In his recent book Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think Tank Colleagues have Transformed Canada, author and adjunct SFU professor Donald Gutstein outlines a battle being waged in Canada for the “climate of ideas.”

The Prime Minister is often thought of as a lone wolf, “the rogue conservative who marches to his own drummer.” But it’s not so, argues Gutstein. Harper is merely “one side of an ideological coin.”

The flipside is the network of key influencers — politicians, industry titans, think tanks, journalists — who work to advance not just Harper’s agenda, but the agenda of neoliberalism that serves powerful private interests, Gutstein says.

According to Gutstein, public sentiment in Canada — around things like environmental policy, free-market orthodoxy and the collection of taxes — is strongly influenced by a cadre of like-minded individuals and organizations who work in conjunction to, for example, sway public opinion on implementing a carbon tax or funding the arts.

The overall effect of this strategy has been the emergence of Harperism, a political style ruled by market logic and economic freedom. What has been lost along the way is robust democratic participation in Canadian decision-making, checks and balances, scientific integrity and the influence of civil society groups, Gutstein argues.

I recently spoke with Gutstein about attacks on environmental groups in Canada and asked him to explain how he sees this factoring into the broader political landscape.

Q: How do you see oil and gas interests, free-market think tanks and the Conservative government banding together to “neutralize,” as you say in your book, environmental opposition?

A: Harper and the think tanks rarely get together but they do work together in a very well understood way. The think tanks are working over a long period of time to change the climate of ideas. They can’t force us to think differently but they cast doubt on the motivation of environmental groups — ‘where do you get your funding?” — these questions are up in the air.

That makes it easier for Harper to do something: attack them, cut off their funding or ignore them. It makes it easier to happen today than it was 10 years ago. I do think environmental groups’ reputations have been sullied or tarnished by this constant work on them.

The articles, the op-ed pieces, the news stories with quotes from the think tanks — all this eventually changes the climate of ideas about environmentalism.

Q: I really like this idea in your book of transforming the “climate of ideas.” It sheds a light on how democracy works, or the way that opinions or perspectives are formed within a democratic setting. Things like the credibility of environmental organizations are really up for grabs in the media. You see grand claims being made, often without substantiation, that could damage the reputation of an environmental organization. I think it was Mark Twain who said ‘a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.’ How do you see this strategy of casting doubt and changing the climate of ideas at work in our democracy?

A: I’d probably need to think more about this question, but one example springs to mind: when Ezra Levant was doing his Ethical Oil campaign he would write op-eds in the Toronto Sun attacking Greenpeace, but the Toronto Sun would never give any space to Greenpeace to say what they are really about or to respond to Levant’s wild charges.

So all the readers knew about Greenpeace was what they read from Ezra Levant.

The way the media frame stories, who they give voices to — that has a lot to do with what ideas gain in credibility and get a more positive or more negative tarnish to it.

That’s just one example, but it’s a bigger picture.

I appreciate that things have changed quite a bit because of Twitter, Facebook and the internet, but I think that the corporate media still play a defining role in determining which ideas get promoted, and which ideas are ignored.

I love that quote…“If the media don’t report on an issue, it might as well not exist.” I think that’s so profound. It’s the other side of asking: which ideas do they promote, and how do they spin them, which things are credible and which are not?

I think the media still play an important role…even on the Internet. So much of what is on Facebook and Twitter are responses or commentaries to what’s in the media.

Q: Do you see certain individuals being deployed as ‘ambassadors’ of anti-environmental or free-market ideas?

A: Oh sure. That’s a long-standing strategy. Just this morning someone contacted me about an article I wrote on Rabble about John Luik, who was a frontman for the tobacco industry. He wrote all these books and papers and was secretly funded by the tobacco industry for years and years.

He’s the model. There are lots of people like this that operate as individuals. [Luik] even did work — wrote a book — for the Fraser Institute criticizing the need to regulate second-hand smoke. Individuals exist as individual personalities and in a way they can seem more credible.

