Liked Mike Harris? You'll Love a Harper Majority

Here's what you are voting for, if you mark that ballot for your local CPC candidate:

• fewer and less stringent food and water inspections -- Walkerton: The Sequel, coming soon to your town!


• the further demotion of women to a "special interest group" (Does The Smirking Corpse not have a mother?)


• allowing the continued abrogation of the Treaty of 1814 by the US government without so much of a murmur of protest (Hey, Corpsey, you're all about northern sovereignty; what about southern sovereignty? What about that "longest undefended border" thing? Are we not into doing that anymore? If so, I demand you arm the rest of the border, to keep the Americans out.)


• an economic plan guaranteed to cause further rising income inequality


• a Prime Minister who promises to "govern as though he has a majority" even if he doesn't (shades of his alter ego Bush in 2004)


• cuts to social spending (Look for the part in the Star article where Harper says "...spending ourselves into oblivion either through deficits or through raising one tax or another. It's all the wrong direction." If that isn't neocon code-speak for cutting social programmes, I need to turn in my rhetorician license.)


• a continued presence in Afghanistan, where, I should remind you, we are doing "counterinsurgency" (aka "picking sides in a civil war"), not peacekeeping.


• a continuation of the Great Canadian Sell-Off (h/t for the title to Sophie Kneisel, Centre Magazine)


• further encroachments of "public-private partnership" healthcare (that is, healthcare administered by for-profit entities, driving costs up and service levels down*)


• American-style mandatory minimum sentencing that ties the hands of judges and prevents them from exercising discretion in extenuating circumstances


• further legislative encroachments along the lines of Bill C-484


• further deregulation and the creation of an even larger speculation-driven economy in Canada


• pulling Canada out of the Commonwealth Scholarship programme such that foreign students can no longer use the programme to study in Canada


• the embrace of wannabe-Republicans like the execrable carpetbagging Dianne Haskett, who disappeared from her riding's area for four years to go work for the Republicans in Washington, DC, only to magically reappear when her former riding was having a by-election, saying she wanted to represent it in Ottawa.

Anybody who still hasn't come to the conclusion that NEOCONSERVATISM IS A FAILED IDEOLOGY FOR GOVERNANCE (although it is great for vacuuming money out of the pockets of the lower 99% and into the pockets of the top 1%) does not deserve to be in office. We suffered through years of neocon misrule here under Mike Harris' government (aka Harper's Brain Trust, or The Stupidest Guys In The Room); failing them upward to the federal level a second time would be a disaster.



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* The most disgusting hospital I was ever in was picking up my broken-backed ex from a PPP hospital in Brampton. The place was filthy, the people working there were surly, and it was so understaffed, he'd been lying on a gurney in the hallway all night. The foyer was lavishly appointed, though...