What Prime Minister Stephen Harper has never understood is that Canada’s diversity is its strength. It makes us strong. It also makes our country hard to govern. We do not fit easily into the strategies of an ideologue. Our provinces are of varying sizes, mixed topography, ethnic and language mixes and even different aboriginal peoples. It is a country that needs strong leadership to grow, enrich and thrive.
Instead of offering leadership, Stephen Harper has caused division. He is a man with no close friends. He has turned on his mentors such as Tom Flanagan of the University of Calgary and Preston Manning of the Reform. He is a lonely but unsympathetic figure.
With a majority government for the past four years, Stephen Harper has concentrated on a mean-spirited agenda. He has given little thought to what the country really needs. He has caused the country and its provinces to work at cross purposes. He has played on ethnicity and pandered to the Diasporas of the Levant and the Ukraine.
Provincial borders need to be open, not barriers to a bottle of wine or a trades person. The problems created by provincial rules are easily negotiated by people of good will. They are the stuff of oppression when there is no leadership.
Canada is a country that grows with the versatility of people from so many lands. When the Harper government slows the process by slashing the budgets of embassies and consulates and concocts more barriers to immigrants and refugees, it impacts the economy of the provinces first.
By promoting Alberta’s tar sands while ignoring the steady loss of manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec, Stephen Harper helped nobody. Without that balance in the country’s export capability, how can its economy handle a trade war with the OPEC countries designed to drive the high priced synthetic oils out of competition?
Leadership is in understanding the concerns of environmentalists. It is in listening to the experts. It is in ensuring that contrary voices are heard. Then, and only then, a true leader can proceed with confidence of the rightness of a decision.
Leadership is also the big ideas. It is in challenging the status quo. It is in seeing the future and what it holds. It is in meeting the needs of a better future.
Stephen Harper has failed all tests of leadership. He uses scapegoats to bear the cost of failure for him. And too often it is all Canadians.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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