Hostel Return

I used to stay in hostels all the time when I was a young backpacker. Time and responsibility have sort of made their necessity fade. However, recently I had the opportunity to stay at one in Edmonton, and one evening I appreciated the encapsulation of the hostel experience.

Booklist 2015

Booklist 2015

January 1-March 19

1.       Excalibur by Bernard Cornwell

2.       Neuromancer by William Gibson

3.       Watch You Bleed by Stephen Davis

4.       Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks

5.       Self by Yann Martel

6.       The Call of the Wild by Jack London

7.       My Best Stories by Alice Munro

8.       The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

9.       The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

10.   Writers Workshop in a Book by various.

11.   Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

March 20-June 21

12.   Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell

13.   Enter Night by Mick Wall

14.   A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

15.   15 Canadian Poets X2 Ed. By Gary Geddes

16.   The Right to Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier

17.   The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J.R.R. Tolkien

18.   Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald

June 22-Sept 20

19.   The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

20.   Let the Elephants Run by David Usher

21.   The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

22.   The National Dream by Pierre Berton

23.   The Secret World of Og by Pierre Berton

24.   The Poets Corner by John Lithgow

25.   Supergods by Grant Morrison

26.   The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Sept 20-Dec 31

27.   Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

28.   The Martian by Andy Weir

29.   World Religions Thomas A. Robinson and Hillary P. Rodrigues

30.   No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

31.   The Last Spike by Pierre Berton

32.   Punishment by Linden MacIntyre

33.   Vimy by Pierre Berton

34.   Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

Unsoical Mediation

"John S. has responded to your comment . . ."

You all know the feeling. Flipping through your news feed you see some joke, some picture, some meme, some comment. You consider yourself cavalier when it comes to political correctness, but you see this right thing at the right time in light of the right events and it manages to irk you. To get under your digital skin.

              Pick your issue, but all of us no matter how tolerant have some group that is ne touch pas.

              Before you react you may have the wisdom or at least the experience to reproach yourself, to remind yourself that no good can come from taking a stand on a digital timeline. But, dammit, you’re peeved. Finally, for whichever of the thousand justifications you have that all basically sound the same and add up to the same, you react, you respond.

              You comment. You hit reply and say your piece. 

              A few minutes later, the offending party responds. Or one of their supporters does. Or one of yours. Or some innocent bystander, some patronizing pedant, some deliberately offensive troglodyte, some bleeding heart.

              Knowing what you’ve got yourself into but unable to resist, you respond to the response.

              And we’re off. Like a starburst of dominoes, the “debate” goes out, drawing from all, affecting all, swaying none none.

              If I may for a time continue with my second-person hypothetical, in the eventual fallout of this ultimately useless argument, perhaps you say or have said to you some nasty words. Maybe you come away resenting an actual human because of their online expression of self. Maybe the real person and created persona begin to blend in your head.

              So maybe you see the folly in this—once again—and you decide—once again—to swear off debating on this particular social medium. Maybe—once again—you start calling into question what good this medium is actually bringing to your life, to the world, to rhetoric. Maybe you quit cold turkey, feeling a sense of freedom. You indulge in your human relationships, finding yourself agreeing readily with points that don’t reflect you ideologically and spiritually to the letter.

              A day of this new found freedom goes by. Another. Someone posts an article or a joke and tags you. In person they berate you for not responding, for not ratifying their existence with commentary in the public sphere. You start getting emails from medium itself telling you there’s stuff you’re missing, like you stepped out of a loud party for some fresh air but someone keeps calling for you.

              You start to get antsy, start to feel withdrawn. You tell yourself you’ll have one quick look. “Just one.”

              Next thing you know, you’re right back where you started.

              And yes, the diction’s intentional: this experience is supposed to sound like that experience. And no, I don’t think that’s over-stating it.

              Because I think addicts would attest that only at the deepest in their drug would they show how truly awful good people can be.

              Several times I’ve “quit” Facebook. I'm certainly not very active—outside of elections—compared to what I was a few years back. I’d like to avoid it, but the fact is I still find it the best way to interact with many of my distant friends, and yes, sometimes I find vines, videos, and George Takei entertaining. I deplore those who treat anything that’s posing as news on Facebook as news and I also tire of those who use it to feed their narcissism. That said, the only hard rule for Facebook behaviour is that how you behave on Facebook is how someone says you shouldn’t behave on Facebook.

