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.

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Stephen Harper is not interested in root causes or academic debates. When Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau suggested in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings that acts of terrorism are best seen in the context of their social causes, Harper swiftly rejected the idea.

At a press conference in Ottawa, Harper responded to Trudeau by declaring that now is not the time to “commit sociology.” As a counter-proposal, Harper said that terrorists are simply “people who have agendas of violence that are deep and abiding threats to all the values that our society stands for.”

It was a familiar piece of rhetoric straight out of the George W. Bush playbook. Terrorists are enemies of freedom who only understand the language of violence. Politicians need to be strong leaders who can cut through the complexity of the modern world with decisive action. Politics is merely the act of choosing sides.

But Harper’s strange linguistic turn of describing sociology as something that one “commits” (what else collocates with that verb?) wasn’t just the return of stale War on Terror posturing. It points beyond anti-terrorism legislation and partisan spats to the deeper roots of Conservative strategy.

His aversion to critical thought aside, Prime Minister Harper is correct in saying that acts of terrorism are an affront to Canadian values. Violence against civilians should have no place in Canadian politics, either domestically or internationally. But it isn’t just terrorists who are excluded from Canada’s imagined community. 

In working to build support for the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines, the Conservatives have repeatedly described opponents of pipeline development as radicals. The implication is that these activists are so unhinged in their opposition to fossil fuels that they have placed themselves beyond the pale of Canadian public discourse. In Conservative parlance, a radical is someone blindly given over to some niche ideology, with no understanding of common sense or the good of the nation.

There’s a considerable amount of overlap between radicals and terrorists in popular usage of the two terms. The mention of radicals conjures images of black bloc tactics, property destruction and pipeline bombings. Terrorists are said to have undergone a process of radicalization, in which they transformed from normal citizens into murderous villains. 

In the United States, where a wave of prosecutions against environmental activists has been labeled a “green scare,” the line between political radicals and terrorists is even more blurred. Members of groups such as the Earth Liberation Front have been prosecuted as domestic terrorists for acts of sabotage and property destruction, although they were deliberately calculated to avoid harming human beings.

In a further abuse of language, American activists who film deplorable conditions in slaughterhouses have been labeled “animal rights terrorists.” New legislation called “ag-gag” laws threatens to criminalize the simple act of filming animal abuse in factory farms.

The end result is that the terms radical environmentalist and eco-terrorist become interchangeable. By equating radicalism with extremism and violence, the political center grows narrower, and those whose views are not represented in government find themselves outside the borders of the body politic.

But when we trace the meaning of radical to its Latin origins, we find something completely different. Radical comes from the Latin radicalis, meaning “of or having roots.” In English, the term originally describes going to the origins or root causes of something, and in its political sense refers to “change from the roots.”

Seen in this light, Stephen Harper’s response to Trudeau’s comments begins to make a little more sense. Though he’s far from being a radical himself, Trudeau’s interest in finding the root causes of terrorism places him in the radical tradition. That tradition sees society as something that we have constructed, and therefore as something that we can collectively transform and improve.

The Conservative tradition, on the other hand, sees the social order as a victory over chaos, and something that must be preserved. It is not interested in looking at scientific evidence, participating in genuine debate, or hearing the voices of the oppressed.

The basic strategy of Harper’s Conservatives is to maintain the injustices and errors of Canadian society by making the social order seem timeless, universal and normal. To that end, they cut funding for science, shut down democratic debate and build a constituency through regular appeals to common sense.

Examples of this abound in Conservative policy. Since common sense tells us that criminals are bad people, we need to build more prisons and issue tougher sentences—despite mountains of evidence on the greater effectiveness of rehabilitation programs. Since oil is a valuable commodity, we need to extract it—even if the resulting wealth goes to a tiny minority, while the rest of us face the ballooning costs of adapting to climate change.

When confronted with threats to the social order, whether from terrorism or imminent climate change, Conservatives react by doing more of the same: more police powers, more oil extraction, more common sense.

Contrary to what Prime Minister Harper thinks, now is the perfect time to commit sociology—to go to the roots. To solve the problems of growing inequality and the ecological limits of growth, we need more than advertising campaigns extolling flimsy economic actions plans. To confront the reality of climate change, we need to draw on scientific evidence as well as democratic debate to transform the way we produce, consume and distribute wealth. Above all, we need to see society not only as something to be defended, but as something that we can radically improve.

Image Credit: PMO photogallery.

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