Q: Do you see individuals like blogger Vivian Krause in this kind of light? She appeared on the scene as this independent researcher just asking questions on the Internet and in no time she was thrust into the national spotlight and given some of our most prominent media platforms. On her resume she even credits herself with initiating the Canada Revenue Agency investigation and audits of Canada’s environmental charities. It seems she’s become a ‘rising star’ because her narrative served the interests and needs of the Harper government and the fossil fuel industry. Do you see her falling into the typical pattern of how individuals are deployed to serve certain interests?

A: There are hundreds of millions of bloggers, so why did she rise to the top? She’s getting op-eds in the news media and it’s interesting to look at that.

She writes for the National Post, which is the most amenable to this kind of corporate propaganda. The Financial Post, which is just the business section of the National Post, is edited by Terrance Corcoran and he’s for a long time gone after ‘junk science’ and has attacked Greenpeace and the environmental movement for decades. So that would be a really good home for her.

[Krause] wouldn’t have really gotten anywhere unless corporate media and some of the industry groups started seeing the benefit of having her.

If she can take away from the harm they’re doing to the environment and move it to the supposedly nasty things that the energy industry’s critics are up to then that really gets the heat off them to a large extent.

She would be playing a pretty significant role for them.

Q: What do you anticipate happening in Canada over the next year as we move into the next federal election?

A: Well that’s an interesting one. Harper has so many files open, from the one on the First Nations property ownership act, trying to transform First Nations [reserves] into private property, but that’s sort of on hold. He moved forward on it to a point. And then the attacks on environmentalists have gone so far…it’s hard to know what he’ll focus on.

They’ve set the narrative for the next election with income-sharing and the child tax benefits.

…

If Stephen Harper is voted back in it will be unimaginable, the plans he has ready to go.

If the Harper Conservatives did get back in, it’s incremental, he would move to deregulate new areas, remove the significance of scientific information. He would find places here and there.

He would probably boost the ability of environment Canada to do financial costing of ecosystem services.

It’s never going to be a huge move, it’s always going to be these small steps, but they all add up eventually into something huge. 

Image Credit: Prime Minister's Photo Gallery

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If revenge is indeed a dish that's best served cold, the President of Cool just served up a four-star pièce de résistance for Stephen Harper.

Tuesday's announcement of Obama's planned veto of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline should not have been surprising, yet when the blow came it carried a shocking intensity.

And how did things go so badly that Canada doesn't have the heft or goodwill in Washington to add a single pipeline to a nation benoodled with them? The answer lies in the delusional hubris of Stephen Harper.

No close watcher of the president should be surprised. In myriad ways, the prime minister's personal ambition shredded our nation's single most important relationship and drew us into the toxic swamp of Washington's poisonous politics.

It's been going on for years.

In early 2008, during the heat of the U.S. primary season, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) leaked a highly confidential communication by the Obama campaign to the benefit of the Republican Party. While no culprit was ever found, speculation fell on the Canadian embassy in Washington, and the 27-year-old son of a Republican congressman who'd been installed there at the behest of the PMO and Stockwell Day.

Unfortunately for Harper, the young candidate Obama overcame the Republican trap laid for him, displaying a masterful command of politics and the art of rope-a-dope. Wiser heads might have been chastened by that experience, and taken heed of the new president's admonition that "elections have consequences," and wiser heads might have considered the damage done to Canada when our PMO's confidentiality isn't trusted.

But wiser heads would not have been so intoxicated by a vision of Canada as a 21st-century energy superpower.

Harper's unbending ambition set him on collision course with a president intent to act on climate change. For anyone watching closely, all the signals were there that Obama would turn to the environment as a major pillar of his legacy.

So it was a foolish miscalculation for Harper to turn Canada and the oilsands into an international symbol of climate obstinacy. But that's a fight he picked. Not content to simply promote the Canadian energy industry and accommodate international pressure for action on the climate, Harper raised the stakes by muzzling scientists and launching an an all-out vendetta on prominent conservation groups.

And while the PM maintained a rigid stance on climate change policy abroad, his proxies at home unleashed a campaign to single out and vilify some of America's and the world's most illustrious scientific research foundations, governed by people like Bush's White House director of science and technology policy, the provost of Harvard, Stanford dean of law and the like.

There probably isn't a more effective way to become an international pariah than the path chosen by Stephen Harper.

