Stephen Harper - Control Freak

Prime Minister Harper is beginning to make Brian Mulroney's government look positively transparent.

Remember, this is the man who for the last several years has whined incessantly about how much political power has been concentrated in the PMO under former Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin.

Here we are less than two months into Stephen Harper's tenure in that office, and he's clamped things down even tighter than has ever been seen before.

Here, the CBC points out "Cabinet meetings are private," Harper said, but "I'm available on a regular basis to answer questions.".

Bullsh!t, Stephen. From day one, you've demonstrated that you are no different than any of your predecessors, and possibly more like Hypocrite-in-Chief Bush Jr.

Harper's little photo-op jaunt to Afghanistan was carefully orchestrated to minimize the flexibility of the media to report on the overall picture. Then, he returns to Canada and muzzles his cabinet ministers. Do the math, people. Harper is busy setting up the walls around his government so that he doesn't have to be accountable to the public. More cautiously, he's positioning himself to be the only mouthpiece for the government's actions.

Why? Because he knows damn good and well that what he wants to do will piss off a maximum number of Canadians if they find out about it before the fact, and he's got enough loose-lipped, narrow-minded dimwits in both cabinet and caucus that he can't afford the political cost of having any one of them open their flaps without it being vetted first. (Can one imagine Minister Day going off about young earth creationism again?)

Far too much of Harper's rhetoric sounds like it has been spun out of the White House by the likes of Karl "Turdblossom" Rove for me to believe that Harper wants to do anything more than cuddle up with the Bush administration in its apparently dying days.

Harper has claimed he was going to deliver "more transparent, accountable government", and not one of his actions to date speaks to that. Every action he has taken speaks to control, cutting off debate and generally doing everything he can to subvert legitimate democratic debate. (Remember, he's already said that debating our involvement in Afghanistan is "unpatriotic" and "demoralizing to the troops" - as if that makes the discussion irrelevant)

Mr. Harper is making himself out to be the sole public face of the Conservative Party in a desperate effort to hang onto power as long as possible. It's already well known that like Ralph Klein, Harper doesn't like to be challenged. I can only imagine that he will get more and more objectionable once the Parliament is actually in session.

I might not have especially liked Paul Martin, but more and more is coming out of Harper that makes me even less happy with him. Perhaps its time to vote Green Party en masse in this country. Tory blue just doesn't cut it.