felis_ultharus

From a brilliant piece of journalism on Xtra.ca. It's by Marci Macdonald, one of Canada's leading investigative journalists:

"At 7:30 on a drizzly June morning, the Confederation Room — the largest and most ornate hall on Parliament Hill — was already crammed to capacity with more than 400 MPs, civil servants, and their guests, all of whom have turned up for the National Prayer Breakfast. An overflow crowd of 150 was being shepherded into an adjoining salon with closed-circuit video screens. Those numbers might not mean much in Washington — where the annual mega-event of the same name draws more than 3,000, including the president, making it the highlight of the social calendar for the Christian right — but the turn-out in 2006 was the largest in the 40-year history of the Ottawa breakfast.

Jack Murta, the former Mulroney cabinet minister who runs the event, attributes the enthusiasm to a new breed of more committed Conservative evangelicals in the House. So many flocked to his weekly parliamentary prayer breakfasts early in 2006 that he had to encourage some to drop out. "It was getting unwieldy," he says.

Not that there is a shortage of prayer meetings on Parliament Hill. The Conservative caucus has its own Thursday-morning Bible study class, and for the last three decades civil servants have gathered for prayer groups in almost every department, including three in Defence."

Part of Harper's success has been convincing religious conservatives that he's a religious conservative, and fiscal conservatives that he's only playing to a base. The reality is that the evangelicals are right: Harper is a committed fundamentalist Christian with very strong ties to the religious right, and his fellow evangelicals believe he's just waiting for a majority to transform the social safety net of this country.

I believe that, too. We have to bust the myth that Harper's shills are perpetuating outside his core constituency that Harper's a misunderstood fiscal conservative. According to this well-researched article, there are about 70 evangelical Christians among his 127 members in the House of Commons. An ex-leader of Focus on the Family is a major member of the Prime Minister's Office.

These people believe dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as people did, so don't expect them to understand the science behind climate change. They're also praying for the end of the world, so don't expect them to care.

They're the kind of people who scream about how they're being treated like second-class citizens, when lesbians and gays (like myself) weren't allowed to marry in our country until just a few years ago.

In case you've been wondering what Preston Manning's been up to, by the way, he now runs workshops teaching fundamentalists how to disguise themselves as fiscal conservatives. In 2006, it was a sold-out three-day seminar called Navigating the Faith/Political Interface. The Ottawa Citizen calls it more honestly "Mr Manning's Charm School for Unruly Christians."

He's not the only one. Tristan Emmanuel -- founder of the Christian Heritage Party and organizer of the "Canadians for Bush" rally now runs an organization called Equipping Christians for the Public Square. Among other things, this organizing trains Conservative evangelicals to hide their religion in public, and helps them get elected candidates at the riding-association level.

Those of us who believe in secular governments -- whether religious themselves or not -- need to be worried. Those of who tend to get stripped of their human rights by Christian religious extremists (like myself) need to be afraid.

And most of all, we need to vote.

So I'm very politically frustrated lately. The latest evil to come from the Harper regime was a couple of a tiny clauses embedded in an innocuous amendment to the income tax act called C-10 -- a resurrection of the bill from previous session known as C-33.

This ponderous bill should have triggered some suspicion because the 568-page amendment was stuffed like a turducken with amendments to close tax loopholes for corporations. A couple of tiny, vaguely-worded amendments, though -- separated by several pages -- clarify that the Heritage Minister has the right to refuse tax credit certificates to films that do not, in her judgement, suit government policy.

I'm not at all surprised that none of the opposition parties spotted them. I missed them several times searching for them -- they're on pages 352 and 356 of this document.

This detail only came to light after the bill had made its way halfway through the Senate. If it makes it through -- and the Senate only rejects a bill very rarely -- the Heritage Minister will essentially be able to decide which films get the tax credit and which don't. And since it's pretty much impossible to make a feature film in Canada without this tax credit, that amounts to deciding what films get made and what don't.

Fundamentalist Christians are already declaring victory. The rest of us are just waiting to see what the Harper government decides is acceptable art and what isn't.

I no longer want an election for this government. I want an exorcism.