This is a re-post of three articles from TheTyee.ca based on accounts from one who has dwelt in the darkness with the Hypocrite. He reveals the strategies of a tyrant, liar, and traitor to the Canada that I know and love. This is a look into the tripe of darkness where evil dwells. The light reveals its true blandness and impotency.
Harper’s Methodical Campaign to Silence Democracy
The plan is revealed in a book by the PM’s former top strategist Tom Flanagan.
Illustration by Ingrid Rice.
Since taking power federally in 2006, the Conservative government has undertaken a continuous attack on civil society organizations. One of the government's first actions was to cut support for women's organizations that lobbied or did research on the status of women. Environmental organizations have been accused of acting in the interest of foreign powers. Revenue Canada was given extra money to investigate them.How did we come to the point where organizations advocating equality and changes to public policy appear to be seen by the government as the enemy of Canadians?
Tom Flanagan, University of Calgary professor and a top advisor to the Conservative leader made much of this very clear in a largely forgotten section of a book he published in 2007.
In Harpers Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power, Flanagan writes about an episode in the 2006 election when it looked like abortion might become an issue.
He writes:
"The door, however, had been opened for a final wave of attacks. Liberal outrider organizations -- feminists, gay-rights activists, law professors, aboriginal leaders, environmentalists -- came at us in human waves, claiming that Harper would roll back abortion rights, use the notwithstanding clause to quash gay marriage, and repudiate the Kelowna agreement and the Kyoto Accord. The Conservative Party simply can't compare with the Liberals in the depth and breadth of these external linkages; Real Women and Campaign Life can't compete with EGALE Canada and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women in terms of public funding and media clout. (We did score one minor coup when the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples broke ranks with other aboriginal organizations to support us instead other Liberal.) If the Conservative Party can stay in power for any length of time, it should be a priority to de-fund the support groups that the Liberals have cultivated so long with grants, subsidies and access to government."
'It should agree with the government'
This May Foreign Minister John Baird made it even clearer when challenged in Parliament over the government's elimination of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. Baird said: "Why should taxpayers have to pay for more than 10 reports promoting a carbon tax, something that the people of Canada have repeatedly rejected? That is a message the Liberal Party just will not accept. It should agree with Canadians. It should agree with the government."
Flanagan recommended these groups be defunded and denied access to government and that is what happened. After all, these are the people who dared to suggest a Conservative government would repudiate Kyoto and the Kelowna Accord with First Nations.
That is how the current federal government views organizations who do not share their world view; the professors and the gay rights activists, the aboriginal leaders, women and environmentalists. They are just Liberal outriders. They are the enemy.
There is a straight line between Flanagan's musings in his book and the actions of the federal government. It is all about controlling the narrative. It is all about reducing the voices that might speak out against the current government's agenda.
Civil society organizations; groups like charities, unions, women's organizations and others play a critical role in our society. They provide a voice that is not clearly heard at the political level. It is organizations of women who drive the fight for equality. Charities working for prisoners and immigrants made public the dangerous direction new policies on crime and immigration were taking us. Environmental groups and First Nations moved us as British Columbians to oppose the Gateway pipeline. Unions have fought for health and safety protections for immigrant workers.
Sometimes these views are not popular. Sometimes they don't even agree with the government. But sometimes they mobilize us as a society to change the way we think. For our current federal government, that appears to be unacceptable.
But there is an even worse outcome than defunding, closing organizations and attacking others through Revenue Canada. That worst outcome is the chill that comes from the fear government will act against you. Many organizations will simply choose to withdraw from public debates rather than risk making themselves a target.
When a government silences the voices it does not want to hear, or when we silence ourselves out of fear, it is not an attack on individual organizations, it is an attack on democracy.
Keith Reynolds is a National Research Representative for the Canadian Union of Public Employees. He has done policy work for all three levels of government. Keith maintains a Facebook page in honour of BC cheese. This was first posted on Policy Note.
Tom Flanagan's Playbook for Ultimate Harper Victory
Rule one: Fear works. And more Conservative battle strategy laid bare by an early architect.By Crawford Kilian, 8 Apr 2011, TheTyee.ca
Cartoon by Greg Perry.
Tom Flanagan. Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 2nd Rev. ed.
Tom Flanagan is a likable guy. He shows up on TV political panels looking like your favourite uncle with some wicked wisecracks (OK, recommending the assassination of Julian Assange was maybe over the top).
