Stephen Harper: the Scary Madness and the Dangerous Denial

If there was any shadow of a doubt that Stephen Harper has lost sight of the boundary between reason and delusion, or democracy and dictatorship, there can be none now.

For he has made a mockery of our democracy, he has smeared his opponents, he has muzzled scientists, he has politicized the police and the military. He rules through fear and intimidation.

He is ramming his foul so-called cyber bullying bill through Parliament, so he can better identify his enemies. 

And now he is going for TOTAL CONTROL.

The federal government is expanding its surveillance of public activities to include all known demonstrations across the country, a move that collects information even on the most mundane of protests by Canadians.

The email requesting such information was sent out Tuesday by the Government Operations Centre in Ottawa to all federal departments. “The Government Operations Centre is seeking your assistance in compiling a comprehensive listing of all known demonstrations which will occur either in your geographical area or that may touch on your mandate,” noted the email, leaked to the Citizen.

Turning every government department into a spy agency. Even though the GOC doesn't have a legal mandate to issue an order like that one. It clearly came from the PMO, and it's clearly illegal.



Wesley Wark, an intelligence specialist at the University of Ottawa, said such an order is illegal. “The very nature of the blanket request and its unlimited scope I think puts it way over the line in terms of lawful activity,” said Wark. “I think it’s a clear breach of our Charter rights.”

Wark said the only lawful way a Canadian government agency, with the appropriate mandate, would have to monitor a demonstration would be if that agency could establish that the protest would constitute some kind of threat to civil order. “But it has to be specific and it has to be justifiable in law to mount such surveillance,” he added.

But then we know why Harper is doing it. He's about to approve the Northern Gateway pipeline. He's determined that NOBODY will stop him.

And the question I have is will Canadians finally waken from their Big Sleep and recognize where that maniac would take us?



Will they finally recognize that there is something terribly wrong with Stephen Harper?

That if it walks like a dictator, if it quacks like a dictator, it probably is a dictator.

And that as Dr Dawg writes, we are like frogs in his ghastly pot. 

To move from a liberal democracy to a dictatorship isn’t always a matter of a coup d’état. Sometimes dictators rise to power because of a perceived national emergency; or they are installed by one great power or another to act as satraps and compradors; or they are voted in by a weary populace. In Canada, it appears, an incremental approach is at work. We’re froggies in the proverbial pot, and I, for one, am beginning to find it uncomfortably warm.

The big problem here, even for me, is our collective capacity for denial. We can’t bring ourselves to believe what’s been happening before our eyes.

You know, over the many years of fighting the Con regime, I have frequently compared that collective state of denial to the Hans Christian Andersen story The Emperor's New Clothes...



But at least that story ends with a child telling the truth, and both the emperor and the people realizing that indeed he has no clothes. 

"But he hasn't got anything on!" the whole town cried out at last. The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, "This procession has got to go on." So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all.

And I can only hope that our story ends the same way. 

With Stephen Harper revealed at last as an ugly little man with delusions of grandeur.

And more and more Canadians realizing that their mad emperor is both naked and dangerous...



Because it really is time as Dr Dawg writes, to take the red pill of reality:

With this latest revelation, though, how can any of us maintain our blissful state of denial, lulled by pundits and assured that it can’t happen here? Indeed it can. Indeed it is. Take the red pill, folks. Surely the time has come.

One day, long after we are gone, historians will no doubt struggle to explain why so many were fooled for so long.

But at least we know now what we must do eh?

Unite to defeat that foul Con regime and it's depraved power crazy leader.

And drive him from office as soon as possible.

Before our denial damages us further.

And his madness destroys our country...



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