Why Harper must not have his majority

Ralph Surette, The Chronicle Herald:

Back in ’07, when the Harper government was new, I got under its skin with a column that went viral in fisheries circles on both coasts, attacking proposed changes to the Fisheries Act that had most of the industry in a fury.

Shortly after, I got a call from Randy Kamp, parliamentary secretary to the fisheries minister and an MP from B.C., who aggressively demanded that I tell him where I got my information and rang off with "the government of Canada is unhappy with you."

Keep in mind that in many, if not most, countries on the face of this Earth, a phone call like that from a government official to a journalist constitutes a death threat.

I was disturbed, but also baffled. I’d had governments unhappy with me for 40 years and never heard the like, and nothing in the Canadian tradition explained it. So I assumed this was just one out-of-control individual who didn’t know his job.

I checked with people I know in Ottawa. They told me emphatically: "That’s them. That’s them exactly!"

Since then, through a rising crescendo of deceit, manipulation, corruption and assaults on parliamentary democracy, the "that’s them exactly!" has become abundantly clear.

Two years ago, the government was proposing a fishery treaty with the European Union — one drafted by the EU itself and that opened the door to the EU, the main predator of stocks off Newfoundland, possibly having a say in how fish are managed inside Canada’s 200-mile limit. Canada’s veterans of international fishery negotiations, going back to the 200-mile-limit and the UN Law of the Sea, raised the alarm, calling it a sellout.

The Senate and Commons fisheries committees both agreed and called for revisions. The government pressed on. Then, on Dec. 10, 2009, the House of Commons rejected the treaty, 147 to 142.

Then — note this — the very next day the government signed the treaty anyway.

That such a flagrant violation of parliamentary process should not only happen, but happen unreported by the mass media (except by me in a column for this newspaper) as though it was normal business not worthy of attention makes me wonder how far we are from that notorious category of countries we usually decry as "corrupt and authoritarian."

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