              In the decade or so of the term and the medium’s existence, social media with Facebook and Twitter as the flagships have degraded. Like the Internet itself, they began as something that offered so much to so many but are now just barely doing anything, and much of the time doing more harm than good.

              It—yes, I’m using this singular pronoun for “social media” if you’ll forgive my catch-all c.2009 jingoism, because IT is the word for addiction and cancer—is the place we see humans being terrible. Sometimes hiding in anonymity, but at least hiding behind a digital ID that we have all agreed to consider as different than an actual human, people say and do things that are simply unacceptable and we accept them because of the venue.

              It’s no good. I’m calling us out. We’re a bunch of digital brutes.

              And I’m not saying I’m not guilty. I’ve often used it as a forum for my political views, but I’d say I’m very rare in that I’m clear that there’s a line between politics and personality, between ideology and prejudice. Facebook and Twitter abound in racism, sexism, and most of all the unrepentant, glaring perpetuation of ignorance. Dare I say it, our social media have become the playground of the wilfully stupid.

              Where my mind fair boggles is that still, after some twenty years of accessible public Internet, it's hunky dory to be racist, sexist, dumb and loud, etc. on-line, as if who we are and what we do in that most public of forums is still sort of not us, not real. We’re just pretending to promote hate, not really doing it.

              Fact: many people I know behave on-line in a manner they wouldn’t dare in real, human life. Twenty years ago, they never would’ve opened their doors and hollered “Don’t you hate Muslims?” They’d never knowingly put up a billboard that deliberately misinformed or, worse, believe any billboard they saw as truth. They’d never come up to a random stranger reading a newspaper and start an argument about an opinion piece that ended up in a contest of personal insults.

              Yet these same folks post racist rants, share and believe memes that my pet fish could sling together and call “facts,” or patrol the comments sections of news pieces looking to pick a fight.

              (Incidentally, the CBC’s disabling of comments on indigenous news pieces due to hate posts is an indication of a bigger issue. There has never been a justification for the comments sections of online news, and it does us nothing but bad as a species that they continue to exist.)

              I actually believed that we were outgrowing “I’m not a racist/sexist/homophobe/moron, but . . .” as an introduction to something decidedly racist/sexist/homophobic/moronic, but it’s wormed its way into our on-line lexicon. It’s become acceptable. Every avatar feels the pedantic right to “Well, actually” on any post by anyone about anything. And to be pretty darn petty whilst doing so too. 

              Facebook started out as something good and bad. So did Twitter. Ironically, this step forward in communication has meant a gigantic step backward in our social evolution.

              Facebook and Twitter, and their many bastard offspring, are where people feel safe being awful. Wanton bigotry and stupidty reign.

              Social media. It’s full of media, but it’s hardly social. Facebook is where we deface ourselves because of its facelessness. And Twitter is where we’re twits.

              Stop it. 

My Canada

Well, quite the year for us Albertan Canadians.

I’ve decided to swear off political blogging for at least a twelvemonth—after all Henry V is an uninteresting play because it’s essentially just a line of victories and no one cares about consecutive wins—but it’s the flush (in both meanings of the word) of politics that drives me to set these words down about about Canada, but specifically my Canada.

What is this Canada? Does it even exist any more?

Canada is an unwieldy state, a nation far too big for its population. Every definitive moment in its history is themed with working on a place that in very good sense has no business existing as it is.

There are divisions between East and West so deep it’s a wonder we’ve never got around to the world’s most polite civil war. There are those who stand rigidly on their side of this geographical divide and hold that we are a nation carved, East and West, regions, Alberta and Quebec. I am not one of those.

Perhaps my vision has always been to grand. For several years now I’ve wondered if I am not an Eastern Canadian at heart. I know I am not, but if one were to embrace stereotypes, then one could say that I am perhaps better suited to Montreal or Ottawa or Halifax. If Easterners value learning above all, culture and art and history, and are more attuned with their European roots, then perhaps that’s where I belong. If Westerners only value hard work, and by work I mean physical labour, and there’s no room for wasteful and frivolous pursuits like reading and painting, where the aim in life is to make money no matter the how, where traditional values and good Christian living are the norm, then truly I’m not a Westerner. But this is also a stereotype, and neither is true, so I cannot be either for I am not false in my identity.

