Rob Ford, Stephen Harper, Addiction and Denial

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Rob Ford, Stephen Harper, Addiction and Denial

[ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2013/11/20/Ro ... nd-Denial/ ]

By Andrew Nikiforuk, November 20, 2013 TheTyee.ca

Are we roused yet to stand up to bullies who embody Canada's new political extremism?

"Denial is also self-reinforcing -- once you make the first denial, you tend to commit to it; you will deny, deny the denial, deny that and so on." -- Robert Trivers, U.S. evolutionary biologist

Just like Ford Nation, Canada has been caught in the throes of an addiction. What enables our addiction is what fuels Rob Ford's: willful self-deception.

We are on the brink of becoming an indulged and stupefied citizenry willingly bullied by our leaders.

We are on the verge of losing our way as a resource-mining people just as surely as Rob Ford and Stephen Harper have lost their respective paths in an elaborate labyrinth of denials.

Canada's new extremism

Harper and his political buddy Ford, Father of All Denialists, simply embody different sides of Canada's new political extremism.

One man is out of control while the other seeks to control everything. Both privileged white men hate the media and see themselves as underdogs that owe the public no accountability.

In Ford Nation and Harperland, the abuse of power seems to know no limits; due process gets no respect and democracy is some fickle notion to be robo-called away with blatant fraud.

Rob Ford, the mayor of a city with great but stifled potential, brazenly insists that an alcoholic can competently run a cosmopolis of four million.

Ford's political friend, Stephen Harper, the libertarian economist and religious extremist, holds another set of equally false beliefs.

He refuses to acknowledge his government's public addiction to bitumen revenue.

In Harperland Tories deny the tar sands are Canada's fastest growing source of emissions as though it were simply some inconvenient video. Or they disband and defund the very climate-change programs and science that track the rising liability of what will soon amount to 20 per cent of the nation's total emissions.

But these denials are all connected to an inconvenient financial addiction: Ottawa stands to collect 41 per cent of bitumen's $126-billion revenue stream by 2020 and that $50-billion is now funding a political revolution to re-engineer Canada into a right-wing petro state.

Canadians and their incoherent media still can't believe this incremental yet relentless subversion is happening, and remain in a state of denial as deep as Rob Ford's alcoholism.

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[ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2013/11/20/Ro ... nd-Denial/ ]