Class Warfare in Canada Orchestrated By Right-Wing Prime Minister Harper
by Bill Berkowitz | December 6, 2011 - 9:12am
In 1960, the Master Plan for Higher Education in California, affirmed a nearly half-century-old policy that tuition-free higher education was in the best interests of the state of California. After a recent demonstration at the University of California, Berkeley, in which one of the grievances raised by students was the rapidly rising costs of a university education, a UC spokesperson suggested that members of the Board of Regents who are well-connected and have the ability to raise large sums of money from well-heeled donors, could raise donations to benefit low-income students.
Charity, the UC spokesperson seemed to suggest, was the way to help low-income students.
What has any of this to do with developments in Canada?
A series of moves being advocated by Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper could spell the beginning of the end for Canada's much-vaunted social safety net. "The Conservative government, libertarian to its core, intends to create the appearance of an increasingly volunteer society as it systematically guts the social and cultural role of government," The Tyee's Murray Dobbin recently reported. "Harper hopes to justify massive cuts to programs (and in general the role of the federal government period) by shifting responsibility to charities and foundations."
According to Dobbin, "This is the Americanization of Canada -- remaking the country in the image of the minimalist government that the U.S. has experienced for decades. The problem is that there is very weak tradition of foundations and corporate giving in this country, so it has to be engineered, too."
Dobbin calls Harper's plan "right-wing social engineering." While Harper has taken on "the status of junior partner in an increasingly aggressive and desperate American empire," he is also launching an "assault on the political culture." In an effort to re-make the country, Dobbin pointed out, there have been "concerted attacks on science, cultural organizations, human rights and women's groups and now the collective bargaining rights for public service workers."
Now, with little apparent support from the people of Canada (a la Ohio Governor John Kasich's attempt - rebuffed on Election Day -- to destroy public unions' collective bargaining rights), Harper seems bound and determined to destroy, or rejigger, many social programs including unemployment insurance, Medicare, subsidized university education, Family Allowance, public pensions, old age security as he can.
According to Dobbin, "All of these elements of Canadian political culture were the result of a democratic imperative. All the polling on these government programs and the social equality they promote suggests at least three quarters of Canadians still support an activist role for government in the interests of community, not to mention the viability of families."
Just as the Bush tax cuts and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan led to massive deficits in the U.S. and cuts in an already tattered social safety net, it appears that the first stage in dismantling Canada's social programs was to reduce the amount of money available to the federal government.
"[T]hat stage," Dobbin noted, "was implemented early on with the huge, five-year, $60 billion tax cut plan implemented by Jim Flaherty in 2007, the year following Harper's first election victory." By creating the deficit, Harper has created the crisis, and as Naomi Klein has pointed out in her book The Shock Doctrine, it is in those times of "crisis" that political leaders are able to accomplish what has been previously thought of as unthinkable. In this case, the shattering of Canada's social contract.
The Frank Luntz Factor
For Harper, the politics of all this has to be a major consideration. It is unclear how many times Harper and his acolytes have met with Frank Luntz, the vaunted Republican Party pollster, political consultant and message manipulator, but there have been meetings.
In 2006, Julie Mason, a longtime political consultant, reported that Luntz, "A long-time adviser to Preston Manning, ... is no stranger to politics in Canada. Recently he dropped by Ottawa for a quick chat with Stephen Harper, and a speaking engagement on 'Massaging the Conservative Message for Voters' for Civitas, a group of Canadian conservatives that includes Harper's Chief of Staff Ian Brodie, Campaign Manager Tom Flanagan, and National Citizens Coalition Vice-President Gerry Nicholls.
"In his speech," Mason wrote, "Luntz advised Conservatives to look for embarrassing details on Liberals that would 'discredit the Liberals so thoroughly that it will be years before they make it back into power,' ..."
In a long article, the blog "Pushed to the Left and Loving It" pointed out that "According to Lloyd Mackey, in The Pilgrimage of Stephen Harper, our PM was 'saved' after being introduced to the writings of C.S. Lewis. This claim is made by many in the New Right movement."
And it is that claim that often leads to monumental excesses.
"Pushed to the Left..." cited a passage from David Kuo, the disillusioned former George W. Bush faith-based initiative staffer, who wrote in his book Tempting Faith: An inside Story of Political Seduction of a passage from Lewis' the Screwtape Letters, that frightened him:
"Let him begin by treating patriotism ... as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the "cause," in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce ... Once he's made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."
Herbert Pimlott, who teaches and researches communication, media and culture at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, recently wrote that Harper intends (much like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker) "to use 'wedge' issues to drive clear and potentially volatile divisions between Canadians, but not necessarily overtly socio-economic (i.e. class) divisions (since it is likely that many millions more Canadians would end up on the opposing side, although he does have the advantage of corporate media chains!). He is attempting to repeat Republican success in the USA by adopting their tactics for his 'war' on Canadian traditions, values, beliefs and attitudes: to push Canada - or to remake it - in Conservative ideology.
