Prime Minister Stephen Harper might have sacrificed a majority victory in the 2008 election when he campaigned in defence of a $45-million cut in arts funding, famously denouncing Canadian artists and their patrons as “a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren't high enough.” Quebecers especially were annoyed.

As a result, Harper and his party said nothing about the arts and culture when they fought the 2011 campaign that ultimately did produce their majority. Acting on their leader's view that culture is a “niche issue,” the Conservatives boycotted all debates and discussions devoted to it.

And what they didn't say didn't hurt them, of course. Emphatically not having a culture policy turned out to be a clever tactic.

That may explain why they've stuck with it so steadfastly despite the opportunities created by their now firm control of parliament. We know what they don't like, but nine years later we still don't know what they do like. As Harper's electoral fortunes fade and questions of legacy arise, the absence of any coherent Tory cultural project becomes ever-more obvious.

It turns out that culture is not so niche after all: It is your face to the future.

The pinched face of Conservative Canada is revealed most tellingly in our embassies. The order to pull down original Canadian artworks and to replace them with photos of the Queen in such prominent locations remains the Harper government's signature cultural gesture. By some improbable combination of semi-articulate impulses and misplaced nostalgia, the high camp of Canadian monarchism became official policy.

Meanwhile all the cultural programming the embassies once produced so successfully shrivelled up and disappeared, pushing modern Canada's most effective ambassadors — its artists — out into the cold. Other cuts have ended Canadian studies at foreign universities, further darkening the veil on the outward-facing image of our country.

Legacy-wise, Harper's biggest problem is the fact that no people in world history have ever erected a monument to a cost-cutter. Thus the government's recent, clumsy attempts to make something permanent before the lights go out in October. If only they had bothered to practice beforehand! But there couldn't be more tragic examples of incompetent patronage than the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Ottawa and the Mother Canada colossus planned for Cape Breton.

Typically for this government — and conveniently for one so culturally inept — both national monuments were outsourced to the private sector, with the Tories themselves content to play their familiar roles as backroom arm-twisters and rule-breakers. Groping instinctively towards statements while avoiding all questions of taste, they are showing the world just how bad it can be.

News that the outrageous Ottawa memorial has been downsized is certainly welcome. But smaller size will not improve the quality of its deliberately oppressive design, which uses all the scale tricks of totalitarian monument makers to make individuals seem puny and abstract power absolute. It even has a forbidding concrete rostrum upon which to array the local politburo.

The only real absolute on display in that design is confusion.

The Ottawa ugliness almost seems sophisticated next to the Mother Canada colossus, which is destined to remind generations of chagrined Canadians just how embarrassing we can be. But embarrassment is only part of what gross amateurism stands to achieve on that shore.

Although this hack reworking of an almost sacred statue remains completely uncredited to any actual artist, the connoisseur will recognize in its awfulness the clear influence of the celebrated Cecila Gimenez de Borja and her Fauvist reinterpretation of a certain faded Spanish fresco.

Poor Mother Canada's sponsors will tell you that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and that respect for the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers abroad justifies her erection on that beautiful shore. But what if the world at large, not just the snooty elites, concludes that she's a laughingstock? How does it respect the dead to commemorate them with a monument that has even the slightest chance of being the butt of snide jokes for as long as it stands?

Simply to risk that now-probable outcome — by barging ahead with no expertise, no guidance, no humility, no foresight — is outrageously irresponsible.

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It all could have been so different. Like Nixon in China, Harper the philistine could have surprised us. But he never even tried, and the niche he once scorned has grown into a chasm that threatens to swallow his memory whole.

John Barber is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Twitter @annegonian

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