I thought since you're so familiar with Mr. Trudeau and call him Justin, I'd be familiar with you and call you Stephen.
The water is rising fast, Stephen. You're pretty good on the piano. Maybe you've played a little number by Bob Dylan called "The Times They Are A-Changin'"
Come gather 'round [Stephen]
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
As with Richard Nixon and Watergate, the crime is not so much the initial blunder (paying Mr. Duffy $90,000 to keep quiet), but the lengths you've gone to cover up the crime. You did tell us some months ago, and repeat it now as a daily mantra, that only your then chief of staff, Nigel Wright, and Mike Duffy, knew about the personal cheque. According to emails uncovered by the RCMP, a number of people, including your current chief of staff and campaign manager, Ray Novak, knew about the cheque.
Stephen, either you're not telling us the truth or you have institutionalized a technique that Nixon made famous — plausible deniability. If the people around you agree to tell you nothing about what's going on, then you can claim to know nothing about anything potentially embarrassing or incriminating. Lucky for you, my friend, we don't have impeachment of prime ministers.
When the New York Times (Aug. 14) has a feature article called "The Closing of the Canadian Mind" and includes these sentences — "(T)he nine and half years of Mr. Harper's tenure have seen the slow-motion erosion of that reputation for open, responsible government … He has consistently limited the capacity of the public to understand what its government is doing, cloaking himself and his Conservative party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance" — you know you're in trouble. The U.S. used to be our closest ally.
The article also includes a very simple and powerful sentence: "The Harper years have seen a subtle darkening of Canadian life." We've learned not to seek the common ground but the personal ground, the ground that gives us as individuals, rather than a community, the advantage. You've taken micro-marketing to a precise art and learned to divide us, one against another. There's been an erosion of trust under your watch and an increase of suspicion and paranoia.
When Jeffrey Simpson in The Globe and Mail, Aug. 19 (hardly a left-wing columnist in a left-wing newspaper) summarizes Duffygate in these searing words — "Throughout the affair — and this the take-away lesson of how the Prime Minister's Office operates — everything in the Harper entourage revolved around image, reputation, damage-control and spin. That the truth might and should be told, openly and immediately, never occurred to any of them" — you know you're in trouble.
You've probably gathered by now that I won't be voting for you, Stephen. Here's why. You're anti-science; anti-facts; anti-debate; anti-change; anti-carbon tax; anti-transparency; anti-CBC; anti-day care; anti-environment; anti-Watch Dogs; anti-Parliament; anti-vision; anti-compromise; anti-legacy; anti-research; anti-press; anti-honesty (anti-ethics); anti-budget officer; anti-Supreme Court; anti-UN; anti-Elections Canada.
Thomas Aquinas reportedly once said: "Beware the man of a single book." The one book that you seem to have taken to heart is Machiavelli's "The Prince" — how to get power and how to keep it. The only legacy you seem concerned about is the retention of power and the destruction of the Liberal Party.
Stephen, you're a rigid, uncompromising man for whom the world is black and white with no shades of grey. You have no sense of irony, ambiguity, or paradox, no practice of self-doubt or self-questioning. Beneath the well-tailored suits and the forced smile is a quiet ideologue and a soft-spoken fundamentalist. You're just not ready to be prime minister anymore.
John
P.S. I like your hairstyle, the northern equivalent of "The Donald" — not a hair out of place.
J.S. Porter reads and writes in Hamilton.