But that's only part of the story. In the autumn of 2012, with America in full campaign mode, it was Benjamin Netanyahu's turn to "blatantly interfere" in the election on behalf of Republican candidate Mitt Romney's financier Sheldon Adelson, which he did by single-handedly making war with Iran an election issue.

The U.S. Republicans are certainly refining their game of luring foreign allies into meddling in American elections against their own interests. The 2012 Netanyahu war maneuver was a major step up on the 2008 Harper PMO leak.

In September 2013, Harper travelled to New York to pointedly skip (again) the opening session of the UN General Assembly, but make a high-profile appearance to lecture Obama in his backyard that Canada "would not take no for an answer" on Keystone. What does that even mean?

Yet just months later, in early January 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry was in Israel on a delicate mission to restart talks with the Palestinians. Because the State Department also has management of the Keystone file, John Kerry was important to Canada. But no sooner had Kerry left Israel than Netanyahu caused an uproar by unilaterally approving annexation of another settlement block in Palestinian lands.

By sheer coincidence, Harper arrived on Kerry's heels to serenade Netanyahu with a Beatles song, pick up an honorary degree, and rise in the Knesset to equate criticism of Israel's policies with anti-Semitism.

Translation: the White House can stuff it.

It's nothing short of bizarre that Harper publicly dissed the U.S. cabinet minister in charge of the Keystone file at the same time he's hounding the U.S. for a favourable outcome. That's not diplomacy – it's not even manners. And something's very unsettling about both leaders' connections with the Republican party and their peculiar tag-team with each other. If Barack Obama views Harper with suspicion, it's for good reason.

All this drama made a shambles of Canada's primary international relationship, which will always be with the White House.

Yet when Obama's new ambassador to Ottawa, Bruce Heyman, was "welcomed" at his first major public appearance, he was bluntly confronted over Keystone. Meanwhile, Harper blanketed Washington with a $24-million ad campaign to persuade Americans that we deserve the Keystone pipeline because we're such good allies, while giving speeches about the craziness of acting on climate change.

In reality, Canadian interests, our industry, and our environment would all be so much further ahead today had Harper adopted a responsible approach to climate change and a coherent strategy to win support from the White House.

That $24 million was all for naught. There was really only one man on the planet that Stephen Harper ever had to persuade to vote yes on Keystone. But pride goeth before destruction, as they say.

Rope-a-dope indeed.

Image Credit: U.S. Embassy

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This is a guest post by author and filmmaker Michael Harris. The article originally appeared on iPolitics and is republished here with permission.

From the cold porches of January, 2015 stretches out like a thousand miles of gravel road.

The country is facing an election that will be nasty, brutish and long — from now until the vote occurs, whenever that may be. The writ period is essentially meaningless. Under the Conservatives, it’s always game on.

True to his word, Stephen Harper has transformed the country, largely by stealth. Canada is now a nation that spies on its friends, guests and citizens. It accepts foreign intelligence even when there is a likelihood that it was obtained by torture. The government lies to the electorate on policy matters. It accuses veterans of exaggerating their injuries in order to take the taxpayer for a ride. It washes its hands of any stake in the fate of 1,200 missing or murdered Aboriginal women. It does not practise unite-and-lead politics, but divide-and-conquer stratagems. A government, by any democratic measure, in disgrace.

Yet have you noticed that almost all of the mainstream media look-aheads do not include the baggage of the Harper record as any kind of liability going into an election? Running for re-election used to be like going to school. You put in your year, did your work, and at the end of a testing process, others decided if you had earned promotion to the next grade.

Not anymore. Instead, the government issues its own report cards and the MSM passes judgment on the efficacy of its spin. They act like bookies before a big race, establishing the odds on who’s ahead, who has momentum, who will win. They do little to inform their audiences in advance of choosing the next government. With notable exceptions, a broad swath of the media is also in disgrace. After all, if the media stops resolving matters of fact, the work falls to the potentates of public relations. Everyone knows who and what they work for.

Confusion rules. The whirling dervish of the polling world drives the nightly news, along with those episodes that give a push or shove upward or downward to somebody’s chances. There is no attempt to ask the most fundamental question of all: on the record, does the Harper government have the character or credibility to be re-elected?

