I am so disappointed in my country right now.
We have given a majority government to the one party leader in Canada who I absolutely think is the last person who should ever have had it—and the worst possible person for the Prime Minister's office. We've just validated all his lies, all his hostility towards democracy and the common person, all his secrecy, all his refusals to do anything constructive about poverty, all the credit he took for an economic survival that was really none of his doing. We've just said that it's OK to prorogue Parliament whenever things aren't going well for you; we've just told him that his hostility towards health care, education and the environment is perfectly fine. We've affirmed that women don't need equal pay for equal work and that it's OK that a pregnant person's right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy can, and probably will, be "up for debate" (read: rescinded) at some time in the next four years.
We've asserted that science is irrelevant and that it's fine to consider the purchase of jet fighters that cost more than Ontario's entire education system (and then lie to Canadians about the price) while claiming that universal health care is just too damn expensive. We've affirmed his position that water that's clean and safe to drink isn't a basic human right. We've OK'd his absolute and utter disdain for the descendents of the first peoples of this continent. We've approved corporate tax cuts in a country which already had one of the world's lowest corporate tax rates—and we've therefore also approved the ensuing necessity for the increasingly-impoverished middle class to pick up the slack. (In Canada, even the poorest people who pay taxes pay a higher tax rate than the richest 1% of the population.) We've given our official seal of approval to a Prime Minister who has several times tried to pass legislation that would make it legal for law enforcement to read Canadians' e-mail and see detailed internet usage data without a court order; after all, who needs privacy?
We've done nothing less than fling open the hen-house door and invite the hungry fox in. We should have tossed him out on his ass. Instead, we gave him an open invitation to do things to Canada that George W. Bush could only have dreamed of doing to the USA. And you know, he once said, "You won't recognize Canada when I get through with it." Given everything that he was able to get away with when his hands were relatively tied on account of having only a minority government, I shudder to think what he'll be doing to us now that he's got that majority that he's been salivating after since 2006.
I hope I'm wrong. I really do. But Harper's track record so far isn't encouraging, and I suspect that things are going to get a hell of a lot worse for us before they even start to get better.
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