Canadians and non-Canadians alike have weighed in on the federal election in the foreign press. It’s … not all good.

Behold, in all its wretched glory, Robert Fisk’s lede in The Independent: “Faithful ally of Britain in two world wars, peacekeeper to the world, NATO but neutral across the globe, it’s difficult to believe that Canada’s democracy might have come adrift.”

Agh. The dangling modifiers. It burns. Furthermore, surely Canada was the faithful ally, peacekeeper and NATO member, not “Canada’s democracy.” Somewhere in Kent, a crusty old English teacher must be spinning in his grave. Readers, tell your children not to write like this. Everyone will laugh at them.

Now, to the content. We haven’t been a significant peacekeeping nation in forever, and we certainly never pursued peacekeeping to the exclusion of war. There were the two world wars, for example, which Fisk helpfully mentions. Then there was Korea, the Gulf War, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, none of which began under Stephen Harper’s dark reign.

“NATO but neutral”? What could that possibly mean? Surely the first thing a country would do if it wanted to be in any sense neutral would be withdraw from any and all military alliances. But of course, Canada has never been “neutral” in any way, shape or form.

Having slapped us about the face with that lede, Fisk levels all the standard-issue complaints against the Harper record both at home and abroad, with the novel addition of nativist tactics that have turned up during this election campaign. David Suzuki turns up to call Harper a “dictator,” apropos of nothing. But what has any of this to do with “Canada’s democracy”? There are certainly charges one could level against Harper in that regard: his disdain for Parliament, most notably. But there isn’t a single accusation in this entire piece that supports the notion of a weakened democracy.

Dreadful.

At Esquire, Chales Pierce rambles on aimlessly about Harper aspiring to be “a Christian oil-sheikh, just as Jesus intended,” but concludes on a somewhat positive note by observing that “unlike (in the United States), the condition of the Native peoples of Canada is a subject of serious consideration in the national election.” You sure could have fooled us.

Heather Mallick Heather Mallicks all over the October edition of Harper’s: The Liberals were altogether splendid people, she explains, while “Harper’s obedient, dark-suited, rural, punitive, women-despising MPs likewise do as they’re told,” etc. etc. zzzzz. (That’s another great sentence, incidentally: “Harper’s obedient MPs … do as they’re told.” You don’t say.) It’s nothing Mallick hasn’t said before two dozen times in the Toronto Star, only it’s aimed at an intellectual American audience in what we used to think was a serious magazine — and with a helpful through-line comparison to Richard Nixon to help the Yankee audience along.

Harper is a Nixon “clone,” says Mallick, albeit one who “must have been watching a lot of Sarah Palin speeches.” She continues: “Harper is Nixon without the charm, he’s Nixon without the progressive social and environmental programs, he’s Nixon but he worships at a fundamentalist church.” Come to think of it, she never actually gets around to saying exactly how Harper is like Nixon. By the end she’s comparing Harper to Captain Ahab.

More presidential comparisons! At the Guardian, Marie-Marguerite Sabongui explains that Stephen Harper is just like George W. Bush. Novel, right? The analogy rests on their purported shared environmental apathy, misplaced obsession with voter fraud, antipathy toward immigrants and a fetish for incarcerating criminals whatever the crime rates might say. The latter two aren’t things we associate with Bush, though. Under President Clinton the U.S. granted permanent residency status to an average of 680,000 people a year. Under Bush it was over a million. The number of Americans incarcerated grew at 6.3 per cent a year under Clinton; under Bush it was 2.3 per cent.

Progressive Canadians claim to loathe the Americanization of Canadian politics. Maybe they should knock off the lousy analogies.

In a good piece for the Guardian, Ira Wells argues “this election has witnessed the full blossoming of a paranoid style of Canadian politics — a Manichean worldview characterised by suspiciousness, exaggeration, conspiratorial fantasy and apocalypticism.” And he doesn’t just mean the Tories. “There’s no gainsaying that opposition leader Thomas Mulcair and his New Democratic party have been revelling in these energies when they paint the prime minister as some bloodthirsty Caligula.” (We’re not sure how the Liberals squirm off the hook there.) “But it is Stephen Harper’s own campaign that has recently adopted the paranoid style as the lingua franca of its political discourse,” says Wells — albeit with more plausible deniability and “indirection” built in than you might see in other countries.

“While the leaders of the other major federal parties have affirmed the right of a woman to wear the niqab at her citizenship ceremony, their stance regarding the practice of niqab in general is unclear,” Safiah Chowdhurywrites at the Guardian. “No one wants to admit that the niqab can be an independent expression of choice and agency by a woman; doing so would be political death in this context.” We’re not totally sure what’s she’s after here. Does it really need saying that the Liberals and NDP wouldn’t ban the niqab in circumstances other than a citizenship ceremony?

In The New York Times, Stephen Marche catalogues the Conservatives’ disdain for government scientists and census-takers and impudent journalists, and argues “the worst of the Harper years is that all this secrecy and informational control have been at the service of no larger vision for the country.” Marche shortly thereafter suggests Harper “imagined Canada as a kind of Singapore, only more polite and rule abiding,” which is a rather striking vision indeed. But Haroper certainly didn’t accomplish it, and we mostly agree with Marche’s overall take: “The Harper years have not been terrible; they’ve just been bland and purposeless.” He’s done nothing that a reasonably ambitious and persuasive new government couldn’t undo in a single majority term. We shall see how ambitious and persuasive the next non-Conservative government is.

“Muslims should have exactly the same rights as all other religious communities, and if their regalia or practices are subject to special censure then a basic human right will have been violated,” Adam Gopnik writes for The New Yorker. But while “Harper’s newfound interest in women’s emancipation may be cynical … his statement that the niqab is ‘not how we do things here’ is not wholly fatuous.” Liberal societies have certain values, without which they would not be liberal societies, Gopnik argues. Tolerance is one, but it must have limits.

“We don’t, on the whole, let children go unvaccinated (we do, though –ed.), or allow members of a sect to abuse their kids in the name of faith (we do that too –ed.), and we won’t, if we can, allow female genital mutilation (well, hopefully not –ed.).” Forcing a woman to wear a veil would exceed the proper limits of tolerance, Gopnik argues, and we agree. But if we concede, as Gopnik does, that many who wear it do so by choice, then we need to establish precisely what value it compromises before we “ban” it.

“If you wish to join our group, which will give you maximum freedom for every kind of self-expression and religious practice, you have to respect that the open engagement of one citizen with another — and, in turn, one face with another — is a core value that lets all the other values you enjoy flourish,” Gopnik suggests. This is, as he says, a legitimate debate. But we can’t ever recall hearing “showing your face at all times” expressed as a core Canadian value before this particular debate came along.

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