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Stephen Harper has given Canada a complex – a military industrial complex to be precise. Among other things, Canada’s long farewell to diplomacy will be front and centre at the Munk Debate on foreign policy Monday night in Toronto.

But will the opposition lay a glove on the man who has single-handedly gutted foreign aid, erased peacekeeping as part of the Canadian vocabulary, and turned Canada’s foreign policy into Wrestlemania with real blood? If the debate on the economy is anything to go by, the answer is almost certainly no.

With a packed, and perhaps stacked, audience of more than 3,000 set to attend the event in the media capital of Canada, it is this debate that has the greatest potential to create high impact on Election 2015 – or what John Wright of the marketing and research firm Ipsos described to me as a “polling bomb.”

All of the low-information, hot buttons will be available to Harper as he and his Australian guru, Lynton Crosby, try to change the channel from a lousy record and zero substance to heightened emotion and rising xenophobia: Israel/Palestine; the Red menace in Ukraine; the beheaders of ISIS; and the refugee hordes of potential terrorists.

And oh my yes, the greatest threat of them all – the specter of Justin Trudeau moving into 24 Sussex after October 19.

If Harper and Crosby get their way, all roads will lead back to the niqab, which is as good a metaphor as any for expressing how distracting issues have trivialized this debate season.

Think about it. The economy is on mired in low productivity and lacklustre confidence, democracy is shrivelling up like a frost-bitten garden, and the Conservatives are trying to slogan their way out of a decade of lying on everything from Mike Duffy to the F-35. And a carefully choreographed anti-niqab campaign moves the voter intention needle for eight-out-of-ten Canadians? And this after the Federal Court supports a woman’s right to be who she wants to be and dress the way she wants to dress. Remember, she has taken off her niqab for security and identity reasons such as a driver’s license photo or airport security.

Lest we forget: she will also unveil before the citizenship ceremony to properly identified.

But while Harper and his dark wizard from down under will hit all the emotional panic buttons within reach, they had better hope that voters are as Pavlovian as they think.

Canada had come a long way, all of it downhill, from the days of mitigating poverty in places like Africa and playing the role of honest broker on the international scene. Canada had come a long way, all of it downhill, from the days of mitigating poverty in places like Africa and playing the role of honest broker on the international scene.

Behind the emotional appeal to the worst angels of our nature and fear mongering is a decade’s worth of diplomatic disaster. The world has become a much more dangerous place for Canadians due almost solely to the Harper approach, and Canada has been involved in some of the darkest episodes post 9/11 – including a dubious role in Afghanistan that might yet spark a public inquiry into allegations of war crimes.

Our trigger-happy PM routinely chooses war over diplomacy. He has also chosen the venal economic self-interest over taking a principled stand every time.

Consider some of the breathless reversals of Canadian foreign policy under Harper: While even China announces a cap-and-trade policy to reduce carbon emissions in the name of planetary salvation, Harper was the first world leader to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.

He also refused to honour Canada’s commitments at Copenhagen to reduce carbon emissions. To be sure it wouldn’t come back on his watch, he then dismantled the entire climate change branch within Foreign Affairs and has yet to regulate the energy industry.

Under Harper, and without informing either Parliament or the United Nations, Canada withdrew from the UN convention to fight drought in Africa and other vulnerable countries, making Canada the only state to do so out of 193 that signed on to the convention. The rest of the world saw encroaching deserts as an urgent problem because they are so obviously tied to famine and poverty. Then foreign minister John Baird referred to the convention as a fruitless “talkfest.”

If it doesn’t go boom and make money, the Conservatives just aren’t interested.

Canada was the outlier at the 2011 meeting of the G-8 Summit in Deauville, France. U.S. President Barack Obama was set to make a statement on behalf of the G-8 that the starting point for Israeli/Palestinian peace talks would be the 1967 borders – as international law required.

Harper blocked Obama’s draft communique against the wishes of all other G-8 members. While other countries were desperately trying to come up with a diplomatic resolution of the Iran/nuclear crisis, (which they ultimately did) Harper closed the Canadian embassy in Tehran and sabre-rattled about bombing.

And just in case Canada’s diplomats weren’t sufficiently aware of their powerlessness, the Harper government then started selling off the embassies.

