Why do you hate Harper?

[slimbotimbo]

Sorry about my last post its just frustrating, that people love Harper so much. The link below is a pretty good list of his short comings. My biggest reason for not liking him was the fact he did nothing for our economy other then cut taxes for billion dollar company's and prop up the oil industry. He tried to Americanize us in every aspect.

http://moiz.ca/harper/

[Thinktank]

I hate Harper because he bombed the hell out of Africa's richest country,
and murdered their leader, because Canada is now 100% partners with
the biggest warmonger on earth - USA. Chretien was the best. Harper is a little weasel.

[fvkasm2x]

Sorry about my last post its just frustrating, that people love Harper so much. The link below is a pretty good list of his short comings. My biggest reason for not liking him was the fact he did nothing for our economy other then cut taxes for billion dollar company's and prop up the oil industry. He tried to Americanize us in every aspect.

http://moiz.ca/harper/

I have no opinion of Harper one way or the other, I am just trying to get more info.

Thanks for the website. However, it really frustrates me when websites like this throw in "scandals" that are either petty, not important at all or a stretch at best.

1. I mean, blaming Harper for how Afghani authorities deal with their prisoners? Give me a break. How is Canada, specifically Harper, supposed to make sure prisoners in Afghanistan are treated?

2. Getting mad because he will only answer 5 questions from the media per day? Jesus, Trudeau sits there with a smug smile on his face when asked questions DIRECTLY over and over again and refuses to answer ANY questions. He either dodges it or sends up one of his minions to field questions.

3. Quoting anything from David Suzuki? One of the biggest frauds in Canada?

4. Literally 7 different articles talking about climate change, simply to inflate the "list" of scandals

5. Listing Bill C-24 as a scandal... when I think it was a GREAT idea

6. Listing anything from the Huffington Post as a credible article

7. Listing Bill C-51 as a scandal... when, well, you know

8. Listing the spending of an MP that has nothing to do with Harper


For a timeline listing "10 years of scandal" I gotta be honest, only 2 ... MAYBE 3 articles in there seem like they MIGHT be a big deal and I will read more up on them, but Trudeau dodging the ethics committee and his spending issues both seem worse than anything I've read about Harper so far.

As for the economy thing... that could be a viable argument, but I've looked into it and would propose this:

1. There are numerous world leading countries that had a hell of a time during Harper's reign as well. A couple in Europe, and Hell, look at the USA under Obama. They had a massive recession that led to our dollar being par or better. People were losing their homes left, right and center. Bankruptcies and bailouts abound. Was that all Obama's fault? If you say no... then you can't really blame Harper for our situation either. It's not that simple.

http://globalnews.ca/news/2152159/reali ... cair-says/

http://www.unifor.org/sites/default/fil ... _eng_0.pdf

These were some interesting things I read regarding the economy, simply showing that "It's not that simple" when just placing the blame on Harper.

2. When arguing the economy, people always say things like "Growth was the worst with Harper, when compared to any other PM." Well so what? Those are different times. Different resources, different deals, different needs... it's not that simple. It's such a simplistic "stat" that I liken to to someone saying "Movies now are $13.00 but in the 1950's they were only 0.25 cents." You don't take into account anything else with it. Are those people implying that the growth under a different PM would have been the 5% growth we saw in the 1960's? I highly doubt it. Because if Harper was so bad and it's all his fault, then as soon as Trudeau takes power... we'll get those numbers back up to 5% growth right?

[Omnitheo]

Thanks for the website. However, it really frustrates me when websites like this throw in "scandals" that are either petty, not important at all or a stretch at best.

1. I mean, blaming Harper for how Afghani authorities deal with their prisoners? Give me a break. How is Canada, specifically Harper, supposed to make sure prisoners in Afghanistan are treated?

Taken from the article:

Under international law, a country that hands over to a prisoner to certain torture is liable for war crimes prosecution.

At first, Canada wanted nothing to do with prisoners.

An agreement, reached in late 2005 just before the Kandahar combat mission, dictated that the army would deliver those it captured to local authorities, including the police and Afghanistan's notorious intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security.

There was no followup mechanism to ensure they were not abused.

When the Globe and Mail newspaper published reports of torture in April 2007, a political brush fire erupted in Ottawa, subsiding only once the Harper government bowed to pressure and signed a revised agreement with the Afghans to establish a monitoring regime.

For the governing Conservatives, the issue refused to go away.

In 2009, diplomat Richard Colvin fanned the flames with testimony before a parliamentary committee that accused the government of turning a blind eye to torture in Afghan jails and trying to cover it up.

That, combined with the government's subsequent refusal to release documents publicly, brought the opposition parties to within a hair's breadth of toppling Harper's minority government — a fate the prime minister avoided by proroguing the House of Commons.

So no it's not a minor issue. It's international law, that a country which was traditionally a leader in humans rights turned a blind eye to, and then shut down government for several weeks so people would forget about it when they were called out on it.

