'Values' drive Conservative politicsFrances Russell, Winnipeg Free Press: The Stephen Harper Conservatives are on their way to shattering the last remnants of the old Liberal fortress through the relentless application of US Republican wedge politics and vicious personal attack ads. The Harper Conservatives have introduced a whole new style of politics to Canada.
Michael Behiels, a native of Alberta's Peace River country, teaches constitutional history at the University of Ottawa. He says Harper's approach to politics and government is shaped by his Christian fundamentalism....
'On foreign policy, Harper is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who maintains that the US, Canada and the UK have a mission, a religious duty, so to speak, to impose an American form of democracy on the world.' On the domestic front, Behiels continues, the prime minister believes 'every left-of-centre Canadian is a moral relativist, that is, immoral, and can't be trusted to govern at any level of society.'...
This is the wellspring for the prime minister's contempt for 'socialists,' for his treatment of Canada's opposition parties as enemies to be destroyed, for his antipathy to 'left-wing fringe groups' working on behalf of the disadvantaged, for his government's crackdown on refugees and his willingness to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building new prisons to facilitate the 'tough-on-crime' agenda...
Bhiels sees the next election as a 'competition of values. There are values on the right which are deeply imbued with religious fundamentalism but you also have longstanding, deeply-entrenched liberal values in Canada that are just as important to people and must be defended.'
