With the new year comes resolutions. Along with the usual - exercise - I would like to blog more regularly. I am happy to say that I have just attended my first exercise class in a very long time and here I am, with my trusty laptop.
Since this is an election year, my humble Harperland spot should be a more regular feature. I have no excuse for letting this lapse. It is certainly not for a lack of material. Almost every day I read or hear something about Harper that drives me crazy. The most distressing thing of all is that the race for PM is so close. There is indeed a strong possibility that the reign of this man might continue.
When someone is Prime Minister for a short term there may not be long-lasting effects. Years later you might be hard pressed to remember any major changes that happened while they were in power. This is not the case with Harper. He has been in power for so long and has reached into so many facets of goverment. It will take years before our country will be able to recover from the drastic changes he has imposed on us all. Many of those changes may not be reversed … like mail delivery. For now, our neighbourhood still receives door to door service. If that changes before the election, would door to door service be revived?
However, there are many more important issues. Yesterday on The Current, CBC's Anna Maria Tremonti interviewed Mark Bourrie. "The journalist and historian takes on the Prime Minister and the Ottawa media in his new book, "Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper's Assault on Your Right to Know." Bourrie lambastes Harper for his systematic shutdown of information and access to the government. Throughout Harper's reign, access to ministers and bureaucrats has steadily decreased to a point where it is almost impossible for journalists to gather basic information. Access that was the norm before Harper, has now vanished.
“Harper is intent on changing the way Canadians see their own country,” Bourrie writes. “He once said Canadians would not recognize the country after he was finished with it, and he’s done a lot to make sure that they do see it in a different light: as an energy and resource superpower instead of a country of factories and businesses, as a ‘warrior nation’ instead of a peacekeeper, as an Arctic nation instead of clusters of cities along the America border, as a country of self-reliant entrepreneurs instead of a nation that shares among its people and its regions.”
Have a listen to the show. Perhaps this is one of the main problems with this government: the secrecy, and the withholding of information. Like the new fencing all around Paliament Hill, this government is very much shut off from the people it is intended to serve. We and our press corps are treated like the enemy, if we dare to ask questions.
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