2. Getting mad because he will only answer 5 questions from the media per day? Jesus, Trudeau sits there with a smug smile on his face when asked questions DIRECTLY over and over again and refuses to answer ANY questions. He either dodges it or sends up one of his minions to field questions.

Harper would dodge all 5 of those daily questions regularly. Towards the end of his tenure he was barely answering any questions at all. And people wanted to re-elect him?

Harper has attended only 35 per cent of the daily question periods in 2015, his lowest rate for any year since 2006, a Citizen analysis found.

The trend reflects what critics say is an increasingly inaccessible prime minister, who rarely holds press conferences and who, last week, signalled that he would not participate in election leaders’ debates organized by a consortium of broadcasters.

Now he has less time for question period where, by convention, the prime minister is held to account by MPs for his government’s performance.

Harper’s attendance’s rate in the 45-minute question-and-response sessions has declined almost every year but dropped more sharply in 2014 and 2015, the Citizen review of House of Commons transcripts shows.


In 2006, his first year on the job, Harper responded to questions on 64 per cent of House of Commons sitting days.

But in 2013, when he faced hundreds of queries about his role in the Senate expense scandal, he made it to only 46 per cent of question periods.

The downward trend continued in 2014, when he attended only 36 per cent.

In April and May of this year, he has made it to only six of 22 sessions.

His attendance this year has been markedly worse than that of the last two Liberal prime ministers in their final years in office.

3. Quoting anything from David Suzuki? One of the biggest frauds in Canada?

Climate change is real. Criticize Suzuki for hypocrisy, but he's hardly a fraud for wanting better environmental protection and the government to be more responsible.

"The consequences are you have these giant holding ponds, which are lethal, that undoubtedly are sinking into the ground water and will eventually leak out into the Athabasca River. Consequences downstream, medical doctors tell us that there are levels of cancer where the native community lives that are way above normal. So, the ecological, the social, the economic costs of the tar sands are immense.”

A few days later, Suzuki was critical of the Canadian government’s overhaul of environmental review processes that would speed up environmental assessments and could put them in the hands of the provinces – an obvious conflict of interest and deeply concerning considering the pipeline just mentioned.

In a CBC interview, Suzuki said, "We saw what happened in British Columbia. The British Columbia government approved a mining development that would poison all of Fish Lake in the interior. [The Minister of the Environment] assessed it and said, ‘No, I just don’t think we can do that,’ and turned it down. We need that kind of perspective that comes from the federal level.

“It’s all driven by a corporate agenda to develop the hell out of everything in Canada. The First Nations along the coast of British Columbia are telling us that there are things more important than money. Their culture, their history will be at risk if there are spills in the ocean.

“The concerns being raised, either by First Nations or by environmentalists, are seen [by the Canadian government] as obstructionists; we’re seen as extremists. The reality is the fossil fuel industry is very, very powerful, and they want to get on with it.”

He's not wrong. And not alone in his opposition.

4. Literally 7 different articles talking about climate change, simply to inflate the "list" of scandals

Yeah? Well we did drop out of th Kyoto Accord, and the prime minister muzzled scientists and shut down research project after research project because they didn't want any dissenting voice that could impact the profits of the oil companies. You have seen the ecological damage done to Alberta right? Land areas larger than entire nations on the planet deforested and torn apart. Entire ecosystems just gone. What we're left with is a giant poisoned wasteland devoid of life which could take thousands of years to recover. For the sake of a couple years of profitable oil exports.

5. Listing Bill C-24 as a scandal... when I think it was a GREAT idea

It's not, because it creates multi class citizens. First of all, terrorism laws are completely arbitrary, and up to the whim of the government. Let's take a certain forum member I won't name for example. They are right wing, and immigrated to the country several years ago. They make dissenting statements against the government on these forums often. Now imagine that the government of the day decides these statements are fear mongering. Should this forum member be exported out of the country, while other posters who say the same things but were born here are not? Now that the law is in place, Trudeau himself has used it repeatedly, and we already know many have been charged for making online comments about wanting to harm the Trudeau's.

6. Listing anything from the Huffington Post as a credible article

I take it you're referring to this article? http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/06/25 ... 92852.html
Burden of proof is on you to discredit if you are claiming these events are false. Do you have an evidence to the contrary,

7. Listing Bill C-51 as a scandal... when, well, you know

Opponents argue the bill's wording is too vague, which could lead to dangerous and unlawful measures.

Again, what it comes down to. This is a bill that gives the government the opportunity to stifle free speech and arrest people without warrant at a whim. The wording of it and what could be considered as terrorism could again apply to many statements that are made on these forums, by either people of the left or the right, and it comes down to the government in power to make that call. You may have liked it when it was a right wing government, but now you have a left wing government in power, and even your own free speech could now land you a mandatory minimum 5 year sentence whether you were being rhetorical or not.

8. Listing the spending of an MP that has nothing to do with Harper

Del Mastro, 44, was once Prime Minister Stephen Harper's point man defending the Tories against allegations of electoral fraud. He maintained his innocence and called the verdict the judge's opinion.