I am a Canadian, truly.

My Canada stretches from ocean to ocean, from border to Arctic. My Canada has a capital in Ottawa, a breadbasket in the Prairies, a glory in the Rockies, and a conscience in Regina. My Canada is a cultural mosaic with two official languages, three levels of government, and one queen. My Canada has its faults, has made its mistakes, and has a history of people marginalized and wronged to make up to. But it is a great place. My Canada is not something to carve up, but something to work and live for and even, if I may say something decidedly un-Canadian: to brag about. It’s not to be broken by petty and short-sighted ideological and geographical squabbles. It is a grand impossibility because the best ideas should be just a little to big and a little too impossible for fear of being lost to complacency.

A year ago, a man killed a soldier, striking violence into the heart of our nation and shaking us as a people. In Vancouver a week later I shook the hand of a uniformed veteran who was standing vigilant for a day at a downtown war memorial, tears in his eyes contagious. Standing there at a spot closer to Phoenix than Ottawa, he was unified with his brethren in the East.

Yet there were some who remained unmoved by those events for they were Eastern events, as foreign to them as the war in Syria. In the Alberta floods of 2013 there was an outpouring of support and aid from our Eastern family, and yet among them voices that delighted at seeing a humbling of the loud, wealthy, redneck child in our Confederation family.

This is not—as I’ve said—a political or even an ideological post, but I must add that the recent federal election exposed an ugly side to us that is tied to how we define what a Canadian is. Forgetting that our nation is a mosaic grown strong because of its diversity, there are those who would tell us that a Canadian is not a Muslim, not a Punjabi or Arabic or Chinese speaker, not a woman in a niqab, not a refugee looking for sanctuary. True, but neither is a Canadian a Christian, a French or English speaker, a white man in a cowboy hat, or a fourth generation fisherman. It’s not that simple, you see, but then it also can be, for a Canadian is a person who lives in Canada, who adds their tile to the fuller picture.

A Canadian is a person who understands where this nation has come from in order to help steer it where it needs to go. A Canadian tries to preserve the whole but understands the strengths has always been in the adaptability of the parts. A Canadian is not one who would try to subvert this, try to divide a nation and its people. A Canadian is neither selective nor exclusive.

My Canada is like a marriage or a tree or a child. It grows, it changes, it adapts. It must be nurtured and can never remain as it was for a period forever. To stay unchanging means it must die. To stop a marriage, a tree, a child at a point is to kill it.

So it goes with a nation. My Canada is a flawed thing but also a glorious thing worth steering past the divisions that threaten it. It, and all of us within, will be better for getting past the chasms to the other side.      

That Immigrant Song

Fox News artist's concept. 

“What we know is we’ve figured out a simple truth—one which evades too many of us in this broken world. And that simple truth is just this: nous sommes ici ensemble. We’re in this together. Our neighbour’s strength is our strength; the success of any one of us is the success of very one of us. And, more important, the failure of any one of us is the failure of every one of us.”—Naheed Nenshi

                Let’s suppose it happened somewhere else. Somewhere more tolerable to our delicate opinions, somewhere less volatile, somewhere not so suspiciously newsworthy. Let’s say it happened in Norway, beautiful Norway. A cataclysm, a crisis.

                Let’s say that in the near future there’s an oil industry disaster, or something more far-fetched like a Nordic earthquake or a Swedish invasion (pfft) or a disease that affects only healthy, ridiculously good-looking, and educated Scandinavians or, since we’ve gone this far, let’s say the frost giants come back and it’s Ragnarök.

                Point is, the very worst happens to lovely Norge and the people have to flee. They need to run, and they need help.

                So, do we close our borders to them, remembering that they were once Viking marauders, once raiders and killers, and according to their metal scene there are still some who lean that way? How can we possible who among those masses of women and children side with the All-Father? Or do we spend months and years putting them into camps so we can say we’re “screening” them, weeding out the bad seeds, when really just keeping them at arm’s length? This is our way of making sure that we keep out one, just one, who worships Tyr?

                Because, if we’re afraid what this group of educated and physically-fit Northmen who could serve as a potential labour force in an aging nation with a low birth-rate will do to us if we let them in, those camps are better than ghettos, right? Because that’s where we’ll be putting these people, or where they’ll put themselves. Little Viking corners of cities. Ghettos. And historically, those always turn out okay, right?

