A tight 2015 Federal Election is developing. The Harper Government is determined to control their message to gain another 38 percent majority.

Controlling the message isn't as simple as cleaning your glasses.

Conservative Party election communications strategy is to limit Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s exposure to the public.

The Conservative gurus who manage Prime Minister’s Stephen Harper’s message want to control all debate leading up to and through the upcoming general election. Their first pass on this strategy is to nix any debates sponsored by a national broadcasters consortium that includes CBC, Radio Canada, CTV, and Global. They have a penchant for control.

Conservative loathing of the CBC is a long standing policy of the Harper Government but extending this now to CTV and Global can only mean that they see traditional election leader’s debates on a national broadcast consortium as a threat of some kind to their federal election communications objectives.

This new policy is managed for the Conservatives by Kory Teneycke, a recent executive of the now defunct Sun News Network. This right wing news organization recently failed due to a lack of interest by viewers. One can only ruminate if Sun News had survived it would have single handedly sponsored a leader’s debate to spur its low ratings.

At any rate Kory Teneycke announced that the Harper Government will not take part in four national broadcast consortium leader’s debates. Instead they will attend smaller events using the excuse that if CBC, CTV and Global can cover these events as they occur. Other debates perhaps sponsored by The Globe and Mail and MacLean’s Magazine are also on the Harper Government agenda as potentially useful to their media management objectives.

The New Democratic Party (NDP) while not rejecting the debates that the Conservatives will attend seem confused about what to do if the CBC, CTV and Global Consortium debates do not have Stephen Harper as a participant. 

This Harper Government decision now places the proposed four Consortium debates on the back burner. The public debate will suffer by a fragmented set of debates not sponsored by the national broadcasters by organizations and without the reach across Canada that the consortium can provide. The Liberal Party’s position on this attempt by Harper to control debate is that the Consortium debates should go forward as usual.

This Harper Government decision is not really a surprise. The are currently using public funds for television commercials and they post flyers weekly into each riding they hold from the 2011 Election. These flyers ask questions that only have one answer that supports the Conservative agenda. These flyers fill the recycling bins at many post offices and blow in the winds surrounding outside Canada Post pick up boxes.

Conservative strategy seems to be why risk uncontrolled national  television debates if you can use public funds to reach constituents with phoney one sided mailouts and videos masquerading as government public information about tax cuts and other services. All sitting governments do this but this government is much more blatant about this practice than we have seen before.

Polls taken last week indicate that the Conservatives and Liberals are running neck in neck with about 32 percent each and the New Democratic Party (NDP) getting a 25 percent share. Undecided is a small number so it looks like a polarized electorate .

This means that all parties will begin the work of turning voters to get the magic numbers which in 2011 was 38 percent to form a majority government. 

Pre Election poll trends show a tight race is building.

As we get closer to the election national polling organizations indicate that the 2015 Federal Election will be a tight race. Take a look below. First  we have May 2015 results and below that the general trends of all polls from 2011 to the present time. 

Bill 51 alienates Canadian Muslims and potentially places all other Canadians on the security watch list.

Canadians... you shall have security where ever you go.

Immigrant and Canadian born Muslims feel the pressures of terrorism every day. Bill 51 will increase those pressures.

by Tom Thorne

The current increase in terrorism activity in North America and Europe is tainting the immigrant and Canadian born Muslims with the misplaced suspicion that they endorse these actions. It isn’t quite so simple. Muslims in the West are shaken by satirical attacks on Islam and simultaneously by the ISIS criminal excesses that it does in the name of Islam. 

It’s a double edged problem. For example, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are scurrilous from a Muslim point of view. They are simply anti religion, anti Islam and mock religion and religious people who use their alleged faith to justify ethnic cleansing, violence and warfare. The editorial stance of Charlie Hebdo is largely atheistic, and it regularly lampoons religion often blaming it for many of the world’s ills. 

They shred Catholics, the Vatican and the Pope with equal zeal.  Although peaceful Muslims agree with stamping out violence and terrorism in the same breath they see the Prophet Muhammed mocked and derided and that hurts deeply. So their response to these contemporary developments is very mixed building up an approach-avoidance conflict of some social consequence.

