The threat of barbarism is grave, insidious and far-reaching. Those responsible are a small group nurturing a foreign-inspired ideology on Canadian soil. They pore over rigid doctrines in cloistered rooms. They scheme to impose their values, attractive only to a minority, on the majority of Canadian people. They have carefully veiled their true selves but their agenda is unmistakable: to erase the country’s achievements in security and fairness.

This threat comes not from a handful of niqab-wearing Muslim women. It has always come from Canada’s Conservative party. Their imported neoconservative ideology, baked into homegrown resentment toward the federal state, has never been palatable to a country with progressive ambitions. They have risen to power through other means: money and economic clout; a deep network of right-wing media and think tanks that have shaped policy options; and an unreformed electoral system that has allowed a party with only a quarter of the electorate’s support to rule unhindered.

They have not been one for grand gestures. Their approach has been a steady accumulation of small, methodical steps, animated by a long-term vision. That vision is to extinguish Stephen Harper’s perception of Canada: “a northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term,” as he once described the country. That those Scandinavian governments are the world’s best in providing free healthcare and education, redistributing wealth, and guaranteeing political expression: this to Harper is cause for loathing.

Small gestures, yet an inexorable dismantling of the finest part of Canada’s governing tradition: the collective project to improve people’s lives and protect our environment. Budgets rammed through parliament, directives slipped in through the bureaucracy, cuts applied carefully, widely, incisively. It has amounted to an unprecedented assault on all that is most distinct and valuable about this country: universal healthcare, a natural world of varied beauty, our public broadcaster, the culture and land protection of Indigenous peoples, and a spirit of openness and tolerance unmatched in the world.

Harper’s greatest success in hampering the state from serving Canadians has been to strip it of its most important resource: taxes. Continuing a Liberal legacy, Harper’s cuts to taxes – GST, corporate and personal – have enriched corporations and denied the state a stunning $45 billion a year in revenue. This has deliberately starved the ability of this government – and of future ones – to pay for public services and address inequality or climate change. Such policies have reduced the country to depression-era divisions: Canada’s wealthiest 86 people now own as much as the 11.4 million poorest.

What welfare Harper has denied Canadians he has not spared the tar sands barons. His great fixation has been to elevate them to unparalleled influence, turning the state into a servant of their industry: granting them billions in handouts, the chance to write legislation, and the use of state officials as spies, spin-masters and overseas salesmen. This new character of the state has disfigured the environment beyond just the climate-torching tar sands: from the razing of the boreal forest to the opening of our water systems to privatization, from the extension of oil prospecting in the Arctic to the refusal to list our most endangered species.

Applying the state to the most destructive ends, Harper has also ensured it will vacate the most essential. The Conservatives’ predecessor – the Reform party – once made the mistake of announcing their desire to privatize healthcare, the social program most valued by Canadians. Though his aim is the same, Harper has been wiser. No announcements, but cuts to healthcare have still been set in motion: a crippling $36 billion dollars over the next decade. The effect is obvious: as public medicare crumbles and complaints grow, profit-gouging companies will be waiting in the wings.

The strangling of the state has had many victims, but none more than women. In Harper’s Canada, half of the population is now treated like a special-interest group. He has shuttered women’s centres that aimed to advance economic equality and eliminate gender violence. Deployed parliamentarians to try to reintroduce a debate over the right to abortion. And used tax policies to encourage one-income families – all the better to keep women tethered to the home. Adding a final insult to injury, Harper has sought to win re-election by stoking fears about Muslim women who choose to wear head-scarves at citizenship ceremonies, supposedly out of concern for their liberation. Racist pandering has scarcely been more shameless.

Certain other images of the Harper era are impossible to forget. A mountain of irreplaceable books from a scientific library discarded in a dumpster. Harper pantomiming empathy for a Syrian child washed onto Turkey’s shores, followed by news that he personally blocked the processing of the most desperate refugees. Or when Manitoba First Nations, stricken by the swine flu, appealed for medicine: Ottawa instead sent body bags. Images capturing the quality of a dark decade, the sneering state-backed contempt for our highest aspirations to grasp our ecological limits, to assist those abroad, and to protect the most vulnerable among us.

Stephen Harper may have changed the character of the Canadian state. He has not changed the character of its people. Stifled and suffering under his policies, an overwhelming majority clearly want a new direction. While reversing the damage he has inflicted will require time, a reformed electoral system and the growth of popular movements, it must start by the removal of his government. Vote strategically and above all with your conscience, but vote Harper out.

On 19 October, Canadians will have their chance to combat a home-grown threat – a threat posed not by veiled women, but by the dismembering of their country. When a regime so utterly ransacks its own lands and people, can we stop describing it as the governing of a nation? It is more akin to a barbarian invasion.