be transparent, to be accountable, but he’s delivered the extreme opposite. He doesn’t consult with anybody but himself in the mirror; he has the most secretive government Canada has ever known; and his accountability consists of “If I make a mistake, you’re fired.” Real leaders know that the buck stops with them, but Mr. Harper is an amazing buck-passer. He won’t own up to his own stuff — such as his heartfelt support for the Iraq invasion — unless shoved up against the wall, and even then he mumbles.

Further, it has now emerged that an overly-enthusiastic former speechwriter so indiscreetly lifted substantial portions of a John Howard speech for Harper, a speech that supported the incursion into Iraq by the US.

This should concern all Canadians. If this apparent resemblance between Harper and Howard is more than a passing one, Canadians should be seriously considering whether they want to live in a Canada led by Harper.

The ten years under Howard saw the Australian government falter, embarrassingly and disastrously, in respect of its national and international obligations.

The examples are varied and numerous, but most egregiously:

1. Those ten years saw the disgraceful affair of the Tampa, which resulted in the “Pacific solution” and mandatory detention of refugees and asylum seekers arriving at Australia by boat. Under the Pacific Solution, islands were retroactively excised from the Australian migration zone to stymie the claims of those seeking asylum in Australia. The Australian Defence Force was deployed to prevent boats from entering Australian waters. Several Pacific islands were paid off to host detention camps, off Australian territory, to hold asylum seekers, thereby circumventing the various international law requirements of the UN Human Rights Committee’s 1951 Refugee Convention.

(Getting paid to host detention centres sounds pretty good if you’re a country like Nauru, a tiny impoverished island in the South Pacific once rich from mining the phosphates delivered by bird droppings, and now struggling as the resources have been depleted.)

Most of the asylum seekers were found to have legitimate claims for asylum. But many were held in detention centres for years before their claims were processed.

2. John Howard has also found fame in steadfastly refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

3. Howard also received the dubious distinction of being appointed “sheriff” of the Pacific by George W. Bush following his loyal support for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

4. Under the Howard government, Australia was condemned by the UN Human Rights Committee for its treatment of its indigenous population. The UNHCR and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination found that Australia engaged in systemic discrimination against its indigenous peoples.

5. Howard oversaw labour reforms that intended to eliminate collective bargaining rights.

What vision does Harper have for Canada? I will assume he does have a vision. Even if it is not one that is identical to what Howard saw for Australia, if the Conservatives stay in power, the outlook is grim. From Australia’s experience, Canada could expect a poorer quality of life for Canadians and a blatant disregard for Canada’s national and international obligations. Canada currently enjoys the international perception that it is a tolerant, responsible, humane and diverse nation that takes pride in its environmental stewardship. If Harper is serious about aligning his vision with that of John Howard, his government could take Canada towards a culture of conservatism that would gravely threaten these qualities. This is not the “leadership” we should be choosing.

Contrary to the Ipsos-Reid survey showing that 31% of respondents believe Harper won the debate (proving only that, proportionately, more Conservative supporters like to vote in online surveys), I didn’t see any clear winner. Political partisans tend to interpret political debate accoridng to their biases, meaning pretty much everyone will claim their side won.

What I did clearly see was that the Conservatives have no platform, that Harper’s plan consists basically in a patchwork of tax cuts, that Harper believes the economy is doing fine (it isn’t), and that Harper continues to embarrassingly pretend his government cares about the environment in any meaningful way. The only sensible thing Harper said was in regard to the need for a withdrawal deadline for Afghanistan.

Harper sets his sights too low

At one point, Harper tried to score a point against Dion by pointing out that Dion doesn’t support Harper’s  income splitting plan for seniors. Dion retorted that indeed he doesn’t Harper’s plan, because his plan will go much further for seniors.

The Liberals’ plan will:

increase the Guaranteed Income Supplement by $600 a year for Canada’s lowest income seniors, and by $800 a year for low-income senior couples

The Guaranteed Income Supplement, according to respected economist Andrew Jackson, is one the main reasons for currently low poverty rates among seniors in Canada.

What emerged the leadership debates was that each leader had specific ideas about:

• rejuvenating Canada’s ailing manufacturing sector
• providing real action on environmental problems
• improving healthcare

Each leader, that is, except Harper, for whom leading a country apparently consists almost entirely in finding out how to cut more taxes. This would not be so inexcusable were it the case that the tax cuts were having any positive effect on Canadian society. But as emerged from Harper’s weak response to moderator Steve Paikin’s pointed “but are the tax cuts working?” question, even Stephen Harper acknowledges that his tax cuts are having little to no positive effect on the economy.

