Watchdog

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As I said in columns written during the recent federal election, the only issue that was really in the forefront was Stephen Harper and nothing else.

We saw how quickly the election disintegrated into a dog fight, with all of the platform issues swept aside and the focus quickly being made upon the party leaders.

It became very apparent that the Conservative Party's main strategy was to make vicious personal attacks on Liberal leader Stephane Dion to destroy him and his party.

The attacks were so personalized that the Conservatives deliberately exploited the fact that Dion has a hearing problem so as to make his halting responses appear to be due to his incompetence, not his impediment.

The reality is that the Conservative party is no longer the party of John A. Macdonald, John Diefenbaker or even Brian Mulroney, but is now an entirely new one.

The current Conservative party has its roots in the Social Credit Party of Alberta by way of the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties.

At the core of the old Social Credit Party was an extreme dislike for the traditional "eastern parties" because of their involvement in Quebec politics and support for Ontario.

The Social Credit Party eventually self destructed in the 1980s due to internal dissent and increasing irrelevancy in a liberal society, but a remnant persisted.

Preston Manning blew life back into the dying embers of right-wing radicalism with the Reform party, and he recruited a young man from Toronto called Stephen Harper to assist him.

The intention of the Reform party from the beginning was to eliminate "liberalism" and "socialism" from Canadian life and to make their brand of hard right conservatism the new political centre.

We saw an early vanguard of this movement with the neo-conservative politics of former Ontario premier Mike Harris that were outlined in the policies of the Common Sense Revolution.

The same policies are being played out under the Harper government, though having learned from Harris' mistakes, they have been done in the background with little fanfare.

What has happened since the fall election is that the Harper government is now implementing the visible side of its policies and the opposition is reacting strongly and publicly by fighting back.

We are yet again in a manufactured crisis initiated by right wing radicals who have wrapped themselves in a cloak of legitimacy by calling themselves "Tories".

They are now attempting to exploit people's ignorance of their own political system and history to cast the opposition as "the bad guys" and themselves as the nation's saviours.

This is an unprecedented situation, with more than a century of nation building at stake, and whose outcome will re-define politics for this country.

It will now be up to democracy itself, and the institutions it serves, to see us through this crisis, hopefully with a resolution that will strengthen the country, not weaken and divide it.

Let us learn that radicalism on the right and left serves no one's interests but its own in the long run.