                Ah, but—and if I may continue my roll of satirical rhetorical query—why is it our problem? Why aren’t the Swedes, the Danes, the Faroese, the Icelanders, hell, the Minnesotans taking in their fellow Scandinavians?

                I would that it’s shameful how nations that in my mind are so similar to Norway—and thus, not so put off by their strange customs—are not taking in who I view as “their own.” But then, I would recall that the constitutional monarchy I live in is and always has been defined metaphorically as a mosaic, a culture that has always been defined by its immigrants. To define those immigrants as only a certain type is to ignore history and to show evidence of far too much viewing of American television.

                But then I might say that this is different. I know that this country was built by immigrants—and don’t bring up that whole tired Native thing because they just need to learn to live in our society and get over it—but those immigrants should be white, Christian, English-speaking and look like the Royal Family. Can we just agree to sign up for the next Irish potato famine and take no immigrants until then? We have no room for these Norsemen in a country that takes up the second-biggest area in the world and has the population of one (uno) Mexican city. We’ve had enough issues with the Frenchies forcing their unused tongue onto our cereal boxes.
               And what about the homeless and the impoverished Canadians? Shouldn’t we take care of them first? I always worry about them . . . whenever I need an excuse to refuse immigrants. After that I ignore them completely, the societal leeches. (“Spare a loonie?” “Get outta here, y’greaseball.”) I mean, you can't  support more than one charity at a time, it's not possible!

                We can’t let these Norwegians in, they’ll change our culture. Just like the Vietnamese did in the 80s. I mean, those people just about took our culture over with their straw hats and sub shops and . . . y’know, stuff. What if these immigrants try to eat herring or put slashes through Os or do biathlons? Next thing you know our dignified and ancient and unchanged heritage will be altered, the one that has been exactly the same since the arrival of the NATIVES EUROPEANS CHINESE TO BUILD THE RAILWAY AMERICAN LOYALISTS JAPANESE FISHERMEN PEOPLE FLEEING THE WAR OF 1812, WORLD WAR 1, WORLD WAR 2, COLD WAR, KOREAN WAR, VIETNAM WAR . . . immigrants.

                I mean, sure, a mosaic is made up of lots of little pictures, but I feel the best mosaic has tiles that are all the same colour. Like the walls of a prison shower.

I know, I know, there really is no “archetypal Canadian” but we know for sure what a Canadian is not. It’s not some blonde-haired blue-eyed hulk in a funny sweater and bizarre curling pants with an affinity for cod!

                We need to keep this country pure, and by pure I mean, y’know, my idealized version of how it was when my dad was six, when there were still residential schools and racial and gender segregation, when we shot the gays and a woman knew her place was bellied up to the stove, and there were no Arabs or Africans or Chinese people (outside of a laundromat) around here. Y’know, the time when the world was right.

                Plus, these people come to our country and they don’t even mix. These Norwegians would be just the same. Soon every city will have this Little Oslo, where you don’t feel safe at night and everything smells like seawater and elksteak. They won’t blend with us locals, like we do when we go to Mexico and the one day we leave the resort where we actually go through the gate and we go to the cleanest-looking McDonald’s we can find and we try to see how these people really live for an afternoon.

                This is all just hypothetical, of course. It’s a “what if” for putting in perspective. This wouldn't happen in Canada because of course we wouldn’t keep a people out just because they’re different, just because we don’t understand them, just because we’re ignorant and don’t really have a good handle on the situation, just because we're paranoid, just because we’re basing all our thinking on stereotypes and Facebook memes.

                It wouldn’t ever really happen.

(Oh, and Matthew 25: 40-45 for all you scriptural types.)