Besides the terror acts themselves this backlash from Muslims as they witness their religion mocked makes for a dynamic that has a no win aspect for anyone. That aids ISIS and all terrorists. Jihadists see a way to spread unease in the West by their actions. Sadly this jihadist strategy is working well leaving a trail of anti-Islam sentiments in its wake. 

ISIS add to the contemporary tensions by destroying archaeological sites and objects valued by UNESCO as World Heritage. Ancient Nimrod is seen as idolatry and is bulldozed. Museums statues from ancient sites are smashed with sledgehammers. All this is done in the name of Islam and endorsed by Sunni extremists whose views most reasonable muslims would dismiss hard core fundamentalist nonsense.

Security and police services in the West are on high alert. Muslims protesting satirical attacks on their faith are taking to the streets to protest. The hatred, ridicule and contempt has spurred a response that is not only satirical but also political as some politicians see this as a way to restricting Muslims in the West. Anti immigration organizations in the West see this situation as an opportunity.

Anti immigration protests have started in Europe with Muslims as the focus. Demands are made on Muslims to integrate more fully into the Western countries they inhabit. Any thoughts of multiculturalism are now on the political back burner. Prejudice is rising. All of which works well for terrorists and radical jihadists whose bloody excesses are well documented in Iraq, Syria and now with 20 beheadings of Coptic Christians in Libya.

Terror organizations who use Islam as propaganda are not only undermining the Middle East but also the West. They are recruiting young people from Western countries using the argument that the West doesn’t care about or respect Muslims. Every anti-Muslim protest in Europe and North America fuels the work of jihadists. It’s a vicious circle.

The answer is not simple. Muslim youth, often well educated, are turned from a life of reason into radical jihadists. This process is not well understood. How can it happen? There may be socio-economic causes as well as cultural aspects of the Muslim communities in the West, that makes them more prone to being radicalized.

Many Muslim youth slide down the razor blade of tradition versus Western values. At home and at the mosque they may be subject to more traditional Muslim views of life but outside the home they confronted with other values that seem to conflict with that part of their lives. They are stressed perhaps by the contrasts they live with daily.

Each immigrant group tries to preserve their culture and faith practices in a new land. On the hard side of this situation we see parents trying to impose standards from the old country on youth with a wider world experience. Imposing strict moral standards, dress codes and parental controls builds these conflicts.

To lower conflicts the youths either rebel or knuckle under. Some go their own way in the name of modernity and their new country. Others go deeper into their parental cultures and faiths to keep the peace. Few throw off their parental cultures and faith completely.  Whatever the reasons, the conflicts that arise give fuel to making decisions that are radical instead of being reasonable. Life tends to become black or white with little middle ground.

How do young Muslims respond to the Iraq and Syria war and mayhem?  They see that the West has always held some kind of influence in this region. However, most probably have as much knowledge of these conflicts as other Canadians do and go on each day without any change. 

However, young Canadian, US and British Muslims cannot escape that Canada, Britain and the USA have been for over 10 years fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and propping up a corrupt government in the process or ridding the region of dictators that kept a lid on tribal and religious differences between the Sunni and Shia Muslim worlds. 

That story is every where in the media. To be a Muslim youth and hear about Muslims undergoing war are at the hands of Western Armies can be galvanizing to a Muslim psyche living and brought up in the West.

To live in the West and see the US attack Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and then set up an ineffective government to replace that dictatorship and then leave creating a vacuum for ISIS to fill, could be very hard to take and remain neutral or unmoved. To witness Canada committing its air force to bomb ISIS in Iraq could be equally hard to take.especially if you have relatives still surviving in Iraq and Syria or even Libya. 

When moderate Muslims support these Canadian efforts it may in some minds mean that Middle East Muslims have been abandoned. To see the post dictatorship stresses in Iraq, Egypt and Libya may be what sets off radical ideas in the minds of young Western Muslims. 

Canadian government Bill 51 changes to Security of Canada Information Sharing Act, amendments to the Criminal Code, and enhancements the powers of Canadian Service Intelligence Act and The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act do not really provide any help to understand the alienation of Islamic youth we now see at home. The measures of Bill 51 will aggravate the internal Canadian situation rather than solve it. Bill 51 smells mostly of election fever. 