Lying, cheating at the polls, suppressing free speech, cooking statistics at StatsCan with a bogus voluntary census, crushing individuals with the full, institutional powers of government, pretending dirty oil is the answer while the planet gasps — all this would suggest that this group has failed. Few seem prepared to say it.

And now we have an even bigger problem, according to an astonishing story in the Ottawa Citizen by Kathryn May. Nearly one in five Canadians believes that the prime minister could be justified in closing down Parliament in difficult times. A further 17 per cent believe that dissolving the Supreme Court would be okeydoke in the right circumstances. The question was asked and answered without providing any details about what sorts of crises would justify imposing a dictatorship.

These alarming statistics are contained in a study by the Americas Society headed up by David Rockefeller in association with Vanderbilt University. The group surveyed attitudes towards democracy and governance in interviews with 50,000 people in 28 countries. It found that Canada was among those nations most likely to support shuttering its legislatures. In fact, the study found that only the citizens of Paraguay, Peru, and Haiti were more likely to put their democracies in mothballs than Canadians.

Although 77 per cent of Canadians questioned in this study did not support abandoning democratic governance or the rule of law at the discretion of the prime minister, there is another worrisome feature about the minority who did. Their ranks are growing.

In 2010, the same study group found that just one in 10 Canadians thought that there could be grounds for the prime minister governing without Parliament or the Supreme Court. Two years later in 2012, 15 per cent held that view.

Are we sliding towards the political equivalent of Pierre Berton’s “comfortable pew,” bearing in mind that a lazy democracy is a dying democracy? Could these strange numbers explain why Canadians yawned when Stephen Harper was found in contempt of Parliament — and immediately handed him a majority government?

Could they also explain the pathetic decline in voter turnout at a juncture in history when it is hard to imagine more being at stake? A second-rate hockey team or an aging rock star can fill the Air Canada Centre night after night in Toronto. But if the last Canadian election had been an arena with 100 seats, only 60 of them would have had bums in them for the May 2, 2011 vote. What happened?

Stephen Harper has a lot to do with it. He is the prime minister who refused to produce documents requested by a parliamentary committee. He is the leader who denounced omnibus legislation in Opposition and vastly extended its use when he formed the government. He is the prime minister who muzzled MPs, misled Parliament on the F-35 acquisition, and told more stories than Hans Christian Andersen on the Wright/Duffy Affair.

Most people play by the rules; this prime minister plays with them.

As long-time Clerk of the House of Commons and former Information Commissioner Robert Marleau told me:

“We operate under Westminster rules — an honourable understanding that you will play within the rules and by the rules. Mr. Harper has not played within the rules. Having attained absolute power, he has absolutely abused that power to the maximum.”

The clearest sign that Marleau is right is Harper’s constant refrain that he is the only person qualified to run the country — not the best person, but the only one. He has said on more than one occasion that his job is to persuade Canadians not to choose the wrong person — i.e. anyone other than him. His long-term goal is to do to Canada what the Progressive Conservative Party has done to Alberta for the last 40-plus years: turn it into a one-party petro-state where voting is the last priority on the to-do list.

That said, Harper has aided and abetted the erosion of democracy — but he didn’t invent it. Since 9/11, the greatest democracy in the world has been steadily devalued — and dragged everyone else down with it. The War on Terror, like all wars on nouns (poverty, drugs, etc.), has been an abject failure.

After 13 years, the villains have merely changed costume — from al Qaida and the Taliban to the beheading fanatics of the Islamic State. The war in Afghanistan was a trillion-dollar fiasco; where Canadian soldiers fought and died, drug lords and corrupt politicians now carry on as they did before the war. As for the United States, it spies on its own citizens, tortures its captives like the people it demonizes, and can’t even raise the moral energy to bring justice to crimes under both international and American law documented by the U.S. Senate.

The fear dividend is what has been offered to ordinary people — the exchange of rights and freedoms, privacy and liberty, for the promise of protection from endless threats. When citizens in a democracy begin to defer to such authority as that, voting is hardly any more important than the Supreme Court or Parliament.

Fear will be big in 2015, an insight no one has to pass along to Steve. The critical question is whether democracy will be even bigger.

Image Credit: Prime Minister's Photo Gallery

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.