Stephen Harper Archives - Page 3 of 3

Well, it’s that magical time of year again, when we all hunker down in our homes in the face of yet another December COVID onslaught.

True this is somewhat depressing, but on the plus side the isolation gives us an opportunity to ponder things.

For example, right now, in the wake of Erin O’Toole’s disappointing showing, I’m pondering what it would take to create the perfect Conservative leader.

Yes, I know, this is a total waste of time, but hey, it’s a fun holiday exercise.

And right now, with everything that’s going on in the world, we need all the fun we can get, right?

So, let’s begin the frivolity.

First off, I’d argue the perfect Conservative leader would need a strong dose of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s sense of gravitas.

I say that because Harper’s strength as a politician was that he exuded seriousness; he actually had deep intellectual thoughts and was therefore able to offer leadership that went beyond vapid superficial glitz.

I mean, admit it, wouldn’t it be nice to have a political leader again who actually came across as an adult?

Of course, to complement his (or her) seriousness a perfect Conservative leader would also need to manifest former US President Ronald Reagan’s geniality.

Indeed, one chief reason for Reagan’s political success was that people tended to like him and people who liked him also tended to vote for him.

In short, likeability works.

Hence, the perfect Conservative leader would be somber, yet likeable.

Plus, in order to ensure he (or she) got a good hearing in Quebec, the perfect Conservative leader would also have to possess former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s fluency in French.

As a native Quebecor, Mulroney could speak the lingo with more authenticity than any leader who learned the language in French immersion classes.

Besides, as someone whose name escapes me once put it, “immersing yourself in the French language for more than five minutes can be fatal.”

At any rate, another quality a perfect Conservative leader would need in my opinion is the ability to brawl.

After all, politics is a blood sport and if you can’t duke it out in the political arena, odds are good, you’re going to lose.

Just ask Andrew Scheer or Erin O’Toole.

That’s why my perfect Conservative leader would also be imbued with former US President Donald Trump’s willingness to give as good as he got.

As a matter of fact, Trump is a master at concocting what American cartoonist Scott Adams called “linguistic kill shots.”

For example, in 2016 Trump brilliantly dubbed his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton as “Crooked Hillary”.

Sure, it’s not exactly Disraelian-style rhetoric, but it’s effective.

And finally, my perfect Conservative leader would also have a strong commitment to a true conservative ideology, that’s to say a doctrine that stood for “more freedom”, “less government” and “free market” economics.

For this, he (or she) would have to be blessed with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s personal courage and steely determination.

Recall, for example, how in 1980, when she was being urged by powerful voices to abandon her pro-free market agenda, Thatcher famously declared, “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the ‘U-turn’, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning!”

In other words, just like the “Iron lady”, a perfect Conservative leader would bravely stick by his (or her) principles even if the political situation got rough.

So, there it is, that’s my recipe for a perfect Conservative leader.

Mind you, I’m under no illusions that the media would share my view.

In fact, if my perfect Conservative leader actually existed in reality, I’m certain the Canadian media would hate him (or her) with a red-hot intensity.

But then again, unlike the people who currently run the Conservative Party, pandering to the media’s prejudices is not my top priority.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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Saudi Arabia has North America’s political establishment wrapped around its finger.

Along with Israel, it is one of the few states that can commit almost any offence, and still guarantee the complete, unfettered support from almost any administration, liberal or conservative.

In Canada, for instance, Saudi Arabia reached its zenith of influence during the tenure of former Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.

While in office (2006-2015), Harper made the expansion of commercial relations with Saudi Arabia one of his government’s top priorities. That prioritization later bore (poisoned) fruit, when Harper and the Saudis brokered the largest arms deal in Canadian history. It’s a deal Harper still expresses pride in, despite the fact that military arms he sold enabled the Saudis to commit countless atrocities against civilians in neighbouring Yemen.

Nothing can quench Harper’s love affair for the Saudis though. It persists to this day, even in political retirement.

Just this fall, he traveled to Riyadh for a business trip and gushed about the “profound transformation” the Kingdom was experiencing. Most telling, he expressed not one single concern about its mass executions, its crackdown on human rights defenders or its subjugation of women and girls. It was all just fawning praise from the former PM.

Of course, Harper is not the only member of the Conservative Party to cozy up to the Saudis.

Prior to becoming Conservative Party leader, one of Harper’s political lieutenants, Erin O’Toole, pledged in the 2019 election to “win some trust” and increase commercial links with Saudi Arabia. A year before that, another dutiful neophyte, the former Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, appeared on a Saudi-owned television station to chastise Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, after his then Global Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, for tweeting out support for the imprisoned Saudi activist and blogger, Raif Badawi.

