Feared but not much loved.
Harper shares several traits with Bush. He can be excessively partisan: you're either with him or against him. If you don't back his disastrous and costly Afghan policy, you are unpatriotic, unfaithful to Canadian troops and an apologist for the Taliban. He is secretive and authoritarian. He does not tolerate dissent...
Harper has also been accused of saying one thing and doing another... Harper and most conservative leaders talk of fiscal responsibility but end up emptying the treasury...
As is well known, he muzzled his caucus, including ministers, and the federal bureaucrats, including our diplomats. We also know what Harper did to the heads of three independent commissions who challenged him... "In each of these dust-ups," wrote professor Lorne Sossin of the faculty of law at the U of T, the Harper government looked "reckless, petty, arrogant, incompetent, paranoid, sinister and/or just plain vindictive."
