January 2, 2008
Villain: Stephen Harper, Jim Flaherty, et al.
Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset.
Probably the most stirring piece of art displayed in Toronto this year, Scott Sørli's "Common Sense Revolution" [PDF] juxtaposed the rise and fall of welfare rates in Ontario with totemically-stacked lists of the names of the homeless men and women who died in this city each year from 1985-2006. The relationship between social-assistance rates and the well-being of society's most vulnerable isn't in itself surprising; what's revelatory is the confirmation of the suspicion that Mike Harris and the Progressive Conservatives who ran this province from 1995-2003 are responsible, directly or indirectly, for more deaths and the ruination of more lives than any of the most notorious killers in this country's history. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka murdered three, maybe four, people; Mike Harris and his buddies took out seven in Walkerton alone.
And entrusting those buddies (such as Jim Flaherty, formerly Ontario's Finance Minister, now the federal government's) with the whole damn country has led to predictable results, as they continue to gleefully starve the social programs and urban centres that they first decimated a decade ago, while applying the same tough love on a nationwide scale. When Harris's spiritual successor, Stephen Harper, came with Flaherty to Toronto in September to announce that their government had even more money than expected and, guess what, it's all going to tax cuts, it was as though Bazis International had held a press conference at Seaton House to proclaim the addition of another dozen storeys to 1 Bloor East.
Those who give the Conservatives the benefit of the doubt attribute their attitude to an evangelical faith in the redemptive power of the free market––but there comes a certain point at which it's more comforting to think of our leaders as selfish and cruel rather than intractably deluded.
Photo from the Darryl Wolk Blog.
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Thank you for heeding my request, back when you announced your intention to have a Villains list.
Of course, unsatisfied by the death and destruction they can wreak on communities by financially strangling them, the Conservatives have set their sights on the world at large with their knuckle-dragging resistance to acknowledging the need for action on climate change.
Harper has one of the least reassuring faces I've ever not been reassured by.
Seeing those vandals leering like hyenas and jabbing their thumbs like that just makes me think, "No, up yours."
Villains...definitely on so many levels. I read in the NP that the chances of a CONservative majority are slim should an election occur. It does a heart good to read that at the beginning of another year.
I'm sensing a huge effort to wipe the smirks off the big-man and the dwarfs face in 2008! These two are too incompetent to govern.
Great post, but why use "leaders"?
Political office provides opportunities for leadership, but it's obvious this group has deliberately squandered theirs—John Baird did it so well, he earned his own "Villian" citation.
Leadership involves positive motivation, setting ambitious goals, cooperation will all stakeholders in any enterprise (not merely those who elected you), and building valuable goodwill through working for the benefit of others. "Canada's New Government" has done none of the above.
Technically they're "representatives," possibly they're "villains", collectively they're the "cabinet," but by no stretch of the imagination are they "leaders."