These are Harper's top people. Hypocrites. People that defend the government over election fraud while committing fraud themselves.

For a timeline listing "10 years of scandal" I gotta be honest, only 2 ... MAYBE 3 articles in there seem like they MIGHT be a big deal and I will read more up on them, but Trudeau dodging the ethics committee and his spending issues both seem worse than anything I've read about Harper so far.

You may wish to read up on Harper and ethics and spending as well then, because you might be forgetting some things or remembering through rose tinted glasses.

As for the economy thing... that could be a viable argument, but I've looked into it and would propose this:

1. There are numerous world leading countries that had a hell of a time during Harper's reign as well. A couple in Europe, and Hell, look at the USA under Obama. They had a massive recession that led to our dollar being par or better. People were losing their homes left, right and center. Bankruptcies and bailouts abound. Was that all Obama's fault? If you say no... then you can't really blame Harper for our situation either. It's not that simple.

2. When arguing the economy, people always say things like "Growth was the worst with Harper, when compared to any other PM." Well so what? Those are different times. Different resources, different deals, different needs... it's not that simple. It's such a simplistic "stat" that I liken to to someone saying "Movies now are $13.00 but in the 1950's they were only 0.25 cents." You don't take into account anything else with it. Are those people implying that the growth under a different PM would have been the 5% growth we saw in the 1960's? I highly doubt it. Because if Harper was so bad and it's all his fault, then as soon as Trudeau takes power... we'll get those numbers back up to 5% growth right?

Obama inherited the nation in the middle of the financial crisis. This was not Obama's fault, but the fault of lax regulation which had been continually eased on banks by the preceding administration. The Obama government worked with the republicans on a compromise that saw billions of dollars of bailouts handed to the banks. After a few years, the US economy began to recover and by the end of Obamas term the US was seeing record numbers of growth. Canada meanwhile, yes we did well weathering the financial storm, and for a short time our dollar did not sink as much as the US dollar so was slightly more valuable, however 6 years later, while the US was flourishing, our dollar was sinking again, and we were back in recession, and this time we couldn't blame the US or the 2008 crisis (though people still tried).

[fvkasm2x]

Thank you for the information/reply Omnitheo!

1. Fair enough. I suppose I just don't care enough about that to consider it a major issue. I've never been a big fan of peace keeping missions, getting involved in the affairs of other countries and I don't have a problem with *bleep* conditions or torture for criminals. That said, I can see why others might and that there are laws in place.

2. Quite possible. That'd probably annoy me as well if I despised Harper the way I do Trudeau. I honestly didn't pay that much attention to politics at all during the 90s and 2000s. I started and ended with Mulroney, then pushed "pause" on my interest level until Trudeau came into office and I admittedly despise him. I had no opinion whatever of ANYONE in office during the 2 plus decades in between. Although my question to Harper haters then would be... if it was bad when he did it, why is ok for Trudeau to do it even more often? Isn't more telling that he STARTS his tenure that way?

3. Oh I believe in climate change, I just don't believe in Suzuki. I think he's a liar, a hypocrite and mostly interested in fame and fortune.

4. My point about listing climate change over and over again, means that it appears that they're trying to inflate the problems, by listing multiple sources/articles about the same thing. Like muzzling the scientists. That's 1 problem. Listing 17 articles showing how much Harper screwed that one up, doesn't make it any more than 1 issue.

5. Matter of opinion. I'd say get rid of the foreigner and don't let him back in ever again. I'd say charge the person born here with treason, hate crime, etc... (whatever the charge) and lock him up. I have no compassion for people who can't behave, regardless of their gender, ethnicity or any other factor. A piece of garbage is a piece of garbage. I just don't want to take care of other people's garbage.

6. I honestly didn't read it. I don't read anything from sources I consider crap. That's mostly anything far left and far right. I consider Huff post fluff crap, usually written by opinion editors with an agenda. I understand that most "news" has an agenda, but I refuse to waste my time with stuff I can't take seriously. Huff Post is the left's version of Breitbart IMO. Just as ridiculous, but on the other side of the spectrum.

7. Same as #5 I suppose

8. Almost everyone in government is a self serving fraud. Probably Harper. Definitely Trudeau. Probably most people under both people. I don't blame Trudeau for example, for those recent liberals abusing the system for the relocation and sale monies for their homes. They inflated costs and took a ton of money from the taxpayers and we should all be outraged. Just because they were liberals doesn't mean it's Trudeau's fault... just like this idiot wasn't Harper's fault.


The economy issue is obviously not a simplistic one. There's so many factors and issues to consider, you can't really blame or credit 1 person for it. To me, it's just as stupid as those Trump fans claiming he's glorious because the stock market, DOW or anything else you want to point out all "did better" with Trump in power. Like he magically made a difference.

But thanks for the well thought out response. Again, not a Harper fan. Ambivalent more like.