No wonder Harper presided over the longest strike in federal public service history with his own diplomats – six months –back in 2013. Tony Clement might be able to ignore established protocol for approving infrastructure grants, i.e., gazebos for his riding, to the tune of $50 million. But federal foreign service officers couldn’t expect a concession from Harper on so controversial a concept as equal pay for work of equal value.

Once upon a time, Harper said this: “I don’t think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values. They don’t want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar.” The new Harper now sells out Canadian values without so much as a blink. Once upon a time, Harper said this: “I don’t think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values. They don’t want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar.” The new Harper now sells out Canadian values without so much as a blink.

In the end, the government blinked and the foreign service workers got their raise, or at least part of it. But Harper had the last laugh. The new thrust of the Canadian foreign service was to turn its officers into traveling salesmen for trade minister Ed Fast, pushing for deals in Asia and South America.

Canada had come a long way, all of it downhill, from the days of mitigating poverty in places like Africa and playing the role of honest broker on the international scene.

Despite its miserable record on foreign policy, the Harper crowd continues to have its supporters. On the eve of the debate, the Globe and Mail is already doing the cheerleading for Stephen Harper with headlines like “Loud and Clear” and descriptives like “muscular” to describe his martial behaviour on the international stage.

Other words that come to mind are “belligerent,” “bellicose” and “unprincipled” … and in some cases “unlawful.”

Harper crowed over the Libya mission, which was run by a Canadian, Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard. The Harper government even had a million dollar fly-by of Parliament Hill to celebrate the “victory.” One look at Libya today makes clear that Harper’s “Mission Accomplished” moment was about as premature as George W. Bush’s triumphalism at the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Despite express promises that the NATO- led mission was not about regime change, but protecting civilians with a no-fly zone, the regime of Muammar Gaddafi was bombed out of office. A heavy toll of civilians died in the raids. Did NATO’s military intervention bring peace or stability to the post-Gaddafi period? No. Just the second Libyan civil war that rages to this day. Gaddafi is gone, but in the failed state left in the rubble, the world now has General Khalifa Haftar warring against various Islamist groups. There is no NATO intervention to “protect” civilians this time.

After a brief flirtation with moralizing against evil-doers, Harper now routinely does deals with the devil. Despite its human rights record, Harper has cut huge deals with China, including Sinopec, the giant Chinese petroleum and chemical company. That $4.6 billion deal for 9 percent of Syncrude was eclipsed by the sale of Calgary-based resource company Nexen to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. The price-tag was $15 billion but the conditions could prove much steeper – Canadian sovereignty. That’s because Harper granted China the right to sue Canada for unlimited damages if domestic laws by any level of government in this country harmed the value of Chinese investment here.

Once upon a time, Harper said this: “I don’t think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values. They don’t want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar.” If you are wondering what happened to the man that spoke those words, he has undergone a sea-change. The new Harper now sells out Canadian values without so much as a blink.

How else can it be explained that Canada just sold $15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, a country recently described by The Atlantic as a world champion of human rights abuse? This is a country that plans to behead and then crucify 21 year-old Ali al-Nimr for protesting against the state during the Arab Spring when he was a teenager. But I thought the beheaders were the bad guys? Now it turns out ISIS is something quite different: Saudi Arabians without money.

Forget for the moment that Harper also sold the Canadian Wheat Board to a company partly owned by Saudi Arabia. Why is it such a sellout of Canadian values to ship massive amounts of weaponry to one of the most repressive regimes on earth? Simply because the armaments will be used against the opponents of this brutal and backward monarchy.

And that not only means anyone, like Ali al-Nimr who might protest against the Saudi regime, but also against its neighbours in the region. Though Harper has maintained radio silence on the subject, an unimaginably vicious civil war is raging in Yemen in which the Saudis are slaughtering Houthis civilians.

The Saudi armed forces are targeting civilian populations and thousands of people have already been killed. No medical supplies or fuel are getting into Yemen, which means the few remaining hospitals still operating will soon go dark. Things are so desperate that the Netherlands has just put forward a resolution for a UN war crimes investigation in Yemen – a catastrophe barely noticed in the western media.

One wonders how it would square with Canadian values if weapons made in this country were found by a UN investigation to be part of the arsenal now being turned on civilians in Yemen. When you start arming despots and war criminals, not even Wayne Gretzky can ride to the rescue.

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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 nine 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. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, is a number one best-seller.

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