Control Freak?

It seems that Mr. Harper's treatment of his own party is shaping up to be much in line with the socially conservative patriarchal view of society held by many of the party members.

Instead of decentralizing power as promised, Mr. Harper has funnelled more and more control straight into the Prime Minister's Office. The PMO now pre-approves everything Tory ministers and MPs do in their political lives. They've been ordered to speak less to the media, and banned from gassing about the government's plans.

When they do speak (to order lunch, maybe) they have to stick to the government's five priorities — the federal accountability act, GST cuts, child care, crime and medical waiting lists — virtually idiot-proof subjects. Big Daddy's boys aren't just on message; they're all message, all the time.

Big Daddy is right. Have you had a look at the Prime Minister's Office website lately? It looks like an ad for the Conservative Party with the only visible member being Mr. Harper, as his mug is plastered all over it. Have a look: http://pm.gc.ca/eng/default.asp. Compare this to the Conservative Party website: http://www.conservative.ca.

For years openly scornful of reporters (“he blames the media for the 2004 loss,” one insider explains), the prime minister has now declared war on the parliamentary press gallery. The PMO no longer advertises the time and location of cabinet meetings, which means reporters can no longer scrum ministers as they leave the weekly brain mash.

As a result, they've resorted to buttonholing ministers as they climb into their limos. The PMO recently volleyed back by asking cabinet ministers not to park their limos near the members entrance to the House of Commons, so as not to tip reporters that a cabinet meeting is in session. Mr. Harper himself has allegedly resorted to sneaking up to the meeting on a freight elevator. All these antics make the nation's business look like a high-level game of sardines.

Mr. Harper bypasses the national media more and more — taking last minute trips, covering up visits by foreign statesmen such as the president of Haiti, waiting three days to reveal that Canada has renewed its commitment to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command — and instead travels the country to talk to local TV stations.

What have we got ourselves into. For the guy who was so critical of the Liberals voting as a block in the past and who has been a major proponent of the Parliamentary free vote, either he's one good liar, or all that (minority government) power has gone to his head. Are we supposed to believe that if he was given a majority government, there would be no influence on other Conservative MP's in their voting directions?

In recent days, rumours have begun to circulate that Mr. Harper has even limited his ministers' opportunities to speak in cabinet meetings. Instead, he has begun to meet them privately beforehand, hear their proposals and then make their presentations himself. That's Big Daddy, for sure.Naturally in partisan Ottawa, a lot of people claim Mr. Harper's love of command and control makes them nervous.

Greg Weston, Ottawa columnist for Sun Media, has been covering Parliament Hill for 30 years. “I don't need the PMO to do my job,” he says. “But the control concerns me. This is the way they're going to be running the country. It's not just early game jitters. This is part of a deep-rooted belief set. It's almost a culture.”

To thwart the Harper team, Mr. Weston has urged reporters to ferret out the home numbers of cabinet ministers, and to hound them in restaurants and in public. But in Harperville, it isn't where you talk that's a problem: it's talking, period. Talking invites debate; debate implies uncertainty; uncertainty is not prime ministerial. The name of this show is Big Daddy Knows Best.

Mr. Harper and his crew claim (without citing evidence) that only the media care about how much access the media get. A more accurate and potentially more damaging charge is that Mr. Harper treats the media — and therefore Canadians — like children. Mr. Harper and his team are betting a majority of Canadian voters prefer it that way.

Just the kind of person we should have directing the country. A control freak with a hidden agenda who sees the citizens of Canada as meddlesome.

“Harper's very message oriented, as we all are. But that's one of the great ironies of this: Political discourse has gone all to hell around here as a result. The bandwidth of political discussion in Canada and Ottawa is now extremely narrow — in the sense that all of the messaging that comes out of the PMO is written by a very small number of people. It destroys political discourse, because all the rest of us are doing is repeating bullets.” Dissatisfaction in the back benches is growing.

I sure hope it grows enough to put a crack in this facade. Hopefully at some point in the not too distant future we'll see the secrets start to leak out, as we're now seeing south of the 49th.