He is also a serious academic at the University of Calgary. As he tells us in the second edition of Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power, he reveals that he is not just a political scientist; he is a political technologist, eager to learn the mechanics of gaining power and -- like any good teacher -- happy to pass his learning on to us.
While Flanagan no longer advises Stephen Harper, he was deeply involved in Harper's progress from right-wing propagandist to prime minister. In the 1980s, Flanagan says, Reform was "just another fringe movement, of which Alberta has seen so many."
But in 1990 he read Reform's "Blue Book" and loved it. It echoed his own views, which were inspired by the Austrian-British right-wing economist Friedrich Hayek. Hayek in those days was very much a fringe item, but was to give some kind of philosophical justification to thousands of conservatives who have never read him (very much like the left-wingers who've never read Marx).
As a full-time professor and part-time dabbler in Reform politics, Flanagan clearly saw Reform as a vehicle for Hayekian changes. His involvement with the young Stephen Harper was tentative at first, but before long they were close associates. They co-authored an important essay: "Our Benign Dictatorship: Can Canada Avoid a Second Century of Liberal Rule?"
Flanagan and Harper learned the ropes of backroom politics as Reform staggered through changes in name, brand and leadership early in the decade. Through it all, Flanagan was clearly taking detailed notes and drawing lessons from the experience
Fear works
The key lesson: Fear works. Raising money to support Harper's leadership campaign taught him to follow "the time-honoured advice for raising money by direct mail -- make people angry and afraid, and set up an opponent for them to give against."
Even when success was assured, Flanagan wanted to ensure a good turnout of Harper's supporters in the Canadian Alliance leadership race: "We wanted them to be alarmed over the possibility that the Alliance might continue its disintegration... We were happy to let the media wallow in their own disinformation because we wanted our supporters to be motivated to vote."
He also learned "There's nothing so dirty that your opponents won't try to use it against you" -- and that was when Harper's opponents were other members of the Canadian Alliance.
Harper briefly hired an outspoken radio "shock jock" as his press secretary, and quickly learned the importance of message control. Harper, says Flanagan, "wants self-effacing media people around him."
These lessons served Harper well when he engineered the merger of the Alliance and the faltering Progressive Conservatives, and then became the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. Soon he was planning a campaign against the Martin Liberals in 2004, with an energetic application of attack ads.
That campaign failed, but the Harper team drew more lessons from it -- including the Liberal attack ads that blasted him for supporting Bush's adventure in Iraq. The answer was to increase the use of feel-good Harper ads: "We still feared that hard-hitting negative ads would reinforce the 'scary' image that the Liberals were pinning on Harper." And when Harper talked about forming a majority government, it was a mistake. Flanagan cites an observer who noted that Harper was "scaring voters who might have trusted him with a minority but certainly not with a majority."
'Scaring the shit out of the Dippers'
"You cannot win," says Flanagan about the Liberals, "without a complete arsenal of negative ads to offset the effect of their attacks
Harper's team also recognized and respected another Liberal tactic, which the Liberals themselves call "scaring the shit out of the Dippers" by posing the Conservatives as the greater evil.
Through this and later campaigns, Harper, Flanagan, and the team learned both to exploit and to survive the tactics of fear. "If chronically fearful moderate or left-wing voters become convinced that Conservatives are a threat to civilization as they think they know it, they are likely to vote for the Liberals rather than the NDP or Greens, because they may think only a Liberal government can keep the Conservatives out of power."
Hence, he argues, "a Conservative government must align itself tactically in Parliament with different parties or segments of parties over different issues" -- that is, form coalitions.
Flanagan's commandments
Flanagan's chapter "Ten Commandments of Conservative Campaigning" sums up what he learned
1. Unity. The various factions and splinter groups within the CPC coalition have to get along.
2. Moderation. "Canada," says Flanagan, "is not yet a conservative or Conservative country. We can't win if we veer too far to the right of the median voter."
3. Inclusion. This means francophones and minority groups.
4. Incrementalism: "Make progress in small, practical steps."
5. Policy. "Since conservatism is not yet the dominant public philosophy, our policies may sometimes run against conventional wisdom. The onus is on us to help Canadians to understand what they are voting for."
6. Self-discipline. "The media are unforgiving of conservative errors, so we have to exercise strict discipline at all levels."
