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When a pollster tells Stephen Harper that his policies have once again outraged Canada’s artists, I imagine the prime minister echoes what Dorothy Parker said when the famously reserved president Calvin Coolidge died: “How can they tell?”

Canada’s artists are in a perpetual state of Harper-phobia, to a point that can seem obsessive. Honestly, I’m surprised that spontaneous artist combustion is not a plague upon the land.

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As an arts critic, I have many times on Facebook seen anti-Harper pile-ons that are as inflamed as they are impotent. (The Harper-philes savour every seething word of it. On a “Stephen Harper Going Away Party” page, a self-declared Harper fan wrote, “many conservatives . . . are on this group strictly for the entertainment value.”)

The Harper-phobes seem to blame the Conservative leader for whatever ails the arts and otherwise, from the smallest cuts in the smallest local programs, to the very existence of climate change — which Harper causes not by reneging on international agreements nor cutting funding, but merely by being alive, so toxic is his presence.