Stephen Harper's Canada: Not Texas North; Alabama North

I hope you are enjoying as much as I am the civility dividends of Stephen Harper's glorious "law-and-order" crusade. Canada is so much the better for it.

Sure. Cranks may decry Canada's unprecedented gang violence and gun crime epidemic. Closer to home, obdurate Ottawa malcontents might be vexed at our record number of unsolved murders. Me, I see these events as character-building opportunities for Canadians to become the gleefully (and non-Northern European) self-slaughtering crypto-Americans our prime minister has always wanted us to be. Besides, even if this recent uptick in nihilist brutality were disagreeable, blaming the federal government for the national crime rates under its watch (when law enforcement and the administration of justice are provincial responsibilities) is precisely the kind of cheap irrational demagogy that a cheap irrational governing party would no doubt deplore after having deployed their cheap irrational demagogy against various Liberal governments, relentlessly and to not inconsiderable effect on the credulous, for a decade and a half. So, one mustn't do that.

How to explain, then, the ugliness currently underway in Newmarket?

A string of racist vandalism against a black man and his white partner has shocked a collegial Newmarket neighbourhood and pushed a couple to the brink.

The latest of three incidents happened sometime between Christmas Eve night and early Christmas morning, according to York Region police.

Rita Brown, who along with her partner, Seun Oyinsan, moved into a home this summer on quiet suburban Hodgson Dr., discovered the “N” word scratched on the hood of her car Christmas Day.

That came nearly 3 ½ months after two other attacks on their home and vehicles. During the first, on Sept. 10, swastikas were spray-painted on the couple’s garage and their SUV was defaced with the “N” word and acid thrown on the sides. Nails hammered into small pieces of wood were also left under their tires.

Most alarmingly, Brown said, police received a message. She was told it said the couple wasn’t wanted in the neighbourhood, called her a “whore” and threatened: “We will kill if necessary.”

Surely, this kind of thing has happened before--perhaps, say, ten years ago, in the days when we, almost despairing of succour, were crying out in vain to the heavens for an agent of blessed deliverance as mighty as the hand of Stephen Harper, that he might smite the evildoers and cleanse the land of their depredations. Surely, this is a recrudescence--a backslide into the Liberal Dark Age of scofflaw impunity, when the nation languished under the unrestrained twin flagrancies of murder and rapine. Or perhaps not:

Newmarket Mayor Tony Van Bynen said he was “deeply disappointed and concerned that something like this could happen anywhere, let alone in my community.”

Van Bynen spoke with the couple earlier in the fall and said he would do so again this week. In the 30 years he’s lived in Newmarket, this is the first such incident, he said.

How fortunate for Stephen Harper that he and the other chief purveyors of facile attribution of criminal acts to the federal government became the federal government almost six years ago; the kind of slander once casually launched at Jean Chretien and Paul Martin would make for a silly and uncomfortable spectacle now, especially since a link that, in their hands, was so specious, seems so much more plausible in this case.

After all, no one outside of the barking kennel of Reform/Alliance berserkers really believed that there was something inherently crime inducing about the nature of a Liberal government, a claim always immediately empirically neutralised (to the satisfaction of the reality-based community, at least) by a couple of decades' worth of steeply declining crime rates. A party willing to hazard its credibility upon the ceaseless iteration of a connection so effortlessly disproved would be sorely tempted to wonder aloud why an unprecedented racist attack would occur on the watch of a party whose founder was mentored by and received key policy advice from virulently anti-Canadian white supremacists and neo-Nazis, that employed violent racists as "security" and riding personnel in its formative years in Ontario, and that once truculently announced its opposition to "any immigration based on race or creed or designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada".

Yes, indeed. What a relief it must be to Harper to have been elevated to a dignity that makes the performance of that oft-rehearsed Reform/Alliance idiocy impracticable. It would be a relief to me, too, if what had occasioned the suppression of that species of idiocy had not also unleashed so many others.