Getting votes with the niqab controversy is a cheap shot by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in a time when he should be working hard with Canada’s Muslims to ensure that they feel included in the Canadian mosaic.

© Copyright 2015, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved.

Stephen Harper's Spring election call is likely given a filled war chest, Liberal readiness and the NDP low in the polls. Let the attack ads roll.

Will we all be counting on the Prime Minister for a Spring election?

The 2015 Canadian Federal General Election. 

Stephen Harper has lots of reasons to call a Spring general election rather than wait until Fall.

by Tom Thorne

I have been ruminating about the upcoming 2015 General Election that according to the legislation passed by the Harper Government must be held this year. The more I think about it, the prospect of the election coming in the Fall is less likely due to circumstances that could hurt Conservatives if they wait too long.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a wily politician. He has experienced more changes than a chameleon during his political career. His party loyalties and affiliations have been varied. In the 1980’s he was a Liberal a fact that he would rather not let people know about after he went hard right on the political spectrum. 

His early conversion to the right was as a member of the Reform Party working first for MP Deborah Grey in the 1980’s. Eventually  after going head to head with Reform’s leader Preston Manning he left politics. That took him out of parliament for a period in the 1990’s when he headed the National Citizen’s Coalition (NCC) as its President. There he found his true right wing home.

Stephen Harper quit the NCC to become the leader of The Canadian Alliance winning a by election in 2002 that made him Leader of the Opposition. By 2004 he had resigned from the Canadian Alliance and ran for the leadership of The Conservative Party of Canada. This act merged the right orientation of the Alliance with the more centre right Conservatives. Effectively the Harper version of the Conservative Party shifted more right with Harper as their choice of leader. 

As Leader of the Conservatives he returned to parliament as the Leader of the Opposition in 2004. The general election of that year returned the first Harper Conservative Government with a minority that required the combined efforts of the Bloc Quebecois (BQ) and the New Democratic Party (NDP) to keep it in power.

In 2008 Harper’s Conservatives were awarded another minority government which lasted until 2011 when another election finally gave the Conservatives a majority with 38 percent of the votes. The Liberal Party faded as a potent force in Canadian political life and the NDP swept Quebec to become the Official Opposition under Thomas Mulcair.

Now the stage is set for the 2015 General Election. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has recently seen prominent conservatives leave his caucus. John Baird, after a credible stint as Foreign Minister is going he says at age 45 into the private sector. My view of this is Baird wants to be out of the fray this time so he can return as a leadership candidate once the Harper era is over.

Then there is Jason Kenny who shares Stephen Harper’s right wing sentiments. Kenny is a rival for Harper’s job and he also is waiting for Stephen Harper to withdraw from politics. Kenny is the most independent of the Harper cabinet bright and tough enough to deflect too much Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) interference in ministries he has headed.  Jason Kenny is the one to watch as the country goes through the next election.

Of course there are other rivals for the Prime Minister’s job but first of all we have to examine reasons why his job will be open. Stephen Harper will remain Prime Minister for at least one more election. How long he stays after that election depends on how well the Conservatives do.  A majority would give him another full term. A minority government ensures that he will leave politics sooner. He will also have had the job for over 10 years by that time.

Other problems are on the horizon for Stephen Harper. First is the upcoming Senator Mike Duffy trial  that is due to start in the Spring. This means that the turgid mess concerning how Duffy received payments of $90,000 from  PMO chief Nigel Wright to repay his mistakes about where his primary residence is actually located. No one has been completely able to nail down what Prime Minister Harper really knew about this payment. That will emerge during the trial under oath. Certainly it was not only Nigel Wright who knew other PMO staffers were clearly in the know. 

If the Prime Minister’s shown that his Question Period answers to Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair’s grillings were misleading or even fibs about the $90,000 payment then he could end up being accused of lying to Parliament. If this happens before a Fall election it could be very damaging and provide a lot of fodder for the Opposition parties to use on the election hustings.

Nigel Wright was not charged by the RCMP concerning his personal $90,000 payment to Mike Duffy. That suggests that Wright may be a key witness for the trial.  It may not be illegal to offer to pay someone’s debt, but when you are also the head of the PMO it smells badly and suggests that the PMO and the Prime Minister just wanted Duffy to go away. The trial should get to the bottom of this embarrassing event. 

