Dear Editor
While perusing the sports pages in one of our Saskatchewan newspapers, I stumbled upon a column written by Andrew Coyne, of CBC's “At Issue” weekly on The National. I don't often totally agree with Coyne's point of view, which I usually find far to the right of where I am, but I felt he had summarized in one succinct (but rather long) sentence almost everything wrong with the Harper government. I thought I should share it with your readers, so here it is.
“If one were to draw up an indictment of this government's approach to politics and the public purpose, one might mention its wholesale contempt for Parliament, its disdain for the Charter of Rights and the courts' role in upholding it, its penchant for secrecy, its chronic deceitfulness, its deepening ethical problems, its insistence on taking, at all times, the lowest, crudest path to its ends, its relentless politicization of everything.” Wow.
If taken at first glance, Coyne's summary may seem a little extreme, but it came, in this particular column, after he had pointed out recent examples of each of the traits he then summarized. After thinking about this for awhile I began thinking back to other things I had read about or had observed on TV over the period the Harper government has been in power. I realized it was possible to easily find many other examples for each of the traits listed by Coyne.
As Huckleberry Finn's father once remarked about a government he didn't like, “Call that a gov'ment?”
Russell Lahti
Battleford