7. Toughness. "We cannot win by being Boy Scouts."
8. Grassroots politics. "Victories are earned one voter at a time."
9. Technology. "We must continue to be at the forefront in adapting new technologies to politics."
10. Persistence. "We have to correct our errors, learn from experience, and keep pushing ahead."
Judging from Flanagan's account, all these points could have been learned in Harper's first campaigns to lead his fellow Alliance members. Later experience seems to have driven those first lessons home rather than leading on to deeper and more respectful understanding of Canadians and the Canadian political process. As it is, Flanagan's and Harper's view of Canadians is that of a border collie facing 33 million sheep: a mighty challenge, but not one to be spurned.
Flanagan is no longer involved with the Conservatives except as a right-wing pundit. But the 2011 Conservative campaign still looks like another battle of a self-righteous paranoid fringe whose advocates will happily lie rather than admit what their real dreams are: a Canada where Friedrich Hayek would be happy.
Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.
The Tories' Dirty Tricks Catalogue
Twenty-two black ops and hardball tactics by Team Harper while in power.
Cartoon by Greg Perry.
The Conservatives have been caught up in many shady activities since coming to power. The revelation that they may have been behind a robocall operation to suppress voting for opposition parties would rank, if proven, among the more serious offences.
Stephen Harper has denied involvement in the scam in which operatives acted under the guise of Elections Canada officials. Coincidentally, another controversy, the in-and-out affair, involved Elections Canada. Some of Harper's most senior officials took part in that operation.
In giving or not giving the benefit of the doubt on matters like these, the question of the track record figures prominently. To the misfortune of Team Harper, its record on duplicitous activities is hardly one to inspire confidence that its hand are clean.
There follows a list -- is Harperland becoming Nixonland? -- of dirty tricks, black ops and hardball tactics from the Conservatives' years in power.
1. Cooking the Books
The duplicity began in the election that brought the Conservatives to power -- the 2006 campaign in which they were promising a new era of transparency and accountability. Via some peculiar accounting practices, the Tories exceeded spending limits in the campaign, providing themselves with an advertising advantage in key ridings. They were later caught, had their offices raided by police and ultimately pled guilty last year to reduced charges of violating financing provisions of the Elections Act.
2. The Hidden Slush Fund
More than $40-million slated for border-infrastructure improvements instead went into enhancement projects in Tony Clement's riding in preparation for the G-8 summit. To conceal the intent of the spending from legislators, John Baird used the border fund as a "delivery mechanism" for the money.
3. Falsifying Documents
The document-altering scam involving Bev Oda's office and the aid group Kairos is only one of several instances in which the Tories have been caught document-tampering. They went so far as to alter a report by Auditor General Sheila Fraser to make it look like she was crediting them with prudent financial management when, in fact, it was the Liberals to whom she was referring.
4. Shutting Down Detainees' Probes
The Conservatives employed a number of authoritarian tactics to avoid culpability on the Afghan detainees' file. They included an attack on the reputation of diplomat Richard Colvin, the shutting down of Parliament and the disabling of Peter Tinsley's Military Police Complaints Commission. The Tories denied Tinsley's commission documents for reasons of national security -- even though commission members had national security clearance.
5. The Cotler Misinformation Campaign
In an act described by the Speaker of the Commons, himself a Tory, as reprehensible, Conservatives systematically spread rumours in Irwin Cotler's Montreal riding that he was stepping down.
6. The Suppression of Damaging Reports
A report of the Commissioner of Firearms that showed the gun registry in a good light was kept hidden by Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan beyond its statutory release deadline. As a consequence, the report escaped the eyes of opposition members before a vote on the registry was taken. It is one of many instances in which the government has suppressed research that runs counter to its ideology.
7. Attempt to Frame the Opposition Leader
Late in the 2011 election camapign, a senior Conservative operative leaked bogus photos to Sun Media in an attempt to frame Michael Ignatieff as an Iraqi war planner.
8. Communications Lockdown
The government went to unprecedented lengths to vet, censor and withhold information. After denying legislators information on costs of programs, Harper became the first prime minister in history to be found in contempt of Parliament. The public service has muzzled like never before. Last week, several groups wrote Harper urging him to stop gagging the science community on the question of climate change and other issues. The Tories denied an opposition member accreditation to attend the Durban summit on climate change, then lambasted the member for not being there. Journalists have faced myriad restrictions. At one point in the in-and-out affair, PMO officials fled down a hotel fire-escape stairwell, Keystone-Kops style, to avoid the media. On another, the governing party had the police clear a Charlottetown hotel lobby of scribes wishing to cover a Tory caucus meeting.
