Supporters of the Harper Government's campaign to use tax laws to de-fund its opponents need to be careful what they wish for. They might just get it!

Consider Prime Minister Stephen Harper's recent reflexive attacks on the environmental charities that dared to oppose the petrochemical pipeline projects desired by the Conservative Party's energy industry financiers.

Harper spotted a momentary advantage in squawking about the fact some of these charities had received donations from abroad -- never mind that this activity is both perfectly legal and quite common -- but forgot in his enthusiasm for the first available cheap shot where a lot of his own favourite political charities' money comes from.

The leaders of all Alberta parties but one seem committed to ending smoking by young Albertans. The sole holdout? It's the Wildrose Party, led by former Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith, of course.

This much was reported by the Calgary Herald last Tuesday, although readers are forgiven if they missed it since the story ended up on page 18.

Other than Canadian political parties themselves, the Fraser Institute must be Canada's most intensely political organization.

Notwithstanding its pious mission statement -- "to measure, study, and communicate the impact of competitive markets and government interventions on the welfare of individuals" -- essentially 100 per cent of the Fraser Institute's activities are 100-per-cent political.

Once upon a time, "in the last decade of the 20th century, Alberta became a paragon of fiscal virtue."

So begins a fairy tale spun by Ken Boessenkool and Ben Eisen, Alberta's equivalents of the Brothers Grimm.

Their fantasy story was treated by journalists with respectful kid gloves and a deceptive lack of background when it was released to the mainstream media last week by the so-called "School of Public Policy" at the University of Calgary.

Is Stephen Harper's goal for Canada the United States of today?

That would mean a nation in which somewhere between a half and a third of its citizens have fallen into poverty or are hovering just above, in low income. This according to latest data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, 400 Americans are worth more than $1 billion.

And the divide will likely worsen, as Congress and Republican-controlled state legislatures continue slashing programs and benefits, firing workers, and further weakening health, safety and environmental protections to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, if that is even possible.

In the opening weeks of World War II the French and Germans spent a good deal of time shouting at each other.

There wasn't much else to do. France had built up nearly impregnable defences along the Rhine -- the Maginot Line -- and was confident that neutral Belgium and the Netherlands, to the north, provided a buffer of safety.

But France was wrong.

To the Germans this initial period of shouting was merely what historians call the "phony war."

The German plan all along was to slice through that neutral buffer zone and into the heart of France before the French could redeploy their defences; and they did just that. By 1940, Hitler would make his first ever visit to Paris, as conqueror.