Beyond the fact that our economy is heading into recession and that productivity is falling under Harper’s watch(unprecedented since 1961), the tax cuts are not merely “not having the intended positive effects,” they are actively gutting the amount of money the federal government has to spend on healthcare and other social programs.

The $50 Billion Harper is proposing in tax cuts could be used to improve healthcare, to fund universal early childhood learning and care programs (which research shows have tremendous social return on investment), or to jumpstart a Canadian sustainable development manufacturing sector. Instead Harper would rather give it to large corporations like Exxon (as Jack Layton made plain).

Again, where’s the beef?

With Harper at their helm, the Conservatives will never achieve anything better than their mid-30s to low-40s polling. To achieve true broad and national appeal, you need to articulate an actual platform, something positive–and I don’t mean feel-good, but rather an actual plan with some content, rather than an anemic retreat into the safety of boring and demonstrably ineffectual tax cuts.

But Harper just doesn’t have it in him. He’s too focused on ideologically-based tax cuts to see that our healthcare system desperately needs a significant injection of new funds, particularly in light of our aging population. He’s too close to large energy corporations to see beyond the myopic pursuit of short-term profits. And he’s too stuck in an outdated laissez-faire economic mindset that fails to see the transformative potential of investment in education and high-quality childcare.

Harper is a tinkerer surrounded by inexcusably incompetent technocrats at a time when Canada neads real leadership that is willing to acknowledge the economic, healthcare and environmental issues we’re facing and provide real solutions.

Here’s a case study on Stephen Harper’s leadership. Nova Scotia and the Maritimes are bleeding youth to Alberta and the oil patch. There is a lack of economic development here, and the jobs are there, so we go.

The result is a huge generational crunch as rural Nova Scotia is becoming almost exclusively populated with senior citizens. My family is a perfect example. My mother is one of ten children born in Guysborough Interval, NS. Of the ten, six are living and retired in Nova Scotia. But of the 23 grandchildren, only five live in Nova Scotia. With such a generational shift, we are going to have mass shortages of labour. We are already seeing shortages of doctors and nurses, and other healthcare professionals especially in rural Nova Scotia. It worries me about my mother’s generation as the results of Bush and Harper’s laissez-faire approach to economics has quite literally left their retirement investments to the free market.

Now, what burns me the most about this situation is where all these young hardworking honest Martimers are going. The oilsands project in Alberta is a phenomenal example of Harper’s lack of leadership, not just on the environment but also on energy security.

First you need to check out this report: Canada’s Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project on Earth.

Did you know the largest damn in the world is in Canada? It’s visible from space and holding back toxic tar sludge from the oil sands project. There are other environmental gems in there like the return of acid rain to Canada over the prairies, and deformed fish that smell like rubber burning when you fry them.

To make matters worse for eastern Canada, despite the fact that Canada is now regarded as holding the second largest oil deposits of any nation in the world, the pipelines flow to the US and the Pacific coast. The Alberta government collects fewer royalties than Alaska charges on its oil, and our unrenewable resource is going across our southern border and to China. There is no eastern pipeline planned, and the Martimes and Central Canada are still reliant on Venezuala, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and recently Newfoundland and Labrador for our energy security.

From the Edmonton Journal November 3, 2007:

“Kinder Morgan’s agenda includes TMX North. For an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion, the firm aims to build a 400,000-barrels-daily branch line from a point west of Mount Robson across the Prince George region of central B.C. to a proposed new supertanker port on the Pacific coast at Kitimat”.

From Energy Security in Nova Scotia (PDF), (June 2007) by Larry Hughes, page 25:

“Nova Scotia still relies heavily on foreign, potentially insecure sources of oil, despite Canada now reporting the second largest oil reserves in the world due to the tar sand reserves.”

Meanwhile nationally owned state oil companies are rushing to buy their stake in the oil rush… and Alberta, and Harper are letting them!

This is a big picture look at Harper’s approach to the environment, healthcare and seniors, energy security and the labour market…. even Canadian resource sovereignty! It’s clear that Stephen Harper is moving in the wrong direction and is not a good leader for Canada.

The result, unfortunately, has been the emergence of a set of tactics more commonly seen in authoritarian countries than in liberal democracies such as Canada, and the erosion of core standards of accountable government.

Harper attempts to muzzle the press

“It’s no secret that Stephen Harper and journalists are about as bad a combo as Maple Leaf meats and a Sunday picnic” begins an article from Surrey’s The Now, and posted on Canada.com, which details how a Conservative MP was escorted away by RCMP from a Stephen Harper rally before reporters were given the opportunity to ask questions.

Rather than being an isolated event, this has become par for the course for Harper who, in 2006, announced that he would no longer give press conferences for national media, choosing rather to speak only with local media. Speaking to a local London reporter, he explained that “unfortunately the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government.” Or, removing the doublespeak: the national press was asking real, difficult questions, rather than just looking to scribble down our finely tuned messages and go write them up as we wanted.

