APRIL 1st, 2023 | RYAN TYLER

Stephen Harper's Ten Years Of Nothing

Conservatives twiddled their thumbs through ten years of power.

Stephen Harper put more effort into making his party appear electable than he did into making Canada a fundamentally better country. So goes partisan politics, but we still hear party faithfuls celebrating his few achievements and opining about the good old days between 2006 and 2015. Sadly, their low standards might let the next Conservative prime minister get away with letting Canada slide even further down the progressive rabbit hole.

Progressivism has devolved into an ideology of depravity. They told us if everyone supported same-sex marriage, Canada would be a more free and inclusive country. It sounded innocent enough at the time, so Conservatives adopted gay marriage into their policies. Almost a decade later, activists have hijacked the LGBTQ movement as a channel to push depraved and amoral ideas, like surgically removing children's genitals and normalizing their sexual exploitation.

Is this Stephen Harper's fault? His supporters would scoff at such a notion, but the answer is yes, he bears some responsibility. Half of Harper's tenure was under a minority government, but four years were under a strong Conservative majority. In that four years, the Harper government accomplished nothing of fundamental value for Canadians or conservatives.

As the reach and scope of what some might call the "liberal world order" becomes more evident as time passes, my fondness for leaders like Harper, Reagan, Bush, Poilievre and Thatcher has waned. They've been nothing less than enablers. In many cases, they've been more than just enablers—they've been arbiters of the current clown world.

In Stephen Harper's case, very little was done to discourage, prevent or mitigate the power of future progressive governments.

He Left Senate Seats Vacant

Either from the assumption that his party would be re-elected, or due to some idiotic set of principles, Stephen Harper left more than twenty seats open in the Senate. These seats were eventually filled with ideological, “independent” liberals who have gone on to rubber stamp every piece of Liberal legislation since 2016.

Nothing has done more harm to the conservative movement in Canada than “muh principles!”.

Canada has no principles and it would be nice to have, at least, a few good ones. However, being principled in an unprincipled world is counterproductive and asinine. Attempting to win support from unprincipled heathens, by being principled and showing principles, won't work. It never has. Conservatives need to take power first, through any means necessary, then use their power to destroy the current system and rebuilt it with some real principles.

Funny thing, though. The Conservative Party had near unmitigated power for four years and did none of that.

Harper's principles left a substantial number of Senate seats open for Trudeau to fill. Hoping that Canadians would see how awesome and principled he was, Harper chose to hand Trudeau more power than just a simple majority government. He gave him more than twenty life-long Senate seats to fill with ideologically progressive morons that will enable every future Liberal or NDP government—and disable every future Conservative majority. If conservatives show even a little bit of hope about reversing gender laws, anti-speech laws and regressive legislation that prohibits investments—they don't know how the system works. Their hope is misplaced.

Because of Stephen Harper, every future Conservative government will have their laws and reforms held hostage by an activist Senate. They'll be lucky to see anything but benign and neutered bills achieve Royal Ascent.

He Allowed The CBC To Continue Existing

I have often argued that privatizing the CBC is a bad idea. It needs to be abolished and only the physical assets should be sold off. Instead of doing either of those things, the Harper government made small, incremental cuts to the CBC's operating budget over four years. This made CBC journalists live under constant fear, which made them produce aggressively anti-Conservative stories.

Harper is often praised for his strategic intellect, but there was nothing smart or strategic about how he handled the CBC.

The CBC is Canada's largest news network. Its team of journalists, digital and otherwise, is larger than anything Postmedia, Rogers, Shaw and Bell employ. The CBC has influenced a majority of the large, breaking stories in Canada for more than 80 years and it continues to do so today. It also covers up and helps to wash away any anti-progressive stories and movements.

The CBC has always been a progressive propaganda machine.

As seen in Wikileaks emails, U.S. diplomats have lamented the CBC for its propaganda and its ability to instill anti-American views in the Canadian population. For the most part, the CBC has acted as one of Canada's largest influencers through news. Their non-news shows are barely watched and their broadcast news has the lowest viewership of any live news broadcasts, but their online presence is strong.

