Sharon portrait from rabble_1

This morning, my 16-year-old son, understanding the depths of my devastation, asked me, “What will he do?”  Though it wasn’t his intent, it reminded me that so many people scoff at the idea of politics, even of voting, by saying, “What’s the point of voting? They’re all the same.”

No. They’re not all the same.

I told my son that Stephen Harper’s minority government has already done terrible damage to our country while laying the groundwork for the days and years to come. I said there would be some things he would chip away at, quietly, and other things he would attack openly and arrogantly.

Harper is an ideologue who believes that the private sector should handle all the country’s affairs except defence, foreign affairs and criminal justice. He will increase spending and support for the military and will, as promised, build mega-prisons and increase criminal penalties to keep them filled. He will, without a doubt, then sell them off to some penitentiary company which will run them — cruelly — for profit.

He will undermine health care and the Canada Health Act by stealth but he will gleefully and blatantly pull the funding rug out from under the arts and cultural sector — including, I regret to say, our public broadcaster which has been under siege for years now from both Liberal and Conservative governments. I foresee the day, and I hate it, when Canada joins the U.S. as one of the few democratic countries with no public broadcaster after Harper sees fit to sell the CBC off to the highest bidder.

And speaking of “joining the U.S.,” Harper will work toward deep integration with the neighbours on military and security affairs and perhaps will wish to go even further than that.

Even running a minority government, Harper has fired people he doesn’t agree with. He has cut funding to organizations whose function went against his own beliefs — organizations that supported aboriginal rights, women, immigrants — and cut long-standing aid programs to other countries in need.

With a majority, he will now turn his attention to public service workers, to the labour movement and — to Ezra Levant’s delight — to human rights commissions. And although he says he won’t open debates on social agenda issues — reproductive rights, same-sex rights — I’m not sure anyone really believes him.

Back in the ’80s when Brian Mulroney was campaigning, he warned us — although he didn’t think of it as a warning — that if we gave him a majority government, he would fix things so we wouldn’t “recognize this country.” I always wondered why we wouldn’t want to recognize our wonderful country but Mulroney made a start on it.

I’m afraid that today, Harper is setting his course to finish the job.