Harper muzzles his own scientist civil servants…

Before the Conservatives’ Environment Canada media-relations-protocol (PDF) was issued in 2007,

a reporter could phone an Environment Canada expert, ask a question and get an answer - in the same conversation and the same business day. Now, under this new-and-improved policy, the reporter phones the expert, who immediately hangs up and goes searching for his or her boss. Both then forward the reporter’s question - no matter how inane - to Media Relations in Ottawa, which then designs “quick, accurate and … consistent” messages that can then be broadcast to reporters all across the country. (desmogblog)

This is clearly a regression from a well-functioning, transparent and democratic arrangement to a more controlling, unaccountable and authoritarian one. And even more strangely, it is a movement away from supposedly Conservative values that emphasize non-interference by government, and the reduction rather than inane increase in bureaucratic red tape. In the words of climate expert Andrew Weaver, who has first-hand experience with the Harper government’s disdain for scientific knowledge, “It’s absolutely Orwellian what’s going on here in science in Canada.”

…even when they’re acting as private citizens

In 2006, not long after Stephen Harper had promoted his Accountability Act legislation as a measure to secure protection for civil servants whistle-blowers, as he was about to present to the National Press Club on the science behind his new novel, Hotter Than Hell, Environment Canada scientist Mark Tushingham was censored by the Environment Minister’s office , and told he could not address the audience. Leaving aside the notion that any sort of censorship of this form is morally and political reprehensible, this book was written by Mr. Tushingham the private citizen, not Mr. Tushingham the government employee. For the Conservatives to disregard this line, first drawn by Kant in his seminal What is Enlightenment? , is to disgregard a key tenet of liberal democracy and to legitimate further advances of governmental control over citizens’ ability to exercise their freedom of speech.

Such encroachments upon the freedom of the press, and on the intellectual and academic freedom of both government employees and private citizens, is entirely unconscionable, is completely at odds with the Conservatives’ stated vision of a “free and independent” Canada, and has no place in a democracy.

But most unforgivable among their systematic evidence-blindness is the approach they’ve taken to addressing climate change, another issue on which the Conservatives are out of touch with ordinary Canadians. On climate change Stephen Harper has forgone long-term, strategic thinking and planning in favour of a pattern of actions calculated to secure short-term, unsustainable gain.

Stephen Harper’s climate policy is not based on science

There is no scientific debate on whether global warming is happening or whether humans are causing it. Moreover, there is a scientific and political consensus on the greenhouse gas reduction targets that must be met if we are to avoid serious environmental calamity.

In April 2007, Germany outlined a plan to cut CO2 emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Not long before, that, European Union leaders had agreed to cut CO2 emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020.

Canada’s Green Party pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 30% below 1990 levels by 2020 (PDF), Liberals say 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 (PDF), and the NDP say 25% below 1990 levels by 2020. John McCaim aims, much less ambitiously (but still more ambitiously than Harper), at a return to 1990 levels by 2020, while Barack Obama sets his sights on 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

You will notice a pattern emerging here: following targets originally set in the Kyoto accord, everyone uses the benchmark of 1990. Everyone, that is, except Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who aim for a 20% reduction from 2006 levels by 2020 and make no reference to 1990 levels.

The reason why everyone uses 1990 as benchmark and why numbers around 20-25% crop up so often is that they are based on recommendations of the International Panel on Climate Change. Harper take note: IPCC stands for “People who are international experts and who every reasonable leader is listening to.” The IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report makes clear the degree of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that is necessary to avoid catastrophic damage to human societies and natural ecosystems, and all the emission reduction targets outlined above are based on IPCC recommendations–except those of Stephen Harper and John McCain.

Experts agree: Harper’s plan will fail to meet even its modest targets

A recently released study by three respected Canadian economists, including internationally-renowned climate change expert Mark Jaccard, lays out several critical flaws in the Conservatives greenhouse gas reduction plans, and concludes:

as currently designed, it is highly unlikely that the policies of the government of Canada will achieve the target of reducing national emissions 20% below 2006 levels by 2020. The lack of an economy-wide emissions price and the allowance for 100% offsets for industrial emitters make it highly likely that emissions will be significantly higher than target levels in 2020 and indeed might even be close to today’s levels. Since the government claims that it is intent on achieving its 2020 emissions reduction target, it is difficult to understand why it does not immediately convert the intensity cap to an absolute cap and eliminate or severely reduce the offset provision.

The damning report echoes findings from a report by Environment Canada, released June 2008, that was quickly shuffled away by the Conservatives. The report found that:

many existing climate change measures such as the transit tax credit, regulations to increase biofuels production and the banning of incandescent light bulbs will result in a fraction of the greenhouse gas emission reductions that they were previously estimated to achieve.