Also it is time to examine how well the Prime Minister chooses people. His batting record with appointing senators like Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin and appointing Nigel Wright suggest poor skills at first choosing people but more his subsequent managing of them. His personnel skills are in some doubt.

Another faux pas is the Dimitri Soudas firing. Soudas was at one point head of the Conservative Party apparatus as its director and later a key communications advisor in the PMO. His help to then girl friend Conservative MP Eve Adams to get a nomination caused Prime Minister Harper to fire him. Recently Eve Adams was told by the PM that she could not run again as a Conservative candidate in 2015. The result: she bolted to the Liberal Party where she was welcomed by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. 

No one really knows how Eve Adams, now engaged to Dimitri Soudas, links to the Liberal Party as an intelligence source, as Eve Adams prepares a bid to run against Conservative Finance Minister Joe Oliver in his riding. Of course a wily Justin Trudeau is making Eve contest the riding against other potential Liberal candidates. If she loses the nomination, then his Eve Adams association ends.

My point is there is something lacking in Stephen Harper’s choice of people to work for his government. He always seems to have problems reigning in people he chooses. Loyal first rate Conservative operatives like Nigel Wright , Dimitri Soudas, John Baird seem to self destruct under his micro management. His choice of senate appointees Duffy and Wallin first screw up and then turn against the Prime Minister. And when someone gets in trouble in his government (actually the PM) they become instantly persona non grata.

Lastly there is the balanced books conundrum. Finance Minister Joe Oliver still says it’s possible even with low world oil pricing battering the Canadian economy. Even if it isn’t possible it will be possible for the upcoming election and that election will be sooner than later so that is possible. It is, after all, the Prime Minister’s wish that the budget be balanced.

Yes, the 2015 federal general election will very likely be in the Spring. Strategically that makes sense since the Opposition will be not fully prepared, polls for some life for Conservatives exist in Quebec, and the federal budget now slated for April will come down loaded with goodies and an upbeat message about how Conservatives always steer the ship well through turbulent times. 

© Copyright 2015, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved.

Jihadist thoughts explored: The True Believer.

Suicide bombers believe that Allah rewards them in heaven. 

The thoughts of an ISIS Jihadist.

ISIS: Understanding the new fascist threat to Iraq and Syria and how this plays out in an Information Age.

ISIS: All the marks of a fascist regime are present in this organization.

ISIS and radicalized Canadian youth. North American and European youth succumb to a new fascism.

by Tom Thorne

At the time of writing Canadian youth are in Iraq and Syria fighting for ISIS. Estimates by the Canadian Government say they number about 130, but these are only the people authorities in Ottawa seem to know about. Canada is not alone. Young Americans and Europeans are also in Iraq and Syria fighting for ISIS. 

Canadians fighting abroad for ISIS are often born Muslims, but now we are seeing converts to Islam who are not from a Muslim background joining these jihadist groups. The Canadian Muslim community is on record denying these people. Several radicalized non-Muslim people have been turned away from mosques once their jihadist notions were revealed.

The youth who engage jihadism are in a state of anomie with Canada and also mainstream Muslims who practice the peaceful tenets of Islam. They may say they are now Muslim but they are a far cry away from it really means to be a Muslim and practice peace, stability and a productive life contributing to Canadian society.  

They also reject their own Canadian backgrounds and yearn to become contributors to the defeat of western countries including Canada involved in the middle east conflicts. They see the West as some Great Satan. They claim that the West is corrupt and without a moral compass on the world stage. 

Radicalization for those without a Muslim background is a two step process. First they have to convert. Second you have to reject the real peaceful and respectful tenets of Islam for the perverted notions expressed in Islam’s name by ISIS or the Taliban in Afghanistan. Finally they must ultimately endorse terror as a means to achieve their ends. This decision puts them at odds with Canada and it is especially drastic when they burn their Canadian passports in ISIS propaganda videos on the World Wide Web.

This means that what goes on in their heads is at least a 180 degree turn from what they know. A Canadian radicalized in this way has to surrender any ideas about democracy and replace it with totalitarian doctrines that are fascist in their origins. Fascism is basically a thought system where views are fixed and the response to any other view is a rigid one way response. Other views are infidels and therefore subject to abuse and even death.