Dear Harper Supporters, You're Okay

Dear Supporters of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada (aka the Harper Government),

Hi!
     You're okay. You can chill. It's darn cute and you can now relax.
     The rest of us get it. Those of us who may not support his party this time around but may have yet to decide who we will vote for in this election get it.
     You like him. You like him a lot. You're going to vote for his party. You were going to vote for his party before the election was called and before his party had a platform and before anyone else had one either. You were really convicted about that. (Maybe because you vote for his party because "Everyone else is bad," or maybe because you like people who say "economy" and "terrorism" like they're their own answers to questions they ask themselves, or maybe--juuuuuuust maybe--you've actually looked into his party's policies, which I know sounds crazy in an election in a democracy, and somehow you still believe that what he says--the very few things that are actually clear and are actually true at the same time--and feel you can retain your soul.)
     So you can rest easy. It's been proven time and again that his support base supports him, period. They do it. They don't bother themselves with questions of facts, and they don't worry their heads with other choices. "I vote Conservative, I cheer for the Patriots, I don't like mango." Life is pretty good and pretty easy.
     You don't need to bother yourself with a leader who says he balances budgets but creates deficits and then says he's good for the economy. You don't have to concern yourself with a leader who says every Muslim is a potential terrorist and has to be screened. You don't have to concern yourself with a leader who says he's going to limit the Senate's power, then learns to like it, then stacks it with his favourites, then somehow doesn't know that a few of them are corrupt in the administration he micromanages. You don't need to be concerned about a leader who is and always has been (see his party's 2014 mission statement) anti-gay. You don't need to worry a bit about a leader who muzzles people whose job it is to research progress and save us from ourselves. You don't have to ask what this Bill C-51 thing is all about because it sounds like it's just there for criminals and we're too soft on criminals, so bring on the police state. No concerns at all. What a treat!
     You've got it good. The rest of us, those of us who are undecided during an election, who read the news and watch the debates with an open mind, who try to peel through the veil of rhetoric and see the policies we really could stand behind when we mark our X have it pretty rough. I mean, we have to do research and stuff. We have to consider things. We have to actually wonder when someone says something is so, and it just isn't, why this man is the prime minister of our country.
     Ignorance truly is bliss. The ability to believe someone when he tells you black is white, up is down, out is in, must be extremely freeing. I'd love to join you. I really am enough of a swing voter that--if they jettisoned the man in charge, sorry, I'm weak that way--the Conservative Party could hypothetically get my vote if they had policies I supported. It's very stressful this electing a government stuff. I'd much rather be the guy who goes into a restaurant and orders a cheese pizza because he always orders a cheese pizza and he's never even looked at the other menu items because the waiter told me a cheese pizza is good for me and why would the waiter lie so a cheese pizza it is, and you're all freaks and losers for how long you're looking at the menu when clearly you should just have the cheese pizza. I mean, why think?
     I envy you. I really do. I still don't know who I'm voting for. I hate having to consider all of these important things like issues. It's a lot of work and I'm busy.
     So, chill. You can stop posting articles about him, you can stop telling us how good he is. It's a three-way race and you're going to support him to prop up his third no matter what. Relax in that. Enjoy it. Indulge in the joy of being able to do something as critical as mount the government of a nation and you need not put in any more consideration than you would for a Timmy's order. You have it pretty darn good.
     Our prime minister has built his empire on the ignorance of his supporters. You can say rah, rah you've voted and you don't have to do a damn thing but show up at the polls. Bully for you. The prime minister whose only legacy will be the establishment of an over-partisan nation and staying in power for a really long time by doing pretty much nothing is what you have to show for it.
     So, live it, love it. Stop trying to appear to work so hard. Don't bother, don't think. It doesn't suit.

Love,

Contemplative Voters of Canada

Harper's Greatest Sin

o.canada.com

               I make no secret about my opinions on the government of Stephen Harper. He’s the worst Canadian prime minister in history. Saying something, given that recent memory stretches past the bumbling Joe Clark and John Turner, the there-when-the-country-tired-of-the-brand defeatism of Kim Campbell and Paul Martin, or the arrogant and despotic Chrétien, Mulroney, and Trudeau. How bad Harper is stretches past these of recent memory, past Bennett, Meighen, all the way to Sir John A.

    Bastards and boneheads, liars, crooks, men (and a woman) remembered sometimes for their deserving faults, sometimes undeservedly for being much more than they were.

                But Stephen Harper will be remembered as the worst. He is the lowest point the PMO has ever reached, and God help us he may have put us on a path of no return.

                His list of wrongs is great. The muffling of government scientists, the selling off of natural resources, the end of transparency, the backroom deals of which the Duffy trial is just a hint, the ugly and churlish attack ads, the turning of a political party into a one-man power trip, the turning of the PMO into an all-encompassing power hub, the neutering of any free-thinking MPs, the ignoring that he is a prime minister, not a US president; all this while assuming his supporters are too blind, too zealous, or too uninformed about Canadian democracy to see anything wrong here. This is a short list of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s wrongs, but none of these is the worst.

