A Brief One from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper
Posted August 29th, 2016 on Niagara At Large
In the middle of a bit of criticism I’ve been getting over how only someone who is “commie” or …. Could post some of the things we’ve been saying about defeated Prime Minister Stephen Harper as he finally takes his leave, one NAL reader sent me a link a very stinging column on Harper that has just recently been published in Maclean’s, one of Canada’s oldest surviving and most circulated national news magazines.
Stephen Harper, during a federal election debate Maclean’s magazine helped sponsor last year.
The column, headlined; “Goodbye, Harper. Good Riddance. – How do you sum up the career of a PM who betrayed every ideal he claimed to cherish?” was written by one of the magazine’ political columnists Michael Harris, and includes a few of the following lines –
“Sucking toes for votes with a crack-smoking mayor while touting family values. Trying to drive a wedge between majority and minority Canadians by exploiting the politics of bigotry. Stephen Harper was Donald Trump before Trump was Trump. … right down to the bigotry, fear-mongering, divisiveness, scapegoating, and profound anti-democratic impulses that had Canada’s entire parliamentary structure tottering.”
Toward the end of the column, Harris writes –
Protesting Harper’s draconian anti-terrorist bill in the months leading up to last year’s federal election
“There’s not much here to feel good about. Harper confabulated his way through a decade of political parlour tricks. He presented himself as a fiscal conservative who balanced the books. He dealt from the bottom of the deck to get there: selling GM shares at a discount and helping himself to the EI surplus and the Contingency Fund. And, oh yes, he took a chainsaw to the budget of Canada’s veterans to pull off his oleaginous accounting, no matter how badly they needed their service centres.”
I’m posting the link below so you can read the whole piece by Harris, which I hope you do.
And as you do, keep in mind that this column is not out of a left-leaning media outlet like Rolling Stone or The Nation or Rabble or Now magazine out of Toronto.
MacLean’s magazine is about as staid and as mainstream as you can get in the media publishing business, folks, and here is a column about Harper that is so stinging in the truth it is telling about the damage this heartless, morally bankrupt character has done to this country – damage that is going to continue impacting countless lives across Canada for many years to come.
Pick up a newspaper in Canada almost any day of the week and you can read stories about the legacy this neo-con creep and his posy has left us.
Look no further than the front page of this August 29th edition of The Globe and Mail with a headline reading; “Risky water systems pose health threat to one-third of people on First Nation reserves.’
Harper was reminded over and over again by United Nations inspectors and many others that whole communities of Indigenous people in Canada – one of the most prosperous countries in the world – are living in Third World conditions, and he hardly gave a fig about it.
In an interview not that long ago, Canadian scientist, broadcaster and environmental activist David Suzuki who, by the way, was vilified by Harper’s shameless hacks as some kind of enemy of this country, said he believes Stephen Harper should be thrown in jail for “willful blindness” when it comes to serious threats to our security and survival like climate change.
I say yes, throw Harper behind bars. But then what about those out there who are too blind to see why he belongs there. What, lord help us, are they going to vote for next?
Here is the link to the Maclean’s magazine column – https://ipolitics.ca/2016/08/26/goodbye-harper-good-riddance/ .
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