Stephen Harper, Give me back my Country!

How have I come to be in this strange place? The world is changing and it is happening in strange ways.

Countries that for decades and longer were Dictatorships of all different stripes are becoming Democracies in different ways and the Democratic Nations seem to becoming less Democratic by the day.

In Canada we have always appeared to have an open Government. Whether one agreed with the Governing Party or not there was always communication, conversation, and debate. When the Parties comprising the House of Commons met there was rhetoric and rancor but it was Political. It stayed in the House.

The Press was also a part of this, back when they were for the most part independent they were free to ask questions of Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries and their Opposition counterparts, but that seems to have disappeared too.

Now when the Government wishes to announce something it seems to just be a press release or a Photo Op far from the House of Commons, far from the questions of the Opposition and neatly packaged for the Press so they don’t even need to ask a question. Not that they get much chance of that. Between their Corporate Bosses who want the Harper Party shown in the best light possible and the Harper Party’s unwillingness to speak outside of their talking points there isn’t much to report.

Here’s the speech, here’s the Press Kit, don’t ask nasty questions or you won’t be invited to the next “Press Conference”.

The actions within the House of Commons are beyond belief. Have we had one piece of legislation moved in the House of Commons under the current regime that hasn’t had the invocation of “limit debate” tossed in? How many times are we hearing of the Harper Party wanting Committee Meetings moved in camera? Should I even mention the Marionette Theatre part deux formerly called the Senate?

Amazingly even the members of the Harper Party are starting to ask questions. The announcement of (possible?) changes to OAS caught most of them flat footed. It wasn’t even raised in Caucus? His own members knew nothing before Lord Stephen announced it in Davos? This doesn’t sound like the Canada I was born into.

No it sounds more and more like the Government from another place where the Party Leadership decided what to propose, informed the Caucus who would support it without question and it was passed into law by their House with no debate.

But the Soviets only had One Party so the debate was usually pretty brief.

Is that a nasty comparison? You bet your boots, but it fits far too well to be ignored.

The fact that some of the Party Faithful are wondering out loud about Lord Stephen and the Harper Party gives me hope that some of these folks remember their Conservative roots. Or at least their constituents have.

Joe Clark was not evil, nor was Robert Stanfield or John Diefenbaker. I may not agree with their given visions for the Country but to my knowledge they did not attack any groups with Canada, they sought to govern Canada and represent all Canadians for the betterment of Canada.

These people earned the right to be called “Right Honourable”. The members of the Stephen Harper Party have not.

I, for one, would like MY Canada back.

I want to be able to refer to the elected leader of my country as “the Right Honourable Prime Minister” and I am unable to do that as long as Lord Stephen and the Harper Party Regime are in power.

I miss my Country.

Lord Stephen and Old Age (in)Security

While our fearless leader was annoying the European Leaders in Davos he decided the time was right to let us know, back here in Canada, that he wants to monkey with Old Age Security or OAS as they like to call it.

Old is not a nice word anymore, especially when you tie it to the word Age.

Now he says he isn’t going to reduce payments or anything mean like that, he’ll just make those of us who haven’t reached age 65 wait a couple of more years to get our OAS, when we turn 67. But then again, he promised he wouldn’t touch the Income Trusts either.

As an added benefit, by waiting two more years to retire, we’ll get a little more Canada Pension Plan (CPP) money when we finally get to retire.

I’m sure that little oversight will get fixed first.

Anyhow, the announcement and the fact that fearless leader made it in a foreign country irked me a bit, but the noise I hear coming from the Harperistas is just grinding my gears.

They make it sound so wonderful, it’s just a minor inconvenience and we have all these wonderful new things to put money away for our retirement that the Harper Party introduced for us. We can put money into registered bank accounts that won’t get taxed until we retire and we can contribute to these new and shiny retirement plans that are just like company pensions but you contribute into it, not your boss.

Splendid things, lovely things, the only problem is that there are a lot of people too bust frittering away their weekly earnings on such frivolous items as food and rent and utilities that they don’t have nickel one to salt away for their retirement.

They are the working poor, and there are a lot of them.

