Which side are you on, boys?
-Billy Bragg
J. KELLY NESTRUCK is a Toronto arts writer, recently decamped from overseas to take a new gig reviewing theatre for the Globe & Mail. He's an affable enough guy, and all in all, a pretty sharp writer. I enjoyed reading his writing on the Guardian Unlimited site while he parked himself over in Blighty. A few years back, he even interviewed me about a little theatre spoof I did called Top Gun! The Musical.
A little over a week ago, a piece appeared in the paper detailing how dailies from a Canadian film called Love & Savagery were stopped by the Canada Border Services Agency. Apparently, an overzealous customs agent thought that sounded a little porn-y. There were some holdups and dark threats that maybe the film would be diverted to an RCMP lab for processing. Producers claimed a sort of chill -- a new attitude that might have been in response to the changing climate as exemplified by Bill C10. Kelly thought that was pretty ridiculous, and said as much here in the comments thread when I wrote about it.
I found myself thinking about that story again on the weekend, for a couple of reasons. One, because somebody forwarded me a kinda smug entry Kelly wrote about it.
It's when I read this article in the Saturday edition of Kelly's current employer that I started ruminating anew. Gloria Galloway files an interesting piece about how Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Minority Government has gone to war with the bureaucracy in several federal departments. It's an interesting peek into the Tory playbook and the ins and outs of governance in Canada, 2008-style:
There's a lot of meaty philosophical stuff in the article, and Galloway takes a provocative tack near the end, fairly raising the point, should the will of the unelected bureaucracy be able to endrun and second guess the judgement of elected officials?In less than 2½ years in power, Mr. Harper has had what seems like an inordinate number of fights with senior advisers and heads of independent federal agencies, as well as with the parliamentary officers. He has:
Refused to co-operate with an investigation by Ethics Commissioner Bernard Shapiro, who was also discounted as a "Liberal appointee" by a representative of the Prime Minister.
Phased out the job of national science adviser, after Arthur Carty said he had been 'increasingly marginalized."
Fired Adrian Measner, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Wheat Board, for defending the board as the sole vendor of Canada's wheat and barley.
"It is not a stretch," Trent University historian Dimitry Anastakis and Toronto journalist Jeet Heer argue in a recent commentary in The Guardian, "to say that Harper simply sees many Canadian institutions - Elections Canada being simply his latest target - as illegitimate, not just in need of reform but worth attacking root-and-branch."
The opposition has been just as scathing. "The enemies list now includes Elections Canada," Liberal MP Michael Savage charged. "We know the Prime Minister loves power. Can he tell us why he hates government so much?"
There's much that's currently dysfunctional in Canada's parliamentary system. Ever since Quebec decided, in essence, to drop out and vote for a spoiler party en masse, putting together a governing coalition that truly represents the nation has been all but impossible. It's nothing new that governments get into power here with the majority of citizens voting against them, but since the crackup that devolved to five increasingly regional parties, the electoral math really doesn't work at all.
Harper's war on the bureaucracy (as outlined in the Globe) is part of a pattern: ruthless 'on-message' discipline where cabinet members are not allowed to speak to their briefs; the most antagonistic relationship with the press of any government in the last twenty years, and, of course, sneaky agenda-furthering actions like hiding a poison pen censorship clause in a 600 page tax bill that sails through the House without debate, and then claiming that "the industry is divided on the issue" when the condemnation of the bill from the industry is the closest thing statistically you're ever going to get to universal. Just today comes word of a new feint by Harper's increasingly imperial government: an attempt to ram through virtually the same copyright legislation that was roundly rejected in a storm of public pique several months ago.
When you take this climate, and combine it with the idea that if you're a bureaucrat or a civil servant -- the word's out that you toe the line or they take you out, is it really such a stretch to believe that the ripples could cause a Border guard to be a little more vigilant than usual in "exercising his duty?"
Kelly thinks so. I think no.
Harper has been playing from the U.S. Rovian Republican playbook for years now. And we know how that goes: all science and policy must be politicized, and subsumed to the political agenda. Independent oversight is not allowed. Dissension is never tolerated.
It's worked so well, and had such a lasting positive effect on the United States over the last seven and a half years, it's no wonder that the battered frogs of the ecosystem see a connection to what's going on here.
That connection could be illusory. Or it might be real and insidious. Maybe I'm paranoid. Or maybe somebody who's spent most of the last few years outside the country hasn't quite gotten the full flavour of cultural life under the Unitary Executive, True North Division.
One more thing. One nice, random piece of info I found out, thanks to people I've been talking to who were part of that Love & Savagery shoot:
Their import paperwork was pristine.
So, what do you think? Bellweather of what's to come? A case of consolidating Tory power, or a random, isolated incident?
The problem with the former is that it does sound a little far fetched.
The problem with the latter is that it requires you to extend the benefit of the doubt to a government that's actively tried to slip things past not once, not twice, but if you count the Elections Canada scandal, a whole mess 'o times.
It's a government that, on the whole, is about as transparent as its leader's shellacked hairdo.
In the end, I really am not sure what's going on here. Inevitably, after twenty years in this business, you find yourself open to all sorts of cockamamie ideas -- because the truths you've heard that you can't talk about seem even less plausible, even when someone shows you the proof. Things get weird out here on the hustings.
I guess in the end all I'm really asking is,
Which side are you on, boy?
Which side are you on?
At the very least, it's a nice piece of theatre. You'd think people could at least appreciate that side of it.
2 comments:
There's no conspiracy theory here anymore, Denis. From museums to immigration; from C-10 to transfer payments, this government has declared war on...govnerning! The most alarming aspect of all of this is they're doing it with a minority house. Me? I'm afraid, very afraid.
The idea behind what Harper's doing is a common conservative idea that government bureaucracies are full of liberal fifth columnists. Remember that Senator McCarthy was not interested in Hollywood Communists (that was HUAC), he was talking about how Communists had infiltrated the State Department and were causing us to lose the Cold War.
Recently Hans Von Spakovsky, a Bush nominee to the Federal Election Commission who was rejected by the Senate, wrote an article where he said that he was warned not to join the Justice Department because it is "a cauldron of left-wing political activism." Other Bush appointees say the same thing about the EPA, NASA, the Pentagon and, of course, the State Department.
The point is that Harper is pretty predictably following the conservative playbook: the idea is that there's a liberal bureaucratic conspiracy to keep their plans from working. Or something. I didn't say it makes sense.
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