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Stephen Harper has made an amendment to the old saying that bullshit baffles brains: marketing trumps all.

Care to play Snakes and Leaders Stevie-style? Easy-peazy. You screw the veterans and then divert attention by surrounding sporting events with commercials saying what a swell job you’re doing for them. The veterans will know you are a fat-faced liar, but that doesn’t matter. They are old and expendable — a disappearing demographic of no political importance. There’s no political upside to them.

You are interested in aiming your message at those millions of non-veterans watching the game, the ones who will be more impressed by all the monuments you are building to past wars, while simultaneously ignoring sick and dying veterans of more recent ones.

After a few beers, a few highlights-reel goals and a few government-sponsored TV spots, hey, they might come away with a more or less sloppy idea that you are in fact the lone champion of the veterans. The beauty of advertising: You can be rewarded for failure and phoniness every time if you get the messaging right.

Playing off that central tenet of Harper politics — perception as reality — there is a rift out there these days suggesting how formidable the Conservatives will be in the next election. Incumbency tends to attract those kind of flies. Some observers seem to believe that Team Harper can serve up one more baloney sandwich to the electorate and win government again. They seemed to have missed the Ontario election. That was not just Tim Haddock on the spit — that was Rob Food and Stephen Hamburger too.

The argument put forth by some — that the future is Tory blue — is premised on buying Harper’s new normal for Canadian politics: The economy is all, and once its shadow falls over the ballot box, the public will come around to that view. The economy is strong, the government is stable, and measures like Northern Gateway can be marketed like pet rocks and walk-in bath tubs.

In other words, Harper will get to frame the ballot question, and then make stuff up to show that Canada is in good hands. The main point? It must be a fact-free exercise. Use government stats more dubious than Donald Trump’s comb-over, avoid reporters at all costs and eschew any living form of debate. Most important of all, buy lots of advertising featuring A pluses for the government and dunce caps for the opposition.

Those commercials are already running, of course, paid for by you. It will get worse right up until the writ drops — but at least by then the Conservative party will stop freeloading on the public dime. Example: Justin Trudeau wants your kid to smoke dope. He’s bad bad, we’re good, vote Conservative.

None of the commercials, whoever pays for them, will have the slightest connection to reality. You’ve heard of Pavlov; in the World According to Steve, he’s the bell-ringer and you’re one of the dogs. Are you salivating yet?

I’m not drooling, despite the seven-per-cent unemployment rate, the nauseating comparisons to how well we are doing relative to the G-7, and GDP numbers that might give woodies to Corporate Kahunas but leave the rest of us unexcited. After all, what comfort does an unemployment rate give you without the details of what sorts of jobs people are getting? You never will get those details. Those are only for important people. And what do important people do with their valuables? Hide them.

This is a crowd that writes its own report cards without taking the exam. They seem to think Canadians want the Bilderberg Bunch as their governance model.

How many of the government’s job creation numbers can be traced back to the offshore workers program, that hot potato currently scalding Jason Kenney’s hands? Besides, who can trust Stats Can anymore now that it has been politicized like every other branch of the federal government?

And just who is benefitting from Harper’s petro-economy? I don’t know about you, but when I fill up my pick-up, I know it isn’t me.

The biggest joke of all? The fiction that the economy has been strengthened by trade deals. I admit Harper managed to get quite a few geese in the media to applaud the free trade deal with Europe. Two small problems. It was a deal in principle, not even close to a done deal — and, not counting corporate, handpicked negotiators like Nigel Wright, no one really knows what’s in it.

And that goes for all the other attempts Harper has made to take credit for things he hasn’t done and won’t reveal. Canada is completely in the dark as a democracy.

This is a crowd that writes its own report cards without taking the exam. They seem to think Canadians want the Bilderberg Bunch as their governance model.

By now, every citizen in the western world should know that corporate power is not only not the answer to what ails us, but a huge part of the problem. Writing in The Guardian, George Monbiot argued that the role of business corporations has gone far beyond that of lobbyist. They are now on the inside looking out, having woven their interests into the very fabric of British politics.

In Britain, cabinet ministers are no longer discouraged from hanging out with corporate executives — they are, as Monbiot writes, required to do so. The biggest companies now have corporate “buddies” with whom they are obliged to meet upon request. There is no longer even the pretence of separating corporate and political power in U.K. Politics and business are one and the same, here and in other former western democracies. That used to be a working definition of fascism.

Now Steve wants to spend $100 billion on the military — albeit over the long hours of the geological clock. He’s already okayed a billion-dollar Taj Mahal for spooks who spy on Canadians. Then there was that cool billion for the G8/G20 that featured 10,000 police and the largest public arrest in history. He’s got the RCMP asking permission from the government to conduct interviews and to report their activities to the minister of public safety. He’s blowing $20 million on his personal security when veterans centres are closing for want of $3.6 million.

That’s too much marketing even for a master of Snakes and Leaders like Steve. A family reunion is coming together in Canada, a gathering of the clans, that could put the Tory Caucus back in a phone booth.

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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