Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

After nearly two weeks without food, Chief Theresa Spence is finding out that there is nothing in an alleged democracy as ugly as oligarchy.

In a democracy, the political leadership is responsible to the people. In an oligarchy, it is responsible to the few — the elite who own most of the assets and wield the real power.

In Canada, those are the people who wanted the Nexen deal, who want the Northern Gateway pipeline, and who want Canadians to believe that what’s good for corporate CEOs is good for them. In an oligarchy, there are a lot of people who simply don’t matter.

This is a political disorder that rode in on a south wind. In the United States, “we the people” has been replaced by “we the peons.”

Lloyd Blankfein, top banana at Goldman Sachs, put it up in neon for everyone to see in a recent conversation with CBS News. Blankfein said that someone should tell middle-class Americans they need to lower their expectations of government-provided social security.

Blankfein, who made $16 million last year as a Wall Street banker, thinks it’s time for the guy making $14,000 a year to trim the beer budget.

Yes, he was referring to the same middle class that bailed out the big, fat ass of the financial sector after it nearly wrecked the planet with its fraudulent trading in worthless financial instruments, including collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).

Goldman sold this junk to its own customers — then, knowing values would drop, shorted the very same CDOs and made money on both ends of the deal. Enterprising, if you don’t mind me complimenting high-functioning psychopaths. Forget about Mayan predictions; the end nearly came in 2008 — and not because Joe the Plumber spent too much on Budweiser.

People like Blankfein, who sufficiently tightened his own belt to buy a $30 million home in the Hamptons, and Sheldon Adelson, personal ATM to Mitt Romney during his doomed presidential run, tried to buy the recent U.S. election. They tried to prop up a venal Republican party built on the idea that making the wealthy even wealthier was good for America.

Sadly for the ten or so rich, old, white guys who thought the Oval Office was just another hostile takeover, they backed a candidate so plastic he looked like he was lying even when he was telling the truth.

The late, great novelist Gore Vidal said that “democracy” had become a “nonsense word” in the American vocabulary. I suppose when the eventual winner of the last presidential election had to spend $2 billion to get elected, the point is delivered. That’s a lot of cheese to become Big Cheese.

Lewis Lapham, author and twice editor of Harper’s Magazine in the United States, made the same point. Democracy, he wrote, announces itself in three fundamental ways: an honest public discussion about issues; accountability of the governors to the governed; and equal protection under the law.

By Lapham’s measure, Stephen Harper’s Canada is not a democracy, let alone a parliamentary democracy. It is an oligarchy with a few well chosen friends and millions upon millions of people to ignore, vilify or bamboozle.

Consider the issue of honest public discussion about issues. For several years, the Conservative government lied its brains out about the F-35 program. They lied about whether there had been a competition, about whether there was a contract, and most spectacularly, about how much these jet fighters would cost the poor saps who have to pay for them.

But contrition is for little people. Oligarchs never say they’re sorry. After being outed by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, by the auditor general and then by independent accounting firm KPMG, the prime minister told a national TV audience that the accounting firm’s report “validated” the government figures for the F-35, and that an “assumption was just made” that Canada would buy these aircraft. This, of course, is the stuff that makes the grass turn green.

It’s not that the prime minister doesn’t realize the figure the Tories put out for the F-35 during the 2011 federal election was $30 billion shy of reality.

It’s not that he really believes vague “assumptions” provide the basis for the expenditure of $45 billion in public money.

It’s just that he believes that the government’s lying about all these things is far less important than the fact that it is the government. Incumbency is a magic potion. Under its influence, people are supposed to swoon. All too often, they do. That’s the way oligarchs think. Richard Nixon put it in a nutshell when he famously said that if the president did it, then it wasn’t a crime.

Stephen Harper has arrived at the exalted position of Tricky Dick. He thinks that the necessity to tell the truth binds other people, not him. He doesn’t adjust to facts, he manufactures them, and when that doesn’t work, he defies them. The F-35 doesn’t just prove his gross incompetence in the expenditure of mountains of tax dollars — it also shows the arrogant belief that he doesn’t have to explain himself to people he believes would be baffled by an elevated game of checkers.

At least former Liberal cabinet minister David Dingwall just thought he was entitled to his entitlements. Stephen Harper thinks he is entitled to everything — including ongoing financial fictions about the F-35 and the overthrow of a professional and transparent procurement policy. Even his most loyal trolls must realize that this guy is just making stuff up and people really aren’t that stupid.

So there was no public discussion of the most expensive military acquisition Canada has ever made/not made. What about Lewis Lapham’s second sign of democracy — accountability to the governed?

The Harper government has just finished passing a second omnibus bill that continued the plastic surgery being performed on the face of the nation. Bill C-45, like Bill C-38 before it, was passed with virtually no debate. It did, however, almost produce a fistfight. Luckily for Peter Van Loan, Justin Trudeau was not involved.

Jim Flaherty’s last budget, the Agatha Christie budget, brought down billions in cuts. But the mystery of what was cut — where, and by how much — endures. The lion’s share of federal departments haven’t responded to requests by Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page for the precise nature of the Harper government’s slashing.

If opposition MPs and parliamentary officers don’t know the details, it is impossible to debate the cuts — which is, of course, pretty much the idea.

So what about Lapham’s third sign of democracy — equal treatment before the courts? This is a very important question because as the Harper oligarchy suppresses the rights of the political opposition, unions, officers of parliament, environmentalists, scientists and aboriginals, it finds itself more and more before judges.

The PM’s view is that you win some, you lose some. Actually, he’s lost quite a few and will probably lose more in 2013 because of the alleged unconstitutionality of much of his justice legislation as contained in poorly-debated omnibus bills. And that is a universe the prime minister is comfortable in — the winner-take-all world of expensive court rulings and a grinding process — life as an elitist joust where he with the longest lance usually prevails.

Which is why Stephen Harper can’t understand Chief Theresa Spence. She is trying to get things done in the old way, using a habit of liberty not well understood by oligarchs or by people who are demoralized by the state of Canadian politics. She is asking for a face-to-face meeting with the man who is supposed to be working for her, for the people, not just his chosen people. She is asking for something Stephen Harper is not much good at giving — personal answers.

Chief Spence’s request might be the fatigue of a front-line respondent to the worst poverty in the country. It might be dismay at how Harper’s promise to forge a new relationship with Canada’s aboriginals has utterly failed to materialize. It might be the Harper government’s statutory war on the environment without bothering to get aboriginal approval for profound legislative change. It might be cuts to native health care or the abominable state of reserve education. Whatever it is, it has put Stephen Harper in an unfamiliar place — on the defensive.

In a hunger strike, most of the phases are well known. When glycogen is used up and no food is taken, the body begins consuming fat stocks. When they are gone, muscles and organ tissue are consumed to produce energy. But there is not much information about when a hunger strike begins to consume politicians.

The country is waiting to see what Stephen Harper will do about a woman who is dying to talk to him. If she does die, the prime minister will not have to ask for whom the bell tolls — and neither will anyone else.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

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