Harper's Bizarre New Canada wins few friends in its first year.
by Ish Theilheimer
This may sound perverse, but if Sun News is happy, I'm sad. If Sun News is worried, it cheers me up. Sun, as you know, is Canada's ever-expanding hard-core conservative media empire. This week they're worried by the results of a new poll they commissioned.
Apparently their main man, Stephen Harper, has a disapproval rating of more than 50 percent, with only 35 percent approving of him. His approval rating is way down from a year ago, when about the same number of Canadians approved as disapproved of the things he is doing. The same poll put his party even with the NDP at 35 percent.
Since Harper insists that everything is rosy in Harper's Canada, it's striking he would lose so much support, isn't it? But the poll results are not really surprising. After all, the last year was Year One of Harper's Bizarre New Canada with a Conservative majority. He went to work right away — on stuff guaranteed to displease Canadians that wasn't exactly spelled out in his 2011 election campaign.
He killed the Canadian Wheat Board to please friends in the corporate agribusiness, despite the expressed wishes of farmers.
Harper doesn’t need counselling. People really don’t like him.
To accumulate the kind of money needed for big corporate tax giveaways, he fired thousands of workers doing things Canadians rely on, like pension and EI claims, running parks, search and rescue, environmental science… The list goes on and on.
He's filling prisons to a dangerous breaking point with the kind of mandatory minimum sentencing that even right-wingers in the States have moved away from — because they can't afford the huge prison populations that result, and these laws don't work.
He's campaigned constantly for war, and yet left disabled veterans to fend for themselves.
He raised the retirement age, and made unemployment insurance almost impossible to get. He killed 50 years of environmental regulation and federal environmental leadership in an omnibus budget bill last spring, with a new one expected any time now.
It's no wonder Harper's approval rating is shrinking. Besides his own anti-social policies, Mitt Romney's antics in the US are drawing close scrutiny and antipathy to the pro-business ideology Harper also espouses.
Harper doesn't need counselling. The polls show any feelings of rejection that might plague him are not paranoia.
If you mess up people's lives, you can't expect them to like you
About Ish Theilheimer
Ish Theilheimer is founder and president of Straight Goods News and has been Publisher of the leading, and oldest, independent Canadian online newsmagazine, StraightGoods.ca, since September 1999. He is also Managing Editor of PublicValues.ca. He lives wth his wife Kathy in Golden Lake, ON, in the Ottawa Valley.
eMail: ish@straightgoods.com
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