C onservatives are out of their particular closet. Not since ripping into social and legal activists during a first year in power has the party so aggressively, or openly, imposed its ideology.

Subtlety is strangely missing in the behaviour of a party tantalized by the prize of turning a minority into a majority. Gone is any serious effort to disguise the motives in Conservative machinations. In its place is the blatant use of money and muscle to discourage and to discipline those judged offside.

Call it clarity or bullying, but there was no doubt about the intentions when the overgrown gnomes in the Prime Minister's Office savaged TD Bank CEO Ed Clark for suggesting both widespread unhappiness with federal deficits and, worse still, tax hikes as a fix. Call it a government exercising its legitimate prerogative or exorcising moderation, but there was no ambiguity in purpose when Conservatives cut funding to the ecumenical church group KAIROS or blew apart Rights and Democracy by tilting its board to new members with strong biases.

Whatever the labels, the writing is on Ottawa's walls: To challenge Conservative orthodoxy is to risk reprisals. Even if it's new to non-governmental and arm's-length federal agencies, the message is familiar to bureaucrats and watchdogs. More quietly – but as effectively – Conservatives have been making it clear to civil servants and independent oversight officials that what the Prime Minister wants is mute obedience.

A capital sensitive to the most nuanced top-down signals gets the point. A memo is superfluous when all-party recommendations to repair the dysfunctional Access to Information Act are rejected, parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page is forced to fight for promised funding or when Linda Keene is sacked for doing her job ensuring nuclear safety.

Certainly the government of the day has every right to expect bureaucrat loyalty. After all, democracy demands that mandarins advise, ministers decide. Still, enforced silence and reflex compliance are anathemas to the openness and intellectual argy-bargy that are essential to the creation of effective policies that put the nation on the most beneficial course.

Less varied and informed debate was the result in 2006 when Conservatives lunged at, among other old Reform bugaboos, the court challenges program, Law Reform Commission and Status of Women. Policy frostbite will be the result of the rising chill on any advocacy that runs counter to the preconceived Conservative consensus.

Prime ministers have as much right to set their administration's tone as they have to expect the bureaucracy to execute government's will. But it's also true that character is often the decisive election factor and, by and large, Canadians like Stephen Harper best when Conservatives are getting on with the job, not on the case of anyone who sees the country and world through a different prism.

So it's instructive that Harper is now appealing so obviously to his party's relatively narrow base. Along with risking further alienation of the broader Canadian constituency, the decision to play so loudly to his most appreciative audience reinforces the same concerns about obsessive control that led to nationwide protests over his suspension of Parliament.

Harper is respected as a shrewd if imperfect strategist. His current tactics suggest a prime minister more concerned with reinforcing the ruling party's core constituency and advancing the Conservative agenda while he has power than in converting the moderate majority to the cause.

James Travers' column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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