Yikes. That sounds awful! So what did Stephen Harper actually do? How precisely did the Canadian prime minister silence debate, suppress information, and squelch democracy? In which dungeon do his critics languish? What are the secrets he has concealed?

Even after reading all 17 paragraphs of Marche’s indictment, it’s hard to say. As so often happens with anti-Harper invective, the accusation combines intense outrage against the man with gaseous vagueness about the man’s offenses. You’re supposed to just know. If you don’t know already, it won’t be explained to you.

In fact, the very difficulty of explaining Harper’s horribleness is—to critics—among the leading proofs of Harper’s horribleness. As Marche complains, Harper is not only a dictator in the making, but also “bland and purposeless.” His policy changes “have been negligible.” He aims to govern in a way that is “steady and quiet”—a totalitarian nightmare, only “polite and rule abiding.” If you can’t see why all of this is oppressive verging on the fascistic, then you have succumbed to “the politics of willful ignorance.”

Stephen Harper is a right-of-center politician. Some people like that; others don’t. Which is fine. That’s how democracy works.

Harper is a highly cerebral man. He eschews public displays of emotion and expresses himself in terse, well-chosen words. That style, inevitably, seems cold and remote to people who preferred the back-slapping warmth of his two immediate predecessors. Harper also runs a tight ship. As a young political staffer in the 1980s, he witnessed the destruction of the 1984-1993 Conservative government resulting from then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s indulgent attitude toward the mistakes and misdeeds of his caucus and cabinet. Some observers believe Harper has over-corrected—that his discipline is too severe and unforgiving. That’s a reasonable point of view. The next prime minister of Canada will probably over-correct in the opposite direction.

But there’s a distinction between objecting to a politician’s policies and personality, and the extreme disproportion between cause and effect in anti-Harper critiques leveled not just by Marche but others among Canada’s well-bred, well-educated, and well-connected. Let’s take a closer look at Marche’s indictment—and pierce through the verbal fog to the underlying facts.

Item One: “[Harper] has chosen not to participate in the traditional series of debates on national television, confronting his opponents in quieter, less public venues …”

The first of five scheduled party-leader debates already took place on August 6. You can watch it here. If you do, you will be joining some 4.3 million Canadians who tuned into one of the most-viewed political events in years. It’s just bizarre to describe the 2015 debate plan as either “quiet” or not “public.”