By Margaret Wente - from the Globe and Mail
I’m not crazy about Stephen Harper. He’s a cold fish. When he tried a little victory smile the other day, he looked like he was having an attack of gas. I’d rather share a beer with Jack Layton or a glass of chardonnay with Michael Ignatieff than a double-double with Mr. Harper. He strikes me as a guy with little sense of humour and even less small talk. I didn’t even vote for him this time around.
But the sheer animosity of many of my friends amazes me. They genuinely fear and loathe him. One of them unblushingly compares him to Hitler. Many of these otherwise smart, delightful and wise people sincerely believe that Mr. Harper wants to turn Canada into a right-wing theocracy where women have no abortion rights and petty criminals are executed at dawn.
“He’ll try to repeal gay marriage and privatize health care,” one of them predicted on Monday night. She was sitting next to me as we watched the returns on the CBC with a bunch of well-heeled downtown Torontonians. As the count of blue seats ticked steadily upward, the mood became funereal. They looked as if they wanted to don black armbands.
It’s not unusual for politicians to be loathed. In the last leg of Brian Mulroney’s reign, people took an irrational dislike to him. But the animosity displayed toward Mr. Harper is far more vitriolic. As Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick told British readers in The Guardian, Mr. Harper is “a Canadian version of George W. Bush, minus the warmth and intellect. … What happens now is the full-scale Americanization of Canada.”
The intellect part is false, of course (as is the Americanization). You need a very big brain to steer your party from outer darkness to a majority government. What Mr. Harper lacks is emotional intelligence.
What are the roots of this animosity? An obvious one is Mr. Harper’s public personality – dour, controlling and sometimes mean. He lacks a vision that calls us to a higher purpose. His leadership strength is managerial, not inspirational. He has many of the characteristics of those CEOs who succeed not through personal charm but by laying out a strategic plan and sweating the details. He is relentlessly determined to push the marble with his nose to get where he wants to go.
Many people have deplored Mr. Harper’s efforts to demonize Michael Ignatieff as an opportunistic carpetbagger. But the hatchet job the Liberals have done on him goes back years, and has been devastatingly effective. Mr. Harper is routinely depicted as a cross between Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort, whose soulless band of Death Eaters will destroy democracy in Canada if they get the chance. They have successfully convinced themselves (and a large but shrinking part of the electorate) that a vote for Mr. Harper is un-Canadian.
It’s not uncommon to find this paranoid streak in the smartest salons of Ottawa and Toronto. Strange to say, it reminds me of those Republican wing-nuts who believe Barack Obama isn’t really an American.
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