Trudeau faces big challenges restoring what Harper killed

[Oscar]

Trudeau faces big challenges restoring what Harper killed

[ http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/karl-ne ... per-killed ]

By Karl Nerenberg | January 7, 2016

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under pressure to restore many of the programs the Harper government abolished.

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What Harper killed: A long list

There were other agencies and institutions destroyed by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper that may be much more difficult to revive.

In 2012, interim Liberal leader Bob Rae listed some of those during question period in the House of Commons.

In the course of questioning Conservative minister John Baird about the Harper government's decision to kill the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, Rae named just a few of the key Canadian entities the Harper government was in the process of killing:

"The Inspector General of CSIS will be gone, the Centre for Rights and Democracy will be gone … the First Nations Statistical Institute will be gone, the Governance Institute will be gone, the National Aboriginal Health Organization will be gone, the National Council of Welfare will be gone, environmental assessment will be gutted, Parks Canada will be gutted, and old age security will be gutted..."

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Harper even tried to rewrite history

Prior to these radical changes to environmental assessment -- which Harper implemented through the stealth means of a massive, omnibus budget implementation bill -- the agency used to proudly tell Canadians about its history and origins, going back to Berger.

It was all there on the Agency's website; but it has all been erased.

All that remains is dutiful obeisance to the Harper government's 2012 Environmental Assessment Act. Some of Harper's minions even went so far as to rewrite the history of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency as told by Wikipedia.

The current Wikipedia entry on the Assessment Agency gushes over Harper's 2012 act, but utters not a word about the vigorous opposition Indigenous and environmental groups expressed at the time it was introduced.

The wiki entry is, of course, entirely silent on the history and antecedents of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

So outrageous is this exercise in Orwellian pseudo-history that the folks at Wikipedia felt obliged to preface the entry with a warning: "This article has multiple issues. A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject […and it] contains content that is written like an advertisement …"

We are talking here about only one of the Harper government's many attacks on the federal government's environmental role.

When you consider the pains the Conservatives took to erase even the memory of what they destroyed, you can get an idea of the magnitude of the task the new Trudeau government faces in reversing the damage the Harper government wrought.