Harper sneers when statesmanship is required

Since the Boston Marathon attack, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been so fixated on denigrating Justin Trudeau that he has left Canadians discounting his words and looking elsewhere for guidance.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has ridiculed the idea of looking for the root causes of acts of violence. (May 1, 2013)

By: Carol Goar Canada, Politics Government, 

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is at risk of sneering himself into irrelevance.

His comments on terrorism in the last three weeks have left Canadians shaking their heads, hoping he doesn’t really mean what he says and looking elsewhere for answers. They want to know how young men amid them, going to the same schools as their kids, turn into mass killers. Who is radicalizing them? How does this metamorphosis happen in plain view of their unsuspecting parents, friends, teachers and imams?

“This is not a time to commit sociology,” Harper said a week ago. “I don’t think we want to convey any view of the Canadian public other than our utter condemnation of this kind of violence, contemplation of this violence and our utter determination through our laws and our activities to do everything we can to prevent and counter it.”

His former parliamentary secretary, Pierre Poilievre, delivered the dumbed-down version in a television interview: “The root cause of terrorism is terrorists.”

These remarks would be laughable under less grim circumstances. But they came in response to the news that two long-time residents of Canada, Raed Jaser of Toronto and Chiheb Esseghaier of Montreal, had been charged with “conspiring to murder persons unknown for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group.” 

According to police, they were poised to bomb a Via Rail passenger train between Toronto and New York.

A week earlier, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathonthat left three people dead and 264 injured, Harper said: “When you see this kind of violent act, you do not sit around trying to rationalize it or make excuses for it or figure out its root causes. You condemn it categorically and to the extent you can deal with the perpetrators, you deal with them as harshly as possible.”

His disdain for probing the “root causes” of terrorism was at odds with his own policy. Less than two years ago, on the anniversary of the 1985 Air India disaster — Canada’s first brush with global terrorism — Harper announced a five-year, $10-million initiative to “better understand what terrorism means in the Canadian context, how that is changing over time and what we can do to support effective policies and programs to counter terrorism and violent extremism in Canada.”

The prime minister’s strategy was obvious. He was heaping scorn on newly installed Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau before he could define himself.

By luckless coincidence, the bloodbath in Boston occurred on Trudeau’s first day in his new role. The news was still breaking when he sat down with CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge for a pre-scheduled interview. No one knew who was responsible or whether it was a terrorist attack. Mansbridge asked the rookie leader what he would do if he were prime minister. 

Trudeau said his immediate response would be to offer the nation’s sympathy and support to the victims and help to the U.S government. “Over the coming days,” he added, “we have to look at the root causes. Where do those tensions from come?”

Harper, who was attending Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in London, saw his opening. He pounced. Since then, he has been ridiculing root causes, sociology and long-term thinking.

But he seems to have lost sight of the bigger picture. The nation looks to him for leadership in anxious times. What message was he sending?

·  That the first thing to do after an act of mass violence is to rush to judgment?

·  That the second imperative is to categorically condemn the still-unknown perpetrator(s)?

·  That there is no need to talk about why it happened or how to prevent future attacks?

No other national leader has taken this stance. None of Harper’s international peers played partisan politics on the global stage.

His aides and core supporters may be applauding. But for the rest of the nation, the prime minister is writing himself — and Canada — out of a vitally important conversation.

Carol Goar’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday in Toronto Star.