9. Intimidation and Bullying of Adversaries
The list of smear campaigns against opponents is long. Some that come to mind are Harper's trying to link Liberal Navdeep Bains to terrorism; Vic Toews' labelling of distinguished jurist Louise Arbour a "disgrace to Canada" for her views on the Middle East; seeking reprisals against University of Ottawa academic Michael Behiels for being critical of the government; and the dismissal of Nuclear Safety Commission boss Linda Keen who the PM decried as having a Liberal background.
10. The 'Citizenship' Dog and Pony Show
As well as being muzzled, civil servants have been put to use for the government's political benefit. In one such case, the immigration department ordered bureaucrats to act as stand-ins at a fake citizenship reaffirmation ceremony broadcast by Sun TV.
11. Writing the Book on Disrupting Committees
The Tories quietly issued their committee chairpersons a 200-page handbook on how to obstruct the opposition. The handbook recommended barring witnesses who might have embarrassing information. It went so far as to instruct chairpersons to shut down the committees if the going got really tough. The Tories have also issued an order that frees cabinet staffers from ever having to testify before committees. They are resorting more frequently to in-camera committee sessions, away from the public and media eye.
12. Leaking Veterans' Medical Files
Colonel Pat Stogran, who was dropped as veterans' ombudsman after making waves, says he became the target of anonymous defamatory emails and other dirty tricks after criticizing the government. Other veterans, Sean Bruyea and Dennis Manuge, say their medical files have been leaked, going all the way back to 2002, in an attempt to embarrass them.
13. Unfixing the Fixed-Date Election Law
The prime minister brought in a fixed date election law which, he said, would remove the governing party's timing advantage in dropping the writ. He promptly turned around and, earning Jack Layton's lasting disdain, ignored his own law and issued a surprise election call in 2008.
14. Declaring Brian Mulroney Persona Non Grata
In the wake of the Karlheinz Schreiber cash hand-out controversy, Harper's team, in its zest to disassociate itself, went so far as to put out the false rumour that Mulroney, who won two majorities for the party, was no longer a card-carrying member.
15. Unreleasing Released Documents
The Conservatives have resorted to the use of shady tactics to de-access the Access to Information system. In one notable instance cabinet staffer Sebastien Togneri ordered officials to unrelease documents that were on their way to the media. Freedom of information specialist Stanley Tromp has catalogued some 46 examples of the government's shielding and stonewalling.
16. Ejecting Citizens from Rallies
Operatives hauled voters out of Harper rallies in last year's campaign for the simple reason that they had marginal ties to other parties. The PM was compelled to apologize.
17. Hit Squad on Journalists
Operating under phony email IDs, Conservative staffers have attacked journalists in thousands of online posts in an attempt to discredit them and their work.
18. Dirty Work on Dion
The Conservatives have set records for the use of personal attack ads. In the 2008 campaign they ran an online ad which depicted a bird defecating on Stephane Dion's head. Protests compelled them to withdraw it.
19. Tory Logos on Taxpayer Cheques
The economic recovery program was paid for by taxpayer dollars but the Tories tried to make political gains by putting their party logo -- until they were called on it -- on billboard-sized cheques. Surveys by journalists showed the money was distributed disproportionately to Conservative ridings and partisans.
20. The Rob Anders Nomination Crackdown
The prime minister has been accused of turning his own party into an echo chamber. When someone tried to exercise her democratic right to challenge Harper loyalist Rob Anders for the nomination in his Calgary riding, Harper's men descended like a black ops commando unit, seized control of the office, seized control of the riding executive and crushed the bid.
21. The Rights and Democracy Takeover
Groups like Rights and Democracy supposedly operate at arm's length from the government. But the Harperites, in what journalists described as boardroom terror, removed or suspended board members and stacked the board with pro-Israeli hardliners. As part of the ethical anarchy, a break-in occurred at headquarters.
22. Vote Suppression Tactics
Along with the accusation of pre-recorded robocalls sending voters astray in last election, reports of several other Tory vote suppression tactics have surfaced. They include a systematic live-caller operation in which Liberal supporters were peppered with bogus information.
The list does not include such controversies as the Cadman affair in which the Conservatives allegedly tried to bribe independent MP Chuck Cadman for his vote; the whitewashing by Integrity Commissioner Christiane Ouimet of 227 whistleblower complaints against the government; the allegation by eyewitness Elizabeth May that Harper cheated in the 2008 election’s televised debates by bringing in notes; and many others.
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Senator to Harper Government: Stop 'Slandering' Charities
Saskatchewan's Sen. Bob Peterson sticks up for advocacy by Suzuki Foundation, and the Fraser Institute, too.
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