After four years of Stephen Harper, the CBC is still here and receives more funding than ever before.

The CBC has helped sculpt Canada's progressive culture and it continues to slander and defame people who attempt to stray from the status quo. The trucker convoy is a good example, while news stories about Mike Duffy stick clear in our minds more than ten years later. At the peak of the last Conservative government, the CBC was manufacturing scandals to damage Stephen Harper and his government. In retrospect, those scandals were trivial compared to what we have seen from the Trudeau government.

The CBC has managed to trivialize some of Trudeau's biggest scandals, including the latest scandal involving democratic interference by China. At the onset of the scandal, they were caught burying their own news stories underneath stories about how the federal government has banned Chinese-owned TikTok. The CBC has either shied away from negative Liberal stories like these, or buried them with a higher number of positive stories. They have even gone into full defence mode to soften some of the most serious allegations against the Trudeau government.

After an American publication broke news about Trudeau dressing up in blackface on multiple occasions, the CBC was one of the last Canadian networks to cover the story. When they finally did, they brought in pundits and analysts to soften the scandal and to talk about how dressing up in blackface was normal and funny back in the day. Furthermore, being the largest news network in Canada, it's no mystery how the blackface story managed to stay buried for most of Trudeau's time as Liberal leader.

The CBC could have been defunded, reformed, or abolished under Stephen Harper's majority government. Instead, the institution was incrementally antagonized and provoked in what has proven to be one of the dumbest Conservative strategies in the history of Canada—after the Senate vacancies.

He Supported The War In Afghanistan

Many of us backed Harper's support of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. In hindsight, the whole thing was a disaster and our support was a mistake. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives were pissed off and ordinary Canadians were scared. This made the false pretenses of “weapons of mass destruction” and Islamic radicalism enough for many Canadians to support the war on terror.

Hindsight is 20/20 and a lot of conservatives have changed their minds about the current world order, about U.S. military intervention and about everything that has happened over the past twenty years.

We've been lied to so brazenly and sloppily over the past few years that official narratives are becoming harder to believe. Many of us are wondering how much of the past twenty years has been driven by similar lies and deceit. The war on terror, weapons of mass destruction, Islamic radicalism—what was all that? The fear and propaganda from that era paved the way for what we are seeing in the 2020s.

If all of those things were lies meant to advance a particular goal and to make certain people wealthy, Stephen Harper was in on it.

He Opened The Door Wider For China

Harper's free-trade policies were a disaster for the country. After 2020, the dangers of hyper-globalization have come to light and our dependence on China and the United States has proven disastrous. As Canadians, we helped pump oil and cash into China's machine. We helped fund their military and their election interference campaign, while we sold out our own industries.

While Canadians have gotten weaker, China has gotten stronger.

By following the liberal world order's globalist ideology, Stephen Harper helped cement all of the bad things that are about to happen. Supply shortages are only the tip of the iceberg. As China becomes more belligerent, the chickens will start coming home to roost in ways we haven't seen. By helping to alienate Russia with his “tough talk”, those Russian chickens will be coming home with the Chinese chickens.

On the global stage and for Canada's long-term prosperity, Harper not only did nothing of value, his policies were a detriment. As hindsight comes back into play, feeding oil and resources to the Chinese beast was beyond disastrous. It was suicidal.

It Was A Show About Nothing

Much like Seinfeld, the Harper government was a show about nothing. The principles and thumb-twiddling that guided the last Conservative government aren't worthy of ever being repeated. In many cases, Harper's policies weren't just limp, they were outright destructive for the country and for conservatism.

After ten years of Stephen Harper, we have a populace that is more crazy and progressive than it was in 2006. We have a Senate stacked with liberals, media stacked with lunatics, institutions bent on child exploitation, and leaders that peddle lies and misinformation without consequence.

If the next Conservative government is planning on just slightly delaying Canada's inevitable slide into self-destruction, why should we even bother? We need a government that will radically change the trajectory of this country, not another Stephen Harper.