The next time you wander into Zellers or Walmart or Timmies… look at the people serving you. They aren’t the fresh faced kids of yesteryear starting out at their first real job, they are increasingly older folks who used to have good jobs but don’t anymore.

They are the “recovering from the recession” people.

These are the people who are often working two or three usually part time jobs to keep their heads above water because their former employer doesn’t need them anymore.

And the reward for being a member of the working poor? Two extra years of struggling to make ends meet.

Now Stephen says that there will be too many Seniors in 20 years for the current OAS/CPP system to handle and the option He considers viable is moving the retirement OAS age back 2 years. We just can’t afford the future He says.

Funny thing is before we had Lord Stephen in charge, the tax and spend Liberals were running the country at a profit. We were paying down the debt and putting money in the Bank. And now we are not. Lord Stephen put us back into deficit financing before the recession.

We would have been able to afford to let people get their OAS at age 65 but the Harper Party messed that up for us.

Thanks, Steve.

The real irony for me is that at the same time that Lord Stephen wants me to tighten my belt and work extra years he still hasn’t touched the Federal Government pension… the one the Tax Payers’ Association now calls Platinum Plated. The same Tax Payers’ Association that had some guy named Stephen Harper at the helm that whined and puled about the Gold Plated Pension that our MPs were getting.

Even better, Lord Stephen has been chucking the party faithful into the revolving door Senate for 8 years at a time… and they are eligible for about $30,000.00 per year in pension when their term is up.

I gotta get me a job like that.

The Shepherd and the Wolf, or the Stephen Harper story.

Aesop wrote a little story about the Shepherd and the Wolf.

At first the Shepherd was afraid for his flock but the Wolf left the sheep alone. In time, the Shepherd came to trust the Wolf as he left the sheep alone and the other wolves stayed away as well.

One day the Shepherd felt safe enough to leave the Wolf in charge of the flock when the Shepherd was called away and when he returned many of his flock were gone and so was the Wolf.

Now days, the Wolf has come back, but now he has picture taken with kittens to show how harmless he is. We kept watch on the Wolf but he seemed to have reformed, not wanting to gut our social services and even promising to leave things pretty much alone… so we went and put the Wolf in charge.

Now the Wolf is hitting our services by reducing staff and demanding budget cuts while at the same time his wolf buddies get nonexistent jobs such as overseeing the EI system to Tens of Millions of Dollars to direct the EI surpluses of which, of course, there are none.

The Wolf looks to the South for guidance, he tells us that putting the Foxes and other criminal animals into cages for longer sentences will make the criminal animals better citizens or that squeezing money out of Health Care will make the Country better. The best Medicare comes from “For Profit” systems.

Never mind the fact that our friends to the South spend more money per capita keeping their criminal animals in cages than we do and that they spend more government money on “For Profit” Medicare than we do with our Government Insurance.

No the Wolf is looking to make things better for his Pack than for us because the one thing that the Wolf truly understands is how wolves think. If the Wolf doesn’t keep the other wolves happy, they will turn on him in the blink of an eye.

Aesop has other stories about wolves.

One is about the boy who called “Wolf” so often the people ignored him when the Wolf took his flock. That is where we are right now and the townspeople aren’t listening to the people who see the Wolf.

Finally Aesop wrote of the Wolf who dressed himself in a sheep’s skin to hide from the Shepherd and to find the fattest sheep. I think we’ve all heard this story, but many of us never heard the end.

When the Shepherd returned from the pastures with his sheep he put them into a pen for the night. The Shepherd’s hounds found the Wolf and tore him to pieces that night.

Is it not time to release the hounds?

Not Canadian Enough?

My Friends,

It has come to my attention again that Stephen Harper feels that he is better than you, or at least some of you.

Stephen Harper says that in order to be Prime Minister of this once proud country, you need to be a Canadian, and only a Canadian. If you currently hold dual citizenship, you are not a proper candidate for the position of Prime Minister.

By law, at least as I understand it, in order to run for an elected government position you need only be legally entitled to vote. You need to be a citizen of Canada. In fact we have had Prime Ministers who were not Canadian citizens but merely citizens of the United Kingdom.