If these young people have any religious or social ideas from the West once radicalized they reject all they know, not for Islamic values but for jihadist ideas that use Islam badly to perpetuate their deeds of violence and social mayhem. Real Islamic values have no conflict with Canadian values.

These converts to jihadism decide to fight for a dark side which to them is a justified fight, believing that it is the right and only way to correct the world’s ills. You have become a true believer keyed to violence, war and human dislocation. If you adopt ISIS you are capable of helping to create thousands of refugees in the Middle East and a terror in Iraq, Syria, and also Canada and elsewhere in the West if the opportunity arises.

In order to better understand this phenomenon I reflect back on the Flemish, Dutch and French youth who after 1940 willingly joined the Waffen SS to aid their German conquerors. These units saw service on the Russian Front fighting for a racist regime locked in by Nazi anti Bolshevism propaganda and the destruction of the Communist Soviet State. Nazi distortions enabled them to summarily kill and murder wherever their armies went in Eastern Europe. There is a parallel to ISIS today.

This propaganda was simultaneously bound up with expanding Germany’s influence and frontiers into Eastern Europe for living space with the idea of enslaving a slavic race of humans. If you had a slavic background you had no human rights.  Anyone in areas under ISIS control who cannot prove they are Muslim can summarily end up as a refugee or dead.

Young Europeans from conquered countries were seen by their Nazi masters as racially pure Ayrans who could be committed with Germans to set up a Nordic state with slavs as subjugated inferior peoples. They fought as these young Canadians do for ISIS an enemy of their own people, history and ideals of democracy. They were radically turned.

How does this anomie develop? How do young people make such as decision? In World War 2 none of the Flemings, Dutch or French young men who joined the Waffen SS were drafted or coerced. They all volunteered or fell for the SS and Nazi propaganda that surrounded them. The SS State within a state created glorious Ayran myths to justify the most heinous crimes on the Russian front and a glowing elite system to attract recruits to be their new SS supermen. In many ways ISIS recruitment in the West is the same.

When the propaganda says you are superior or always right it is an attractive lure that contributes to casting off your old values and simultaneously suspending critical thinking. Your own culture becomes unattractive and bankrupt. Recruits see themselves as winners where before they were losers or victims. These young people may be leaving behind student debts, and an economy that tolerates 25 percent youth unemployment or underemployment. Many of them have higher educations and also skills very useful in the Information Age to ISIS.

This World War 2 Waffen SS example sounds all very familiar when young Europeans saw almost 10 years of the Depression before 1939. Their experience was not the same as Canadian youth in that time who could join the Canadian military after war was declared on Germany and contribute to a Nazi defeat. Many of the young men who went to war in Canada had also undergone or were brought up through ten lost years of economic depression.

In Europe the youth could only cooperate with the Nazi conquers if they were to have any kind of life in the Nazi New Order or at least that’s what they thought.  Resistance seemed futile because the Nazis were so confident and strong by 1940.

We see the atrocities and beheadings of ISIS as they try to cut a Calif out of Iraq and Syria. In order to do the wicked things that ISIS does you must always be right and without doubt of any kind. The Nazis had a similar mentality.

You have to be morally numb to kill civilians who cannot prove they are Muslims or create refugees on a huge scale to build your new state on tension and anxiety.  ISIS adherents  must suspend their moral compass to build a state capable of withstanding the influences of the West and its leader, The United States, their Great Satan upon which they can pile all their angst and vitriol.

That is the anomie displayed by North Americans and Europeans who join ISIS. This force can justify any excess as it makes its point. It is kind of logical madness where might is always right and any other view is sufficient reason to kill. Adherents can behead journalists on TV and film their filling of mass graves with victims.

Compassion is suspended and brains are turned off. However when this kind of mentality is disciplined it can be a formidable force to stop. The SS was exactly like this in World War 2 as our troops found out in the 1943 Italian Campaign and after D-Day in Normandy.

The focus is on being superior in all things, being so radical that moral judgement is suspended indefinitely. It is unleashed disciplined terror with no appeal to any reason or justice. It is the new fascism and it requires the same answer we gave to the Nazis 75 years ago.

