{"id":20407,"date":"2013-05-24T10:39:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-24T15:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20407"},"modified":"2013-05-24T10:41:34","modified_gmt":"2013-05-24T15:41:34","slug":"is-this-stephen-harpers-tipping-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/05\/24\/is-this-stephen-harpers-tipping-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this Stephen Harper’s tipping point?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Wells<\/a> talks about the terrible week Stephen Harper has had:<\/p>\n

A government is like a shark. If it stops swimming, it drowns. Harper has lasted 11 years as a party leader for two reasons: He was never alone and he had a plan. Indeed, it\u2019s the plan that has often helped keep him from being alone, because his are a loner\u2019s instincts. He reached out to the Progressive Conservatives in 2003 after battling them for 16 years because he knew his Canadian Alliance was too slim a platform for a man who aspired to govern. He made serious concessions to Quebec nationalism after mistrusting it all his life. After he united the Conservative party, he reached outside its bounds to attract Liberal MPs \u2014 David Emerson, Wajid Khan — and then, through Jason Kenney\u2019s ethnic-outreach efforts, he took away an ever-growing bite of the Liberal voter base.<\/p>\n

At every moment, he could afford such bold moves because he was secure in his leadership of the Canadian conservative movement. Harper\u2019s critics tend to describe him as a loner, a brain in a jar created by mad scientists toiling in underground laboratories at the University of Calgary. But in fact he has expressed a broad cultural conservatism in the land. Millions of Canadians have been happy he is their Prime Minister. Knowing he had a base, he could build beyond it through decisive action.<\/p>\n

And now? He is increasingly alone and isolated. Look across the country, across the border, around the world, and even within his own caucus.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

In private conversations with reporters, Conservatives were calling for Harper to provide far more detail about the Duffy-Wright deal than he did on Tuesday. He let them down, as he has often done in this drama. Duffy was Harper\u2019s choice for Senate. Wright was Harper\u2019s chief of staff, working under Harper\u2019s nose. When their plot was revealed, Harper\u2019s response was to make a great show of reminding his MPs to keep their own noses clean. It\u2019s like a neighbourhood kid who sends a baseball through your living-room window and then comes over to lecture you on your clumsiness.<\/p>\n

All of this would matter less \u2014 to Conservatives, to the country \u2014 if it felt like a distraction from an \u201cactive and important agenda.\u201d Of course, some of this government\u2019s activity is well-known and broadly popular among Conservatives. Since the 2011 election, Harper has shut down the Health Council of Canada, the National Council of Welfare, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, Rights and Democracy, the First Nations Statistical Institute and the National Council of Visible Minorities. The Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the Council for Canadian Unity and the Canadian Council on Learning were shut down a little earlier. The end of the mandatory long-form census was only the beginning of sharp cuts at Statistics Canada.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Wells talks about the terrible week Stephen Harper has had: A government is like a shark. If it stops swimming, it drowns. Harper has lasted 11 years as a party leader for two reasons: He was never alone and he had a plan. Indeed, it\u2019s the plan that has often helped keep him from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,53],"tags":[431,458,413,553,258],"class_list":["post-20407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-politics","tag-conservatism","tag-parliament","tag-scandal","tag-senate","tag-stephenharper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5j9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20407"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20409,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20407\/revisions\/20409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}