The Harper Government’s War on Critical Thinking

The oligarchy on Parliament Hill has spoken — the next phase of operation “The Slow and Painful Death of Freedom in Canada” is an all-out war on critical thought.

For no more is Canada a place to irreverently “commit sociology,” or disrespectfully engage in “academic pondering” over simple problems like terrorism. We’ve not the time for petty scientific inquiry regarding such trivial matters as environmental degradation or global warming. And it’s best to just ignore frivolous problems like increased inequality, abhorrent aboriginal conditions, and unflinching gender gaps.

After all, “the root cause of terrorism is terrorists.” That’s it, case closed. Just as the root cause of pollution is the environment. Unemployment – that’s employees. Drug abuse, the abusive drugs, and gun violence, well it’s all those violent guns we’ve got.

So keep calm, we’ll win the wars on drugs and terror if we continue trading rights and freedoms for safety and security. As for the rest of our hindrances — fear not, the free market will fix everything. In the mean time, we’ll continue to chip away at those cumbersome social safety nets and outsource any means of production, if you promise to continue spending money you don’t have on things you don’t really need.

After all, according to Dear Leader Harper, “we know what Canadians want.”

Of course, Harper is not alone in his anti-intellectual quest to rid Canadians of that pesky desire to engage in attentive reflection before unapprised reaction. That “we” are his posse of cronies — cabinet ministers and backbench MPs alike who serve as PR foot soldiers in the ongoing war against reason, knowledge, and critical thought.

Sounds sensationalistic? I wish it were — but let’s survey the damage by unpacking some distressing exploits of the Harper Government’s most infamous lieutenants.

In a shameful attempt to pass Bill C-30 — a supressing legislation that authorised the warrantless acquisition of any private citizen’s online history, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews insisted that Canadians who didn’t back the bill were supporting child pornographers. A pitifully illogical tautology that does its best to take any thinking out of the equation, and guilt-trip Canadians into mindlessly embracing bad policy.

Not to be outdone, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver — a former banker with no professional environmental background at all, has taken to fool-heartedly insisting that he knows more about the ecological risks associated with an oil pipeline than a top NASA climate scientist. Call it another humiliating case of an oblivious minister doing his darndest to make sure Canadians don’t go using our bothersome brains.

Speaking of oblivious, enter Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird — a notorious fear-monger with an affinity for hyperbolic rhetoric. Baird likens Middle Eastern leaders to Hitler, insists that Iran has first-strike intentions against Israel, and in a blunder that both ostracised secular-to-mildly religious Israelis and disregarded diplomacy, he brought an ultra-orthodox rabbi — who fervently opposes Palestinian statehood, along with him as his “teacher and mentor” on an official state visit to the region.

Meanwhile, Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenny continues to nourish a “deep-rooted, yet widely ignored undercurrent of racism in Canadian society” by abolishing all but the most basic healthcare for refugee groups, and using taxpayer dollars to fund official government billboards in Hungarian cities warning prospective Roma asylum-seekers they’ll be swiftly deported from Canada.

As for the Minister for the Status of Women — Rona Ambrose, she was one of ten cabinet ministers who voted in favour of Motion 312 — which moves to reopen the abortion debate in Canada with the specific aim of eliminating a woman’s right to choose. Thus, the MP tasked with working to equalise gender rights in Canada is one of only ten ministers officially supporting the re-appropriation of the female body.

Don’t forget Defense Minister Peter Mackay’s fighter jet debacle, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s breach of the Conflict of Interest Act, or former International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda’s luxurious spending habits, I could go on, but you get the picture.

What’s more, the Harper Government’s affinity for blunt and reactionary policy that favours the strong hand of retribution hasn’t solved anything — the drug war is an utter failure, our environmental record is irrefutably dismal, the war on terror is self-defeating as well as costly — both in terms of freedoms and dollars, the poverty rate continues to increase, and currently, the gender gap won’t close for 228 years.

If we combine the abuses and misuses of power in the Cabinet with the above list of “act first, think never” policy catastrophes, it paints a bleak national portrait indeed.

The Harper Government must believe the majority of Canadians to be incompetent, apathetic, and too simplistic to take note of their ultimate vision. How else can you explain trying to brazenly yank such an excess of wool over our collective eyes?

But this ultimate vision is slowly becoming clear. By callously stifling the research of our scientists, forcefully restricting our ability to assemble, unnervingly assuming increased control over the CBC, ominously redrafting our national history to reflect images of a Conservative polity, and sloppily framing critical and analytical musings by concerned citizens, journalists, and academics alike as patronisingly “committing sociology,” the Harper Government is meticulously eradicating our means of democratic debate.

And in treating critical thinking as indulgence, something that a good government has no time for because they’re too busy “governing,” Harper is trying to enshrine a notion of his party as the so-called defenders of what he believes to be the “average Canadian” — who upholds the status quo without asking too many tough questions.

However, as an open letter from dozens of Canadian academics indicates, we need to be questioning and thinking critically now more than ever.

In doing so, we can show the Harper Government that those “average, simple-minded Canadians” they believe to be representing, do a great deal more thinking than we’re given credit for.