Margaret Atwood, in The Globe and Mail (excerpts):
Why do I feel so strongly about this? It's not just the arts... His arts position is symptomatic of his deeply worrying, out-of-touch, out-of-date boy-in-a bubble thinking towards everything. Like George W. Bush, he sticks to his ideology and ignores the evidence... As Mr. Duceppe paraphrased in the French-language debate, he seems to think artists are "spoiled children."
Then what are voters? They, too, are children: a view Mr. Harper learned well during his University-of-Calgary-Reform-Party-firewall-around-Alberta-think-tanking days... People should be managed from behind the scenes by a few superior intelligences such as his; they must be told sugar-coated lies; and you should decide everything really important about their lives without consulting them...
Mr. Harper hugs his True Believer hardcore neo-con faith -- deregulate and do nothing, aside from weaponry and jails -- and he'll stick to it, no matter what he says during this election... During the debates Mr. Harper kept saying, "Canada is not the United States." He forgot to add the word "yet": If he has his way, it soon will be... Mr. Harper got elected by promising to consult, to be transparent, to be accountable, but he's delivered the extreme opposite. He doesn't consult with anybody but himself in the mirror; he has the most secretive government Canada has ever known; and his accountability consists of "If I make a mistake, you're fired."...
Dear fellow Canadians: If you give Harper neo-cons a majority government, you'll lose much that you cherish, you'll gain nothing worth having, and you'll never, never forgive yourselves.
