McLeod Group Blog, Oct. 15, 2014
Earlier this month, the Canadian Literacy and Learning Network (CLLN) announced that it was closing its doors. Like the North-South Institute and dozens of now-defunct Canadian organizations that depended on the federal government for basic core support, the CLLN was a victim of the Harper government’s slash-and-burn approach to anything it doesn’t like.
The CLLN’s board cited “a shift in federal funding priorities.” A more pointed reason for the cut to the CLLN and many other Canadian literacy agencies is said to be a shift to support for job-ready people rather than those who need longer-term and extra help to enter the job market. The government can claim, in working with job-ready people, that its input enabled them to get work. Here are the government’s famous results at work.
But job-ready people tend to get jobs anyway in an improving economy. It is those with fewer skills, including fewer language skills, who really need the investment.
The real shift in federal funding priorities here and in so many other areas – the environment, native people, science, the arts, women, international development – is not towards a smarter (or even a more cynical) use of funds. Instead, the Harper government is simply balancing its budget on the backs of organizations that make Canada a nation.
Worse, the possibility exists that Mr. Harper is delivering on the Conservatives’ long-held view that any and all institutions smacking of liberalism must be put down. In his 2009 book, Harper’s Team, Tom Flanagan – once Stephen Harper’s mentor, election manager and party strategist – wrote, “Canada is not yet a conservative or Conservative country… If you control the government, you choose judges, appoint the senior civil service, fund or de-fund advocacy groups, and do many other things that gradually influence the climate of opinion.” He called for toughness. “We cannot win by being Boy Scouts,” he wrote, saying that the Harper government should do “whatever is legally possible to jam our opponents’ communications and disrupt their operations.” Whatever is legally possible.
In defunding the CLLN and so many others, the Harper government has defined “opponent” in new ways, and it has certainly done whatever is legally possible to disrupt their activities. Defunding organizations does represent a shift in federal funding priorities, but if it has anything to do with the budget, the cuts are more than offset in military flypasts, Airbus flights for European officials and jet fighters to Libya, Europe and Iraq.
The changes that Mr. Harper has inflicted on Canada are substantial and they might be seen as tragic if the damage were permanent. But, according to the Ottawa Citizen, a recent EKOS opinion poll found “a wave of Canadians declaring their political ideology to be ‘small-l liberal,’ regardless of which political party they support.”
“Values are pretty glacial things,” said EKOS President Frank Graves. “They don’t typically shift that much but they seem to be moving in response to, I think, being governed from the right… [Canadians] were OK with it for a while, but it seems now they are going, ‘No, that’s enough.’”
That may be comforting for “small-l liberals” but it will take a long time to repair the wreckage of the past decade.