There is one problem however. The moral compass of the West is not clean or without blemish. This week a report was released that has the potential to fuel ISIS recruitment and can be used to justify the current ISIS activities. In short the propaganda war can now easily turn on the West and particularly the United States. 

It seems that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) clearly used torture of the most heinous kind to extract information from alleged terror suspects after 9/11. The order to do this ultimately came from President George W. Bush and others in his administration. This damning report tells that no really useful information was obtained from these torture sessions and how the information was obtained through torture was sanitized for White House decision making.

Now we face a propaganda war on top of the hot war going on in Iraq and Syria. ISIS is a fascist organization and it feeds off propaganda such as using our turned young people to denounce their own Western values. Now the CIA will be shown as an arm of the Great Satan and ISIS will justify their harsh regime with that as a backdrop.

Bombing ISIS armies is only one step to destroying this force. Fighting them on the ground through second parties will also have no real effect because they are well motivated, ruthless true believers and without any normal standards of restraint. 

© Copyright 2014, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved

Get ready for a Harper Government propaganda binge as we move towards the 2015 General Election.

The road to the 2015 Federal General Election is paved with unanswered political questions for the Harper Government.

by Tom Thorne

These days I keep saying Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s current media and the potential for positive voter responses are pretty good for a PM coming to the end of a mandate. His media relations are quite well managed at least on the international stage.

He’s had good press in China and at the G20 Summit held in Brisbane. He looks like a leader with moxy when he tells Vladimir Putin to get out of the Ukraine. Usually by this time a Prime Minister (PM) has worn out his welcome after almost five years in office. He also he won the by-elections last week in Oshawa and Yellowhead.

Fortunately for Stephen Harper the media and the public appear to have short memories about the PM’s recent experiences. It seems that the scandal pots are currently off boil but some big items now in limbo are coming up to the front of the stove.

The first one is the upcoming Spring 2015 trial of Mike Duffy. You remember him, the Senator who managed to get a $90,000 personal gift from Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright.  Mr. Wright just personally decided to give Mr. Duffy the money he needed to pay back his allegedly improperly booked Senate of Canada expenses. Of course it was 100 percent a Nigel Wright decision as we know.

Whether Nigel Wright resigned or was fired by the PM after this mis-step no one is quite sure. Mr. Wright’s actions seem out of character given his heavy weight credentials in the business world before taking over the PMO. He remains unscathed at this time by charges from the RCMP investigation into this sorry affair. However he will likely be called as a witness for the Mike Duffy trial.

Who knew about all of this in the PMO still remains an open point. The PMO was  porous enough with many staffers knowing about the Mike Duffy deal as they implemented it for Nigel Wright. However, despite a widespread knowledge of the deal, the PM himself managed to stay out of the fray with an almost angelic yet strangely obscure innocence. The Duffy affair orbited the PMO and the PM for several months so was he in the know about the deal’s final cut? He lied to Parliament if the answer is yes.

The PM’s evasive and obscure answers about Duffy and Wright during Question Period still resound as an enigma wrapped inside a conundrum. Mr. Harper was probed whenever he was in the House of Commons with uncommonly hard  precision by New Democratic Leader Tom Mulcair.  He weathered Mr. Mulcair’s inquisition, but not without doubts being raised about his knowledge of the Duffy-Wright events. Those doubts remain although softened by the wiles of time.

Mike Duffy’s trial may very well open up these old questions. Answers under oath could bring the PM’s obscurities into a clearer light. The PM and PMO staffers who know the details could  summoned to appear on Mr. Duffy’s witness lists and perhaps one of them could even be the PM himself. This is one of the reasons why the election will be in the early Spring before the Mike Duffy debacle begins in earnest.

The Americans are still mulling over the Canadian built pipeline that will bring Alberta crude to refineries on the US Gulf Coast. The Republican House of Representatives and the outgoing Senate voted for the pipeline and lost by one vote for the necessary 60 percent to carry it several days ago.  

President Barack Obama may have exercised his veto had their legislation passed.  It is not over. The new Republican held Congress will likely go at it again. This situation still contains a lot of concern in Ottawa and Alberta until those elected in the US midterm elections take their seats and they try the pipeline vote again. Of course the decision about what President Barack Obama will finally do is up in the air.

