The Tories have changed Canada in no time at all
OTTAWA— The Conservative majority turned two Thursday. Hold the cake.
For all its carefully-crafted imagery as the stay-the-course, steadyas-she goes government, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have reshaped much of this country in 24 short months.
From the environment to health care to foreign policy, this is a different Canada than it was May 2, 2011, and many of the Harper initiatives may not be easily undone by future governments, or even future leaders of a Conservative government.
In some cases, this government has been remarkably up front about its plans to hobble any future governments, most notably in its decision to destroy data from the long gun registry, now a thing of the past everywhere but Quebec which is fighting for its data in court.
But it will clearly be difficult to undo a series of environmental measures, including streamlined regulatory reviews, formal withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol, the radical overhaul of the Navigable Waters Act and the Fisheries Act, plus the uncertainty over the future of the Experimental Lakes Area, the freshwater research centre, in northern Ontario.
It shuttered the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy and then spurned its offer to keep its research in the public domain. NDP Leader Tom Mulcair told my colleague Joanna Smith recently that because of these measures, “environmental degradation” could become permanent, but Bob Rae, who presided over the Liberals for most of the two years, believes nothing is irreversible for a new government.
Some of the change is profound, nonetheless.
The two-year-old government has cut scientific research, muzzled its scientists, put limits on the independence of Statistics Canada and is facing charges that it plans to wield more influence over the CBC.
Harper has abdicated the federal role in setting national health-care policy in this country, a radical break from convention in which the federal government provided the cash and left the delivery to the provinces.
In fact, Harper has essentially ended group consultations with premiers in any form, meeting with them one-on-one and eschewing the grand federal-provincial conferences of yore.
Quietly, this government has also reshaped the Employment Insurance program, pushing the unemployed to uproot and accept jobs at less pay, a move that has faced stiff criticism in Atlantic Canada, if a more muted response elsewhere. It has changed the age at which Canadians are eligible for Old Age Security, but pushed those changes past the next election, and the NDP has pledged to roll back the measure. It has had organized labour, using the shorthand “big union bosses,” in its crosshairs since the 2011 election, quickly legislating workers back on the job when it can, even passing back-to-work legislation before there was a job disruption. It quickly passed a private member’s bill — now stalled in the Senate — which forces unions to account for their spending on behalf of its members, including all lobbying and political activities, and there is a thirst for federal right-towork legislation among some MPs in the government caucus. Under the guise of standing tall for taxpayers, the government, in its most recent budget bill, has signalled its intention to have a treasury board representative at the table during upcoming contract negotiations at the supposedly arms-length VIA Rail, Canada Post and the CBC. But some of the biggest changes in two years under the Harper government have been our place in the world. Canada’s lockstep support for Israel and its noisy bid to undermine Palestinian observerstate status at the UN has removed from Ottawa any pretense of a voice searching for common ground in the Middle East. Its disdain for the UN in general, and some of its programs — we are the only country in the world to pull out of a UN convention that combats drought in Africa — and the sudden severing of ties with Iran have been noted globally. This week, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird bluntly stated the country has better things to do than seek a seat on the UN Security Council, the seat denied to them in 2010.
It has rolled CIDA into the foreign affairs department, aligning our trade and foreign policy with our aid objectives.
All of the above took a mere two years. It is also reads like a blueprint for continued support from the party base. As it turns the corner on this mandate, the real test will be how the Conservatives try to reach beyond that base heading to 2015. Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter:@nutgraf1