                Harper’s greatest sin is how masterfully he has turned us against each other.

                He came into power at a perfect time for his brand of politics. George W. Bush had convinced much of America that there was a snake under every rock, and we were learning to fire off any opinion we liked behind a shield of online anonymity. The Bush era taught us that you can say anything no matter how ludicrous and you were only accountable for it if you allowed yourself to be. Enter Stevie Harper.

                It was all there when he became leader of the newly-minted Conservative Party of Canada. Harper had learned that his old Reform brand of politicking (the one that saw him take out full page anti-gay [read: hate] ads in western newspapers) was too polarizing. The only consistent motivation he has shown in his career is to gain and retain power. He has seen that the best way to paint yourself as the hero is to always have a villain.

                I’ll never forget a shot in Macleans just prior to the 2006 election showing a self-satisfied Harper in his seat as the leader of the Official Opposition, presumably having just mic-dropped on poor, hapless Paul Martin. (Perhaps he asked how a senior staffer in the PMO could possibly sign off on a giant cheque unbeknownst to the prime minister, say.) All around him, his young Reformed neo-cons waved and hooted. One wild-eyed MP was gesturing “Come at me, bro,” across to someone in the government.

                If you’re not with him, you’re against him. Liberals and socialists and environmentalists and scientists and terrorists are the enemy. Harper is all that stands up to that enemy.

                Much has been made of Harper’s carefully-crafted image, his branding of his party and of the government of this country, his control of every aspect of his administration, his micromanaging of everything that happens in the PMO (with the exception of whatever it is Nigel Wright does with his cheque book). There is no room for dissenting opinions in his party, and his relationship with the media and the voting public fluctuates between the mysterious and the contemptuous.

                But what hasn’t been said enough is how carefully he’s crafted the image of his foes. Harper has been prime minister for almost a decade and has very few discernible policies—brutalizing criminals and attempting to turn Canada into a police state the rare exceptions—to show for it. Where he excels is at attacking fault in his opponents, real or imagined. His entire mode of campaign and governance is summed up in the outline of his attack ads: petty, inaccurate, misleading. By going after shortcomings he avoids any approach to his own. The best defense is a good offensive and his office has been constantly offensive.

                It’s trickled down to the rest of us. Never in my life have people north of the 49^th so defined themselves and their “enemies” by their political affiliation. Support of parties and leaders is as passionate and as illogical as backing a sports team. Harper has rewritten if not totally erased the democratic process by trying to erase the concept of the swing voter. Everyone must choose a side or be relegated to a side if they refuse to pick themselves. Trenches have been dug by supporters and opponents alike. It’s all about what side you’re on, forget how multi-faceted the issues.

                It’s not surprising that his administration has paralleled the rise of social media as our main form of expressing opinion. Look at any political debate on Facebook or Twitter, any comments section of an online news story, and you see people being absolutely awful to each other. Something about the shield of anonymity or at least the allowance for knee-jerk pettiness provided when facing off against a digital face rather than a fleshy one has made us nasty, and it’s suited Harper’s aims just fine.

                Our parliament has become a ridiculous thing to watch. Childish, a caricature of government. It’s a comedian’s punch line summing up politicians in general. Shouting, pointing, with absolutely no intelligent debate. It’s all about partisanship. It is all parties and all MPs involved, but it’s the work of Stephen Harper.

Even in Trudeau and Chrétien’s arrogance, Clark’s flustered interjections, there was more respect for fellow Canadians than this. Hell, even oily Mulroney said “sir” when he called John Turner out. Not so under Harper. It’s not about governing, it’s about winning. Having the power to lead but not doing any real discernible leading.

This is Harper’s greatest sin. Whether his enemies are liberals, socialists, terrorists, or those he simply labels as such, he defines himself by his attacks on them, and so defines the Canadian people by this as well.

His legacy will be the institutions he’s destroyed. Our public parks, our public broadcaster, our lakes and rivers, our economy, our national image, the dignity of our veterans—all sins. But the lasting damage done by Stephen Harper will be his encouragement and exploitation of our indecency.