But at that time they were legally entitled to vote in Canada.

The irony here is that while Lord Stephen feels that the Right Honourable Thomas Mulcair and the Right Honourable Stephane Dion are undesirable choices for the Prime Minister’s office, he is happy to replace Canadian paintings in government offices with portraits of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II who is not a Canadian citizen.

I wonder how Lord Stephen feels about me then.

I was born of a Landed Immigrant and a Canadian by choice. I am entitled to hold dual citizenship if I choose, but I have chosen not to.

Does the fact that I am Canadian Only by choice make me a better Canadian that Stephen Harper who, to my knowledge, has no choice?

And what of our Aboriginal neighbours?

I am no expert on Aboriginal affairs but I gather that natives, while they may be Canadian, consider themselves members of their respective Nations. Should this affect their efforts should they decide to run for the leadership of a National Political Party?

No!

My friends, in order to be considered for the Leadership of our country, one needs to be honest and truthful. One must be respectful of the Rules of the House of Commons. One must obey the laws of the land.

In other words, one must not be like Stephen.

Thank you for your time.

Lord Stephen, Promise Made, Promise Kept

Apparently the Harperistas have a new line.

“Promise made, promise kept.”

I’m sure the PMO thought long and hard to dream this up before sending out to the trolling class of Harperistas. You know the ones, they post an op/ed and get all annoyed when it gets challenged. Calling people names and being rude because it was in the National Post and so it has to be true or Ezra Levant wrote it so it cannot be challenged… note to the Harper Party chattering classless… op/eds are opinions and carry no more weight than a blog by a cranky old cat and Ezra is an overfed sparrow fart that will write anything for anyone who pays enough. Kind of like prostitution isn’t it?

I write for me.

Now the last time I saw this buzz phrase PMPK was in regards to the impending closure of the Canadian Wheat Board. These junior league Harper Party operatives are all aglow with the news that their Lord Stephen has beat up a bunch of farmers and is rewriting the laws to do it. They think this is wonderful.

I would suggest that the Harper Regime is doing the same type of thing that the despots running the Middle East have been doing for the last few decades. Breaking the existing laws and just writing new ones making whatever they want to do legal.

Government control of the media? New law. Easy peasy. Just pull a string and all the Harper Party marionettes raise their hands and say “Aye.”

Somewhere Orwell is laughing at us.

Now the junior leaguers are not so happy about the class action lawsuit over the properties owned by the CWB and lost income and so forth. The evil ring leader is an immoral LIEberal. Could be, but he’s a member of the Canadian Wheat Board and a citizen of Canada and he appears to be within his rights to sue.

When Ritz got his marching orders from the PMO over this I’m sure I’m not the only one who saw the lawsuits coming fast and furious. The irony is that the very same farmers who wanted the CWB killed will be first in line to get their hands on the spoils should the class action suit prevail. Isn’t Ritz a grain farmer? Think he’ll send that cheque back uncashed?

No, the only problem is that if the government loses, it won’t be the Harper Party footing the bill. It will be a cranky old cat and the rest of Canadians paying for Harper’s folly. If there was true justice in this land the lawsuit would have named Harper and Ritz and the Harper Party and every last one of the puppets that supported this bill accountable for every red cent.

But it’s the Government of Canada that’s doing this, and so it’s the Government of Canada that gets named in the lawsuit.

And win or lose, we get to pay for the lawyers.

Let’s face it, Canadians have hired the most incompetent manager on the earth to run our country. When the situation in Attawapiskat arose our fearless leader looked surprised and astounded about this. Basically the response was “We sent the cheque, what did they spend it on?” followed by blaming the Indians for spending it on stuff. A competent manager wouldn’t have to ask.

These same guys are still planning to buy the jets that may never be made, much less fly. Plan B will be to blame the Liberals for buying the planes.

No, when Stephen Harper wanders off into the sunset after his time in office, we will be holding the bag. Billions of dollars of debt, gutted social services screaming to be rebuilt without a penny in the coffers and who knows what else and we will pass it on to our children because we won’t be able to pay for it ourselves.

That is the promise we’ll get to keep.