Stephen Harper Will Not Friend You

On the continued cloistering of the prime minister.

The Conservatives' policy of booting anyone who isn’t a card-carrying Tory from Stephen Harper’s rallies is silly, writes the National Post’s Lorne Gunter, but “the phony shock over the incident by the other parties and by reporters covering the Conservative campaign is equally unjustified.” Parties always carefully screen the crowds at rallies, and Gunter should know because he used to do just that when he worked as a self-described political hack for the Liberals. He says the difference here appears to be that the Tories aren’t just on the lookout for local nutcases or Liberal operatives; they’re trolling people’s Facebook pages for any hints of partisanship, a tactic Gunter admits has “gone too far.” Which begs the question: Is the opposition’s shock really “phony” as Gunter says? Couldn’t it be argued that it is justified, if more than a little opportunistic?

The Ottawa Citizen’s Kate Heartfield says the Liberals’ characterization of Harper as a power-hungry tyrant is “so far past ridiculous it's crossing the border into parody … But while the Conservatives have a maddening cat-in-the cream grin that shows they know they're full of it whenever they say ‘coalition,’ some of their counterparts on the left seem to believe their own fearmongering.” Wait, what? Saying false things you don’t believe in is better than saying untrue things you actually think are true? In politics, we’re never going to all agree on what is true and what isn’t, but surely throwing things we know are disingenuous into the mix is only going to make things worse.

The Conservatives’ seeming eagerness to distance themselves from ordinary Canadians is troubling, says the Vancouver Sun’s Daphne Bramham, but it’s important to keep some perspective. “It's glib to blame Harper's Conservatives for the demise of democracy, although they seem to have speeded it up,” she writes. After all, Pierre Trudeau “mocked backbenchers in the 1980s” and Kim Campbell famously said elections were not a time for serious issues. “Neither Campbell nor anyone else has explained when an appropriate time might be.” Sometime soon, one would hope.