Trump And Cruz Aren't The Only Politicians In The Hemisphere With Fascist Tendencies

Corrupt right-wingers Otto Pérez Molina and Stephen Harper

When I was a DJ at KSAN in San Francisco, the program director once told me that the day I felt I had played a song so many times that I couldn't stand hearing it again was the first time most listeners ever absorbed it. Nevertheless, for the sake of my own sanity, I have to take some time off from writing about Trump, at least for the rest of the day. I was thinking about writing about another fascist strongman instead, Guatemala's grotesquely corrupt president, Otto Pérez Molina. Funny how right-wing extremism and corruption always go hand-in-hand. I thought Pérez was going to be forced to resign this week, but apparently I was incorrect.

So, instead, let's look north to a more moderate situation, in Canada, where another right-winger is on the verge of being replaced. Canada's general election will be on October 19, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government look unlikely to win reelection. (The campaign will last 11 weeks, the longest in Canada's history-- and quite the contrast to the circus they're watching south of their border!) There has been some speculation that Harper's Conservative Party, which has plenty of campaign cash and a reputation for corruption, could come in third. Just like in Guatemala, there's a bribery scandal that reaches way up the food chain.

The other two parties, the Liberals (a dull centrist party led by Pierre Trudeau's son Justin) and the New Democrats (the exciting populist left-wing party that is led by Thomas Mulcair and has been leading in all the polls) don't have anywhere near the campaign funds the Conservatives have. The Conservatives raised $13.7 million through June, while the Liberals trailed with $8.2 million and the New Democrats with $6.8 million. The most recent public poll, on August 19 by Forum Research, has the New Democrats with 34%, the Conservatives with 29% and the Liberals with 28%. The Bloc Québécois and the Greens are each polling 4%.

Last week, the NY Times published an op-ed about how Harper is undermining democracy by keeping the election as quiet and distant as possible.

He has chosen not to participate in the traditional series of debates on national television, confronting his opponents in quieter, less public venues... His own campaign events were subject to gag orders until a public outcry forced him to rescind the forced silence of his supporters... Whether or not he loses, he will leave Canada more ignorant than he found it.

Harper's tenure has been a disaster, which has a lot to do with why his party is polling so badly against the party that sounds the most like Bernie Sanders.

Americans have traditionally looked to Canada as a liberal haven, with gun control, universal health care and good public education.

But the nine and half years of Mr. Harper’s tenure have seen the slow-motion erosion of that reputation for open, responsible government. His stance has been a know-nothing conservatism, applied broadly and effectively. He has consistently limited the capacity of the public to understand what its government is doing, cloaking himself and his Conservative Party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance.

His relationship to the press is one of outright hostility. At his notoriously brief news conferences, his handlers vet every journalist, picking and choosing who can ask questions. In the usual give-and-take between press and politicians, the hurly-burly of any healthy democracy, he has simply removed the give.

Mr. Harper’s war against science has been even more damaging to the capacity of Canadians to know what their government is doing. The prime minister’s base of support is Alberta, a western province financially dependent on the oil industry, and he has been dedicated to protecting petrochemical companies from having their feelings hurt by any inconvenient research.

In 2012, he tried to defund government research centers in the High Arctic, and placed Canadian environmental scientists under gag orders. That year, National Research Council members were barred from discussing their work on snowfall with the media. Scientists for the governmental agency Environment Canada, under threat of losing their jobs, have been banned from discussing their research without political approval. Mentions of federal climate change research in the Canadian press have dropped 80 percent. The union that represents federal scientists and other professionals has, for the first time in its history, abandoned neutrality to campaign against Mr. Harper.

His active promotion of ignorance extends into the functions of government itself. Most shockingly, he ended the mandatory long-form census, a decision protested by nearly 500 organizations in Canada, including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Catholic Council of Bishops. In the age of information, he has stripped Canada of its capacity to gather information about itself. The Harper years have seen a subtle darkening of Canadian life.

The darkness has resulted, organically, in one of the most scandal-plagued administrations in Canadian history. Mr. Harper’s tenure coincided with the scandal of Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto who admitted to smoking crack while in office and whose secret life came to light only when Gawker, an American website, broke the story. In a famous video at a Ford family barbecue, Mr. Harper praised the Fords as a “Conservative political dynasty.”

Mr. Harper’s appointments to the Senate-- which in Canada is a mercifully impotent body employed strictly for political payoffs-- have proved greedier than the norm. Mr. Harper’s chief of staff was forced out for paying off a senator who fudged his expenses. The Mounties have pressed criminal charges.

After the 2011 election, a Conservative staffer, Michael Sona, was convicted of using robocalls to send voters to the wrong polling places in Guelph, Ontario. In the words of the judge, he was guilty of “callous and blatant disregard for the right of people to vote.” In advance of this election, instead of such petty ploys, the Canadian Conservatives have passed the Fair Elections Act, a law with a classically Orwellian title, which not only needlessly tightens the requirements for voting but also has restricted the chief executive of Elections Canada from promoting the act of voting. Mr. Harper seems to think that his job is to prevent democracy.

But the worst of the Harper years is that all this secrecy and informational control have been at the service of no larger vision for the country. The policies that he has undertaken have been negligible-- more irritating distractions than substantial changes. He is “tough on crime,” and so he has built more prisons at great expense at the exact moment when even American conservatives have realized that over-incarceration causes more problems than it solves. Then there is a new law that allows the government to revoke citizenship for dual citizens convicted of terrorism or high treason-- effectively creating levels of Canadianness and problems where none existed.

For a man who insists on such intense control, the prime minister has not managed to control much that matters. The argument for all this secrecy was a technocratic impulse-- he imagined Canada as a kind of Singapore, only more polite and rule abiding.

The major foreign policy goal of his tenure was the Keystone Pipeline, which Mr. Harper ultimately failed to deliver. The Canadian dollar has returned to the low levels that once earned it the title of the northern peso. Despite being left in a luxurious position of strength after the global recession, he coasted on what he knew: oil. In the run-up to the election, the Bank of Canada has announced that Canada just had two straight quarters of contraction-- the technical definition of a recession. He has been a poor manager by any metric.