Back in March I wrote about the wackiness of many attendees at a Bill C-51 protest.

It’s completely legitimate to voice concerns about this anti-terror law. I’ve done so myself.

But many protesters were disproportionately hysterical over this bill. The winner for most outlandish rhetoric was the sign: “I’m more afraid of Stephen Harper than terrorists.”

It was a clear case of Harper Derangement Syndrome (HDS), whereby people are so blindly incensed by the mere fact Stephen Harper is prime minister that they can’t think straight, thus completely undermining whatever credibility their arguments may have had.

It’s one thing to witness such antics from anonymous misfits, it’s another to see them in the pages of the Toronto Star.

“Why Harper (and friends) are a bigger threat than (the Islamic State)” is the actual headline of an opinion piece by Tony Burman, that appeared on Saturday.

He argues that Harper, Australian PM Tony Abbott and British PM David Cameron make up an international movement of leaders who, when it comes to the terror file: “Wildly exaggerate the actual threat. Inflame the rhetoric. Blame Muslims. Brush aside issues of human rights.”

Why would they do that? According to Burman, “it is a clever way to distract voters from more immediate and genuine threats, such as climate change and the economy.”

Read that again. He’s not just arguing climate change matters more to him than the threat of vocal terrorists who have already made inroads in various countries and inspired actual attacks in Canada. This would be curious enough on its own.

No, he’s arguing one of the slowest-moving phenomena on earth is more immediate than the activities of an expansionist terror group that enacts new atrocities weekly.

Burman was editor-in-chief of CBC News from 2002-2007. Did he hold these fringe ideas back then, when he was tasked with crafting balanced news content for the public broadcaster?

Or perhaps he developed them during his subsequent employment, as managing director of Al Jazeera English?

Either way, it’s startling to see HDS find a home in the biggest daily newspaper in the country.

However the Star is not alone in indulging Canadians in anti-Harper theatrics. On Sunday the New York Times published a column by Torontonian Stephen Marche headlined “The Closing of the Canadian Mind.”

Marche’s thesis is that the PM’s “peculiar hatred for sharing information” has resulted in “cloaking himself and his Conservative Party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance.”

His main examples are that Harper won’t participate in widely broadcast debates (even though he just did), that he eliminated the long-form census and he supports the oil and gas sector.

Later: “The darkness has resulted, organically, in one of the most scandal-plagued administrations in Canadian history.” He then cites the Rob Ford and Senate scandals.

Yes, that’s right. A New York Times column somehow suggests Harper’s elimination of the long-form census caused Ford to smoke crack cocaine.

Both Burman and Marche paint a picture of a country on the decline. Yet report after report reminds us that Canada is one of the greatest places to live and work in the world.

How do otherwise credible people get so worked up by the relatively centrist PM of a country with a rather narrow and tame political spectrum?

As I wrote of HDS back in March: “Folks living in a peaceful liberal democracy with a decent standard of living feel so guilty about their quality of life that their mind actually tricks them into thinking they’re worse off in Canadian society than in Burma, North Korea and so on, just so they can sleep better at night.”

The headline on Marche’s article is a reference to conservative philosopher Allan Bloom’s groundbreaking book The Closing of the American Mind.

Perhaps the headline writers were making a veiled jab at their columnist, because Bloom’s 1987 book argued that moral relativism was getting out of hand. After reading these HDS-inspired rants, many more will agree.