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Except for the most serious Kool-Aid drinkers, it is getting painfully obvious to everyone that the current prime minister is getting past his best-before date.

If he were a week-old loaf of bread, or a dubious meatball at the back of the fridge, it would be time to throw him out. Of course, he is neither: he is a major and successful politician and his trip to the trash heap of history will be gradual. It will be buffered by a comfortable pension, and further soothed by cushy seats in the boardrooms of the nation. What is said about lawyers is also true of politicians — they never lose the case.

But all political leaders wear out their welcomes. The longer you are in power, the higher the pile of dirty laundry gets. There are the ministers who have to be fired, the flip-flops that must be performed, the impossible lies that need to be delivered as though there were actually things you still believed in. In the end, they all believe in the same thing — staying in power. Where else but in politics can you be treated like a rock star or royalty without either talent or pedigree?

In Stephen Harper’s case, a new trait has come into play in the country’s growing weariness of him. He is a one-man show with a mean streak. You don’t displease this King without consequences. The road-kill to prove that can be found on both sides of the political highway. It includes people like Bill Casey, Helena Guergis, Michael Ignatieff, Stephane Dion, Munir Sheik, Richard Colvin and Kevin Page.

For the first time in our history, fear now plays a bigger role in Canada’s public life than science. But there is only so much fear you can put into people, just so much and no more. When that moment arrives, when their fear quotient has been exceeded, ordinary people find what has been there all along — their natural store of courage. With that, an old democratic discovery is made: the great are only great because they are standing on our shoulders.

Fortunately for the prime minister, he has lived under a lucky political star. For serendipitous rather than cerebral reasons, he has been given an unnatural reprieve from the reaction that sets in against all bullies — which, of course, is what he is. For most of his career as prime minister Stephen Harper’s political opponents have either been hobbled by their former political sins, as the Liberals were by Adscam, or in no position to be seen as a government-in-waiting — which up until now applied to the NDP and the Greens.

But with a rejuvenated opposition capturing the public’s eye — one party through a policy-driven convention taking dead aim at this government, and the other by selecting a new leader who might just bring the kids back into politics — Stephen Harper suddenly looks old.

He looks old flying to the funeral of a woman who defended apartheid and whose death sent thousands of her own countrymen into the street partying. He looks old fronting for a corporate elite who can’t buy enough advertising to portray their greed as swashbuckling philanthropy, putting us all to work. He looks old welcoming Chinese panda bears to Canada while cold-shouldering native kids who walked through an eternity of winter to be heard on the lawns of Parliament.

Old is bad enough. Then there is ancient. That’s the place where Stephen Harper has arrived on the environment. This is a file you just can’t lie your way through, no matter how many spinners do your bidding. The polar ice caps are disappearing and Canada opts out of Kyoto. There is a reason that anyone in this PM’s environment portfolio ends up with more wrinkles than an Agatha Christie plot.

With a rejuvenated opposition capturing the public’s eye … Stephen Harper suddenly looks old.

Not even an accomplished master of the teleprompter (the machine that gives the illusion of understanding through the vacuous power of image) like Peter Kent can conceal the central truth about the Harper view of the environment: it is no more than an obstacle on the path to Klondike Days, a gold rush mentality brought to the development of our resources as if there were no tomorrow. Did Joe Oliver really say we only had ten years to tear out Canada’s commodity wealth? Joe, why not five?

Former Liberal environment minister David Anderson offered me an explanation for the prime minister’s dismal view of tree-huggers from when Harper was in Opposition. He described him as “a guy who let it be known that he cared about the guy-things, the economy and the military, not the do-gooder things. A guy from the Fifties.”

The Fifties. A time when a man could throw his ciggy and chip bag out the car window without a lecture from his girlfriend, when gasoline came with lead, and only sissies showed up with flowers.

Stephen Harper’s environmental policy is pure Ozzie and Harriet. Why should a scientist hurt aquaculture in the Fraser River over a silly virus? Why should the government pay freshwater scientists at the ELA to come up with reasons to slow down the poisonous juggernaut of the tar sands? Why should those geeky types in white coats come up with facts that bring policy-based evidence into disrepute?

If Harper did care about about things like fish habitat or the protection of species-at-risk, his government wouldn’t have proposed in last week’s Canada Gazette changes to the Fisheries Act that will make it easier to degrade the environment.

After reading the government’s proposed changes published in the Canada Gazette, here’s what Jeff Hutchings, a world-renowned Canadian fish biologist at Dalhousie University told me: “The document asserts that these regulations will strengthen environmental protection. All of the available evidence indicates that they will do the opposite … There appears to be no requirement for DFO to undertake an on-site inspection by DFO scientific staff to verify the information provided by the applicant.”

In case you are interested, guess who gets to decide if a development project is likely to damage a commercially important fish stock? You guessed it: the applicant/developer. And this from a government that has already passed a lot of the power over environmental assessments to the province.

So with the PM suddenly looking like one of those tired sitcoms just before it gets cancelled, what will the next phase of our politics look like? For the Conservatives, there will have to be renewal — the kind the party brings about itself, or the kind that the people deliver.

On the leadership side, there is no shortage of eager hopefuls. John Baird — the “kid in class with gum on his nose” as Megan Leslie described him — is certainly ambitious. Nor should our curry-in-a-hurry Immigration Minister Jason Kenney be discounted. He may not be lean and hungry, Cassius-style, but emperor saliva drips from his chin.

Perhaps the worst-kept secret in Canada is that former Harper cabinet minister Jim Prentice is also gunning to be top Tory. For my money, he’s the best bet. He disembarked from the Good Ship Harper before he was asked to walk the plank, and was a good environment minister — even a great one, by Tory standards. And he may be able to deliver a better approach to getting indigenous peoples onside with pipeline development than the Godfather Negotiations offered by Stephen Harper.

But the smart money favors one of the opposition parties to give Harper the heave-ho — if only because even an incumbent in decline has more staying power than those who seek his mantle. In the end, the Tories will be too timorous to stage a Night of the Long Knives, as the British Tories arranged for Maggie Thatcher.

But it would be a very big mistake for either Justin Trudeau or Thomas Mulcair to think that they can walk into the job because Stephen Harper is shopworn and without much room to grow his support. The demographic they are all most anxious to engage — the youth vote — will be demanding more than just a new prime minister’s face on the TV news. They will be asking for what Anonymous gives them — a sense that it is possible that the public can get the truth again.

The next prime minister of Canada can’t just be a more charming Wizard of Oz.

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.

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

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