Stephen Harper reminds me of a panicked child, surrounded and overwhelmed in the schoolyard, red-faced and flailing at every perceived enemy and striking not a one.
It would be nice if our issues could be solved with quick fixes, but they can’t. For instance, more people in jail does not reduce crime — just glance south for proof of that. And lowering taxes does squat for an economy that nobody trusts. Lowering taxes might stimulate the economy we had a few decades ago but it won’t impact the complex, globalized system that we’ve got now. This is a simplistic, infantile strategy.
Canadians need a government that they can trust to rely on the processes and institutions that have stayed strong and effective through the test of hundreds of years of democracy.
One of these institutions is the Supreme Court. Stephen Harper defies the Supreme Court: Despite a ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada and the Supreme Court of the United States, Stephen Harper refuses to request that a Canadian who was captured by US forces as a severely wounded child soldier be returned from imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay, where he continues to be routinely tortured. The evidence against this young man is circumstantial at best.
Think that such things could never happen to your kid? Check out Harper’s proposed toughening of laws related to young offenders . Think your kid can’t be so stupid as to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Remember David Milgaard.
Listen, Stephen Harper and his fellow Conservatives are crude thinkers, culturally backward, and racist. The evidence of this is everywhere. Moreover, they are arrogant: they don’t feel that they need to answer to you. So far, Harper refuses to take part in a CBC program called Your Turn, a forum that allows viewers to seek direct answers from party leaders.
Need to know any more? I don’t.
– Eleanor Claire