The fact that many of their measures are going to be significantly less effective than they’ve been telling us is entirely in keeping with the Conservative’s history of basing policy on ideology, ignoring evidence, and willfully keeping the public from the truth. This is further evidenced by the fact that since early 2008, the government’s own civil servant scientists have been effectively censored, and ordered not to speak to directly to media.

A contempt for truth

A vote for the Stephen Harper is a vote for more government from someone who have shown that he doesn’t care about basing decision on fact or common sense, and who will go to extreme anti-democratic lengths to prevent the truth from being discovered by citizens.

Such maneuvers may translate into short-term political gain, but are entirely un-strategic. At this juncture in time, a truly strategic leader would recognize the threat posed by climate change and undertake measures to address it. Indeed, this is the course that is being adopted by the vast majority of political leaders in the Western world, at various levels of government. But Harper would rather stick his head in the sand and pretend everything is business as usual: a classic failure of leadership.

Harper is no small-time politician: in addition to having been president of the National Citizens Coalition, a well-funded right-wing lobbying organization, in 2003 Harper was a co-founder of the federal Conservative Party and shortly thereafter became its leader. He is, according to the Conservative Party of Canada website, a “leader of competence and vision.”

Where’s the beef?

But what is that vision? The page mentioned above makes no direct mention of it. If we look to the biographical page on the Prime Minister website, we see, along with the featured “Foster Pet Program” graphic, that

As Prime Minister, Mr. Harper is committed to building a Canada that remains strong, united, independent and free. He is committed to enacting accountability measures for government, lowering taxes for working families, reforming the criminal justice system, helping parents cope with the costs of child care and negotiating a patient wait times guarantee with the provinces.

Foster pet programs?

Now, let no one say that I have anything against foster pet programs.

Nor do I have an inherent disagreement with the idea that Canada remain “strong, united, independent and free.” That, of course, is just the point: none of these “big picture” elements of Stephen Harper’s purported vision is interesting or compelling enough that anyone, other than fervent Québec separatists, could possibly disagree.

In addition to “independent” and “free” being synonyms in most people’s vocabulary, I was not aware that Canada’s independence was in any way threatened, or that our freedom was going to be put into question.

There is similarly little in principle to question in Harper’s commitment to a strong Canada. But where a strong federal government has been needed, the Conservatives have let Canada down on several significant occasions. At the same time, the federal Conservatives’ efforts to forge a “strong” and “independent” Canda have resulted in isolationist policies that have earned us international shame.

Harper’s vision is out of touch with reality

What about the more tangible items, like “lowering taxes for working families”? Tax cuts for working families is a not unreasonable idea, so long as the tax cuts themselves are useful and not excessive. But polls suggest that Canadians do not feel this is the case. Survey data released last April by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities show Canadians are “so concerned about municipal under-funding that they would have preferred the federal government kept the GST at 6 per cent and used the funds to help municipalities.”

It is not entirely frequent that Canada could learn progressive lessons from its neighbour to the south, but on child care the federal Conservatives would do well to observe the trend towards increasing State-level government in childcare that is cropping up across the political spectrum. A vast and ever-growing wealth of research on child care and early learning documents the benefits of well-funded and regulated state-sponsored child care programs.

The Conservatives’ vision for child care sees it as a purely private matter and flies in the face of the best evidence that is informing policy decisions in other jurisdictions across the world. Canadian NGOs roundly award the Conservatives poor marks in this area.

Canada needs a strong leader with a strong vision

Stephen Harper’s vision is weak, poorly defined, and out of touch with Canadians.

ReallyNotALeader aims to make plain the many ways in which Stephen Harper fails to live up to his own rhetoric: the central premise of this blog is that Canada deserves better a better leader than Stephen Harper. With this blog, I hope contribute to the efforts of many Canadians to raise the bar of professionalism for political debate and campaigning.

What constitutes real leadership is, of course, up for question. The Globe & Mail’s Rick Salutin argues persuasively that the traditional “strong” leader is not actually desirable in a democracy, echoing an observation from Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man that modern democracies tend to be run by administrators rather than “leaders” in some classic sense. Democratic citizens want leadership that is going to listen and adapt to their demands and concerns, not carelessly pursue preconceived policy goals.

But despite the inevitable disagreement over exactly what leadership is, there is a core set of traits or characteristics most people believe to be reflective of good leadership, and it is the purpose of this blog to explore those traits and, moreover, to show how Stephen Harper has consistently failed to embody them.

By appealing to a shared sense of what good political leadership looks like, I hope to foster a serious and informed debate over Stephen Harper’s merits as a leader, and the kind of leadership that Canada needs and deserves.