'Government by Surprise'

Chris Cobb of the Ottawa Citizen penned an article on Saturday about Harper's 'government by surprise' communications strategy.

He noted:

While he follows a tradition of political leaders who have tried to control their public image and their government's message, Harper has adopted a communications strategy unlike any Ottawa has seen before.

Cobb then quotes Chretien's former communications adviser Peter Donolo who expands on that thought:

"New governments and communications strategies are like teenagers and sex: they think they're the first ones to discover it."

Donolo is right. There's certainly nothing new about a political leader who feels he has to muzzle his cabinet ministers and MPS in order to keep them from misbehaving or tarnishing the Dear Leader's image. The former Soviet Union, China, North Korea...all examples of very tightly government-controlled messaging regimes. The problem with Harper's style is that Canada is a democracy where freedom of speech and the press are exalted and cherished. The more he tries to keep a lid on things, the more every single word he utters will be closely examined and what he doesn't say will come under scrutiny as well.

As Cobb's article notes, the negative impact on Harper's caucus and the media causes a strain in what is supposed to be an open society in which dialogue is supposed to be encouraged. Perhaps it's because Harper doesn't have teenagers yet that he hasn't learned the lesson that locking them in the rooms when there's a window they can easily crawl out of is often an exercise in futility. Thus he ended up with an MP like Garth Turner who just couldn't take the pressure anymore and chose the handy escape route by daring to write about the truth, regardless of what the consequences might be. Those consequences, of course, were nasty and brutish.

If our MPs are supposed to be our voice in parliament, they should not be stifled just to appease a control-freak of a prime minister who threatens to mete out punishment when they choose to simply do their jobs. They work for us, not the prime minister. Harper has turned that aspect of open democracy on its head by not trusting members of his party to act responsibly in public. That's an insult - not only to those MPs, but to all of us.

This 'government by surprise' regime may be useful when it comes to matters that need to be kept confidential but when Harper doesn't even clue in his ministers and MPs about what's coming down the pike, this type of governance looks more like a dictatorship than a democracy.