Equally troubling are Harper’s efforts to control and suppress government information, especially that which could run counter to his political agenda. A year after scrapping Canada’s mandatory long-form census, Harper’s government became the first in the history of the British Commonwealth to be found in contempt of Parliament, for failing to provide documentation on several budget items. The independent parliamentary budget officer grew so frustrated with his inability to access the government’s financial records that he sued for them. Like the veterans’ ombudsman, he was not reappointed.

The Prime Minister’s Office and its adjunct, the Privy Council Office, micromanage government activities in the farthest-flung outposts. Responses to the most minor media inquiries are subject to intense vetting that blurs the line between partisan political operations and the traditionally nonpartisan civil service.

Micromanagement has been especially intense during the election campaign. This encompasses not merely, as Frum dismissively describes it, a few rules to make press conferences “less rowdy.” Local Conservative candidates have reportedly been discouraged from taking part in debates or giving interviews. Rigidly enforced media arrangements at Harper campaign stops seem designed not only to keep reporters away from the prime minister, but also to keep them from his carefully vetted supporters and anyone who shows up to protest. This in a country where informal interactions between politicians and the public have long been commonplace. As a former New Democratic staffer now working as a lobbyist wrote in August:

Stephen Harper may become Canada’s first political leader to have conducted an entire national election without once meeting an unvetted, non-partisan ordinary voter; nor encountered a national reporter who had not paid for his seat and the promise of an occasional question. (And only if your question has been vetted and approved and you behave yourself, mind.)

The approach isn’t working. Too many Canadians are embarrassed at having the worst record on climate change in the industrialized world. They recoil at the Harper government’s decision to remove environmental-assessment requirements from the development of most of the country’s waterways. They shake their heads at the corruption trial of a buffoonish Harper-appointed senator (charged with accepting a bribe from Harper’s former top aide, who was inexplicably not charged with proffering the bribe). Even after a lone wannabe jihadist shot a Canadian soldier dead and invaded Parliament to terrorize lawmakers before dying in a shootout, many Canadians object to Harper’s latest anti-terror legislation, which increases domestic surveillance and imposes preventative detention.

Frum has it backwards. The only “difficulty of explaining Harper’s horribleness” involves deciding which of his retrograde policies and postures to leave off an ever-lengthening list of grievances. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the electorate want his government sacked. At the moment, they are evenly divided between two competing center-left parties. In October, voters may choose the one most likely to bring Harper’s nine-year reign to a close, or the Liberals and New Democrats may face pressure to cooperate in forming a new government—a government, let us hope, that is far more respectful of the norms and values that have long made Canada the country that it is.

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