Alberta can only see more difficulties to ship their crude oil in the medium term. It will mean, of course, that more crude will be shipped by railway tanker across Canada through to Eastern Canada.  The idea of a pipeline to the Pacific coast can only resurface during the  2015 election with a lot of opposition from British Columbia, native bands and communities where the pipeline runs.

A US presidential veto on this file or any procedural Congressional hold up is a lose for the Harper Government here in Canada. Also the price of crude oil is low at the moment and so Alberta and Ottawa revenues are down with a need to show a surplus for the 2015 federal general election this adds stress.  And so it is with resource-based economies.

The Conservative strength in Alberta is losing opportunity if their oil cannot get to market. On the other side until other Canadian pipelines are constructed or upgraded moving Alberta crude will remain the task of using more risky railway cars. It will be hard to defend this situation with memories of  the Lac Mégantic fire and 47 dead in the election equation.

Handing out election year goodies like the recent income tax sharing scheme will be harder to fund unless other departments are cut back.  This is not a good situation during an election year when the Harper Government is determined to hand out goodies and balance the annual federal government budget while doing so. 

The late Jim Flaherty, Mr. Harper’s former finance minister before he died recently, opposed this income tax sharing plan. Obviously Mr. Harper thinks its a good idea. Cutting or lowering taxes always makes a right wing government look as if it hasn’t strayed too far off the less government in your life path.

The Harper Government has also been waffling on green house gases and climate change since 2008 and again in 2011. With the US and China recently signing an  agreement on this file it means that Canada now must to get into step. 

The Harper Government’s lack of action on this file has been linked to the argument that while the US does little or nothing to stem green house gases there is no way Canadians can make a difference. That is about to change and it is a vulnerable spot on the 2015 campaign trail for the Conservatives. 

Generally this government is the most secretive in recent memory. Ministers of the Crown are sparingly available to the media or the public to explain themselves because the PMO sees the media as an enemy to be diligently managed like bad children. 

The PMO considers it can only master political events by issuing as little information as possible and controlling the Conservative caucus and what they say and do. There is really only one voice for this government and that voice emanates from the Prime Minister and his office.

They usually use Friday afternoons to launch policies and then take no questions after the announcement so the whole idea can lull through a weekend. They continually deal with unpleasantries that could embarrass the government without any clarity or shame. They answer questions in the House of Commons with contempt for the institution. 

Earlier this year Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s parliamentary secretary Paul Calandra went too far by answering a question from Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair with an response that had nothing to do with the original question. 

After an irritated exchange through the Speaker from Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair, Mr. Calandra apologized the following week in tears to the House of Commons for his behaviour after thinking it all through during the weekend. It was one of the only acts of contrition by this government influenced Mr Calandra said by his father’s standards which he had forgot in the rough and tumble of adversarial Ottawa politics.

Paul Calandra is a master of obscurity and when he often represented the government and the PM on CBC’s Power and Politics program he would shamelessly skate around issues and obscure them continually. The Harper Government has not learned that by trying to control their message to the extent they do, it is ultimately counter-productive to their credibility. It is hard to think of this government as being forthright, open and candid. And  please notice they are never, ever wrong.

The Government’s Economic Action Plan media advertising keeps reminding us that the Harper Government is a great fiscal manager of public funds spending wisely to create jobs yet youth unemployment remains stubbornly high despite their promotions. 

The truth the Harper Government has been running a deficit and spending since their re-election in 2011. To balance the books and have a $1.5 billion surplus for the election means that funds are being reallocated or cutbacks made through the ministries to make the Harper Government appear to be great fiscal managers for the 2015 general election.

Watch now for an intense media advertising barrage by the Harper Government, all done at public expense rather than Conservative Party expense as we go into 2015. This government will use every means to get its propaganda out masquerading their political message as federal government services advertising. That is one of the prerogatives of the party in power but remember who pays for it all.  

Finally the record of this government with our veterans is appalling. Services and help are withheld in many cases or veterans are put through insensitive rounds of bureaucracy when they apply for benefits, or fight funding cuts and the lack of help. Veteran’s service offices are cut back and yet the stops are pulled out for Remembrance Day. There is a distaff between the reality and the action on this file that resonates very loud.

© 2014, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved  

© 2014, Tom Thorne, Harper Cartoon, All Rights Reserved