It was a disgraceful and dishonourable move on Baird’s part; one that only served to humiliate him and severely damage his integrity, all while highlighting the Liberal’s more principled approach to taking on the Saudis. At that point, the Liberals had shown commendable nerve by suspending the arms deal that they had inherited from the Conservatives, after news broke that the Saudi Crown Prince had arranged for the brutal murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Unfortunately, the Liberal’s grit did not last long. In the face of Saudi pushback, the Liberals quickly abandoned their previous principle and became just as complicit as their Conservative predecessors. In no time at all, they reinstated the permits they had previously suspended and continued the exportation of light armored vehicles, along with sniper rifles, explosives, and other military equipment.

The political situation is much the same south of the border.

Soon after taking office in 2017, former Republican President Donald Trump snubbed traditional allies in Canada and Mexico by selecting Saudi Arabia as the destination for his first foreign trip. His government’s subsequent exportation of more than $8 billion worth of arms to the Saudis, with seemingly no regard for the immense misery and suffering experienced by Yemeni civilians – the disproportionate victims of Riyadh’s unlawful and indiscriminate airstrikes – was further proof of he (and his party’s) unbecoming allyship with the Gulf Kingdom.

For a time, the election victory of Joe Biden offered a brief moment of hope (just as it did in Canada with Trudeau’s 2015 electoral triumph) that the U.S. might pursue a more just and even-handed approach when dealing with the Saudis. In his first foreign policy speech as President, Biden declared that that the war in Yemen had to end and that his administration would be eliminating “all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arm sales.”

As you might have guessed, the public’s optimism didn’t last long.

Within a matter of months of delivering those lofty remarks, Biden had authorized the sale of $650 million of missiles to the Saudi Kingdom, along with hundreds of millions more in U.S. military maintenance for Saudi aircraft.

It was a move entirely out of the Trudeau Liberals’ playbook: promise a more humanitarian foreign policy when it is easy to do so (i.e., before an election) and then renege on your word once in office. Or in Trudeau’s case, after the first threats of financial retribution are made.

As recent history has shown, neither the centrist Liberals and the Democrats, nor the right-wing Conservatives and the Republicans, are capable of pursuing a foreign policy that is complicit-free from the war crimes and human rights abuses committed by the Saudi regime.

With the political establishment in both Canada and U.S. unwilling to stand up against the Saudi regime, it has once again fallen to the members of the public and their political champions on the social democratic left, to stand up against such immorality and demand real policy change from the status quo.

In the U.S., progressive standard-bearers like Democratic Rep. and Squad member Ilhan Omar and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders deserve credit for their legislative attempts to block Biden’s newest arms deal (together with strange political bedfellows, Republican Senators Rand Paul, and Mike Lee).

In Canada, Jagmeet Singh and his left-leaning team of third-party New Democrats deserve equal praise for their steadfast opposition of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, and for their electoral promise in general to ensure that “Canadian-made weapons are not fueling conflict and human rights abuses abroad.”

Whatever their faults, Omar, Sanders, Singh, and their fellow social democrats are at least showing some bravery and morality by speaking out against both the Saudis and their own respective governments for facilitating violence and bloodshed. That in itself is whole lot more honourable than anything on display from the political establishment these days.

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If there existed a political “Ten Commandments” carved in stone tablets, the very first one on the list would likely be “Thou Shalt Not Alienate Thy Base.”

After all, it’s hard to win an election when even your own side doesn’t like you.

Sounds pretty basic, right? Sounds like a concept any leader worth his or her salt would understand.

So why is it then Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole seems intent on making himself as unpopular as possible with his grassroots base?

I mean, just think about what he’s done since taking over the leadership.

For one thing, on a whole range of issues from carbon taxes to gun rights to deficits, O’Toole has blatantly abandoned conservative principles and values to take on policy stances that are essentially indistinguishable from what the Liberals offer.

How could his conservative base, which tends be ideologically-oriented, not feel snubbed by this? The sense of their betrayal is likely even more acute, since during the Conservative Party leadership race, O’Toole had branded himself as a principled conservative and as a champion of the party’s grassroots.

Talk about false advertising!

At any rate, I guess if O’Toole had won the last election, all would have been forgiven.

But, of course, he didn’t win and now discontent with his leadership is simmering within the Conservative Party’s ranks.

In response to this growing anger the wise move for O’Toole, it seems to me, should be for him to offer some sort of olive branch to the base, just to reassure grassroots party members that he’s willing to win back their support.

Instead, however, for some inexplicable reason, he has decided to try and bully his base into submission.

Just recently, for instance, O’Toole, pour encourager les autres, booted Senator Denise Batters from the Conservative caucus after she had the audacity to launch a petition calling for an earlier than scheduled leadership review.

In announcing her expulsion, O’Toole sounded a tough note saying anyone “who’s not putting the team and the country first will not be part of this team.”

Basically, his message seems to this: “It’s my way or the highway and if you don’t like it, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Yet, if he thinks such heavy-handed action will stifle dissent, he’s likely in for a rude awakening.

