This is the text of Item 10. It makes me glad to think that in three days there will never again be grounds for a blog post title such as the one above. I am proud to have helped make history, however minor my one vote contribution.
The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
House of Commons Ottawa,
Ontario Canada
K1A 0A6
October 11th, 2015
— Via Xpresspost PG 341 768 541 CA —
Open Letter to P.M. Harper
Dear Sir:
The alleged misappropriation in the Duffy case is approximately $90,000. As we both know, this is little more than a rounding error in a Canadian economy with an annual run rate in excess of $2 trillion dollars.
Yet you and your associates felt the need to protect yourselves with a cover-up costing in excess of $4 million once the investigation and court case are factored in. Some leadership!
In this election you have managed to insult the intelligence of the citizens of Québec while you play the rest of Canada as fools and economic illiterates. You push the niqab as an issue, and inflame prejudice to the point a pregnant woman is knocked to the ground when a pair of toughs strip her of her religious garb. You must feel proud of your ability to incite hate and revulsion.
But let’s talk about money as you advertise yourself as an economic expert.
In 2013 Jacques Parizeau, with a Phd from the London School of Economics, gave a speech in which he decried the decline in labour factor productivity in Québec. If you have forgotten your economics, what Parizeau was saying is that the citizens of Québec have become poorer with each passing year.
Compared to Ontario, Alberta and B.C., Quebec has a 25-per-cent-lower gross domestic product on a per capita basis; a 16-per-cent-lower average salary, a four-percentage-point lower rate of employment; and a 17-per-cent-lower rate of productivity growth.
This decline in the fortunes of Québec comes despite total equalization transfers to Québec of $90 billion dollars during your tenure as P.M.. This $90 billion dollars was taken from the pockets of the citizens of B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and NFLD. By definition, this transfer made them all poorer.
These facts were communicated to your M.P.s. None of them cared to raise it as an issue. For $90 thousand, little more than a rich man’s walking around money, the entire PMO, and the full weight of government, was engaged in a cover-up, investigation, and court case. But for $90 billion spent on increasing the poverty of the nation you do nothing apart from making a false claim of leadership.
You cannot claim to be a leader when you do not talk to your own M.P.s. You cannot claim leadership when you refuse to talk with the Premiers. You refuse even to talk with Premier Wall when he raises these same issues. That is not leadership.
A man who counsels hate, engages in deception, and refuses to dialog, cannot be a leader in Canada.
You sir, must go.
Francis Fuller
Gatineau, Québec
Cc:
All major news outlets
Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada
Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada
Leader of the Green Party of Canada
All 2013 recipients as shown below:
The 2013 recipients consisted of the Premiers of BC, AB, SK, ON and NL plus about 5 to 10 M.P.s in each province. The M.P.s were drawn at random and, apart from those in NL, were almost all from the C.P.C.
The letter was written when it appeared Harper may have been gaining traction with his attacks on people of the Muslim faith. I have friends who are Muslim. Many of the people I coached and trained at Gargantua were Muslim. I find it abhorrent that when this first arose as an election issue the press did not condemn Harper’s posturing.
The letter has caused me some confusion over dates. The date on my local file is October 8th which is before this became Item 10. I know I was slow and had problems writing the letter. The early drafts were started when this issue first erupted on the national agenda. By the time the letter went out to Harper, Trudeau, Mulcair, and May, on the 13th, it was clear Harper was engaged in a process of self immolation. This saved me from having to transmit it to the thirty or forty other M.P. recipients. Of those recipient M.P.s, over half were not returned to the House. I celebrate the intelligence of the Canadian public over that of skunky Canadian journalists.