More from Jeff Sallot available More fromavailable here

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper called this election two weeks ago, I thought nothing of much significance would occur until after Labour Day. I was wrong.

A deeply passionate and serious debate about Canadian politics emerged last weekend with the publication of a Sunday New York Times op-ed piece provocatively titled, “The Closing of the Canadian Mind”.

The article, by Toronto writer Stephen Marche, holds up Harper’s anti-democratic and anti-intellectual record for the world to see. Reaction to it lit up the Internet. Turns out this was the start of the wide public debate we’d been waiting for.

By Sunday evening, 976 readers had posted comments to the Times’ website. Thousands more tweeted and retweeted links to Marche’s article.

The reaction from those who identified themselves as Canadians was strongly anti-Harper. Americans and other non-Canadians typically seemed puzzled and dismayed by Marche’s description of a country they had long admired as a modern, liberal democracy.

Marche clobbered Harper in a way that none of the opposition leaders came close to doing in the first televised debate on Aug. 6. In that match-up, the NDP’s Tom Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau were too worried about avoiding ‘mistakes’ to do a proper job of making Harper defend his record.

Marche does a far more vigorous job of it. He notes Harper’s “peculiar hatred for sharing information,” his outright hostility to journalists, his war against environmental science, the gag orders imposed on government research scientists, his “active promotion of ignorance” with the scrapping of the long-form census, the criminal efforts of party operatives to suppress the anti-Conservative vote, the Senate corruption scandals, and on and on.

“The Harper years have seen a subtle darkening of Canadian life,” Marche wrote.

He accused Harper of “know-nothing conservatism.” And he concluded that, whether Harper wins or loses, “he will leave Canada more ignorant than he found it.”

None of this will be new to Canadians — who have been slowly ground down by what’s been happening in Stephen Harper’s Canada for the past decade.

The sheer number of intelligent comments sent to the Times by Canadians suggests that a lot of people are paying attention to politics, even in the middle of summer. They are primed. They want change — the sooner the better. The sheer number of intelligent comments sent to the Times by Canadians suggests that a lot of people are paying attention to politics, even in the middle of summer. They are primed. They want change — the sooner the better.

Nevertheless, the Marche piece is devastating because it rakes the evidence of rot into one big heap.

Tories who care about Canada’s reputation abroad — and there are still many — must be livid or ashamed (or both) that this piece is reaching a very large and influential world audience.

The New York Times, like most digital media outlets, keeps track of what its readers are reading. One reliable measure is the number of times readers share a link to an article. On Monday morning the Marche piece was number two on the paper’s top ten list, second only to a page-one investigative piece about the tawdry employment practices of Amazon. Columnist Maureen Dowd’s interview with Donald Trump, to my surprise, ranked only tenth.

Canadian political punditry is not Marche’s usual bailiwick. He is a novelist who also writes a regular column of social commentary for Esquire magazine. The fact that he brought an outside observer’s sensibilities to the task of writing this Times’ piece is its great strength.

Those of us who toil regularly in the trenches of written political journalism too often bog down in minutiae; we sometimes become passive stenographers, failing to connect the dots, forgetting to stoke the fire in the belly that brought us into journalism in the first place.

Broadcast political journalists face all of this and other challenges as well. The unrelenting broadcast news cycle requires them to report the latest ‘development’ on continuing news stories even when it’s trivial and devoid of context. I shudder to think of how much money that could go into real newsgathering the CBC spends on getting live shots of Mike Duffy, Nigel Wright and the lawyers walking in and out of the Ottawa courthouse four times a day in stony silence.

Marche, on the other hand, has the freedom of a Jose Bautista to swing away at a hanging pitch.

And Marche connected. The reaction the piece generated surprised me. The sheer number of intelligent comments sent to the Times by Canadians suggests that a lot of people are paying attention to politics, even in the middle of summer. They are primed. They want change — the sooner the better.

One typical Canadian reader, Helen Heikkila, posted this comment: “Thank you for writing this article. Canadians have a general idea as to what is wrong with Harper but nowhere has his dangerous deficiencies and blatant controlling aggressions on our beloved country been so succinctly and clearly stated. I’ve seen this article popping up all over Facebook and I hope that if enough Canadians read it, they will vote for a leader who will restore the Canada we knew.”

Her post was typical in another way: it made no mention of a specific opposition party or leader as her chosen alternative to the Tories and Harper. People seem to be saying that ousting Harper is what matters; they’ll figure out how when the time comes.

Jeff Sallot is one of Canada’s most experienced and respected political writers. A graduate of the Kent State University journalism school, he shared a Pulitzer Prize with colleagues at The Akron Beacon-Journal for his eyewitness coverage of the massacre of four Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard during an anti-war demonstration. He worked for The Globe and Mail for more than three decades, much of the time as a political journalist based in Ottawa. He started his career in political journalism at The Toronto Star when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister. He taught journalism at Carleton University for seven years until he retired in 2014.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.