In fact, it could make his situation even worse, since he’s turned Batters into a martyr, someone who disaffected Tories can now rally around.

On top of that, keep in mind, angry party members have effective ways of protesting against an unpopular leader.

For example, they might start redirecting their party donations to right-wing advocacy groups, or they might stop volunteering for the party or they might stay home on election day or they might end up voting for the People’s Party.

So, in a way, O’Toole’s decision to openly antagonize his base is like a military commander ordering his artillery to bombard his own supply lines.

It just doesn’t make strategic sense.

Mind you, some might say, O’Toole’s acting no differently than former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who also jettisoned certain conservative principles and who also ruled the party with savage discipline.

Yet, O’Toole is no Harper.

True, Harper didn’t always give the party’s ideologues everything they wanted, but he always treated his base with respect.

And for that, he won the loyalty of the rank and file.

That’s a lesson O’Toole should heed.

At any rate, the one possible explanation for O’Toole’s behaviour is that there’s actually a method to his madness, that he actually wants to dig out the party’s ideological roots, that’s he hoping hard-core conservatives will abandon his party.

Indeed, it has been suggested to me that O’Toole’s overall game plan is basically to water down the party’s ideology until it’s nothing but an idealess, wishy-washy, non-confrontational, conservative-in-name-only political entity; a Conservative party, in short, that lacks conservatives.

This he hopes will make his party more appealing to the media and more attractive to Liberal voters.

If that indeed is O’Toole’s plan, then he is taking a mighty big gamble.

As American conservative activist Morton Blackwell once noted “you cannot make friends of your enemies by making enemies of your friends.”

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There are many words to describe Canada’s $15 billion arms deal with the human-rights abusing, war crimes committing regime of Saudi Arabia.

‘Disgraceful’ is one. ‘Reprehensible’ would be another. ‘Immoral’ and ‘inexcusable’ also come to mind. So too does ‘shameful’ and ‘sordid’.

As for how everyday Canadians feel about said deal, I’m sure the words ‘appalled’ and ‘mortified’ would not be far from their lips, especially after learning that Riyadh is using Canadian-made arms to perpetuate its war in Yemen; a war, which let us not forget, has resulted in the death of a quarter of a million people – ten thousand of whom have been children. With millions more displaced and on the brink of starvation, the battleground in Yemen has long been referred to as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”

In the face of such calamity (and with the knowledge of our governments culpability for that calamity), most Canadians probably aren’t feeling too proud of their country’s arms sales.

Well, most Canadians outside Stephen Harper that is.

In a recent post on twitter, Harper announced his plans to tour the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, all to promote “Israeli-based surveillance systems.” After heaping praise upon the three Gulf countries, Harper egregiously wrote of the pride he has for the military contract he brokered with the Saudis.

In typical fashion, Harper omitted the fact that the contract in question, the one that he is so “proud” of, enabled the Saudis to obtain hundreds of Canadian-made, light-armoured vehicles (LAVs), which they subsequently used to lay-waste upon Yemen.

Instead, Harper had the nerve to describe the deal as nothing other than a “manufacturing contract” though he still lauded it as the most lucrative of its kind in Canadian history.

The $15 billion LAV sale may indeed be Canada’s largest export manufacturing contract, as Harper says it is. But that does not make the deal any less odious, as no amount of financial profit or number of jobs secured can ever justify the facilitation of violence and war.

Granted, that has not stopped Harper from defending the deal, both in and out of office.

During his final years as Prime Minister, when Canada’s military agreement with the Saudis was first being brokered, Harper tried his best to justify the deal, including by citing the Gulf Kingdom’s opposition to the Islamic state as cause for selling them arms. He continued to do so even as reports were coming in saying that “the LAVs that Canada had already sold to Saudi Arabia had been used in Bahrain when Saudi Arabia went in there to suppress a peaceful demonstration.”

Six years later, and Harper is still making the same weak justifications for the deal. In his twitter communique, Harper claimed that Canada’s relationship with Saudi Arabia is “grounded in shared opposition to the threat posed to the region and wider world by the regime in Iran.”

Do you see the pattern here? Harper can absolve himself of all blame for the ruination of Yemen and the subjugation of the Saudi people, so long as he can point the finger at the Islamic State, Iran, or any other regime that he can use to justify his selling of arms to Riyadh. He picks and chooses the countries whose human rights records concern him, as defined by his own narrow worldview.

So unflinching is he in his beliefs, that even if Iran didn’t exist, the former Prime Minister would just fabricate a new enemy in its place to explain and excuse his unbending support for the Crown Prince. He’d find any way he could to not see the flaws in his own thinking, or the culpability he has for the devastation of Yemen.

No matter the human rights abuses and war crimes that pile up, Harper will only continue his defence of Saudi Arabia and the noxious arms deal he brokered.