‘The common welfare was your business!’ The imagined thoughts of Stephen Harper as Dickensian ghost

This week, video emerged of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper saying that everything he predicted about the Trudeau government “came to pass.” Harper didn’t specify the predictions, but he was on record in the 2015 election saying that Justin Trudeau would immediately plunge Canada into permanent deficits, and also that his immigration policy would bring “hundreds of thousands” of migrants into the country with little to no vetting. Both prophecies ended up being empirically correct. 

In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of Stephen Harper. 

A mysterious rattling can be heard throughout the nation. The jangling of rising crime. The clank of endless deficits. The cacophony of terror marches in the downtowns.

What is this fettering that now plagues you? From whence did it come?

Ah, but this chain is yours, Canada. It is the one you forged, link by link and metre by metre. You girded it of your own free will, and of your own free will you wore it. It is the chain of sunny ways, of “better is always possible,” of “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” Are its aspects now strange to you?

The air fills with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste. Over there, its leg manacled to a safe, is Sustainable Finances. And there, paying $3,000 in rent for a one-bedroom, is Broad Public Support for Immigration. That soldier with ear spacers and green hair? That’s Functional Armed Forces.

They are spoken of as if they are real, but they are spectres. These are but shadows of the things that have been, long absent in the affairs of the nation. That they are what they are, do not blame me.

“But we have become a nation of equity! Of inclusion!” you cry in piteous lamentation.

Prosperity should have been your inclusion! Social cohesion should have been your inclusion! Good government should have been your inclusion! Your business was the common welfare, not its factionalization.

Why did you pass these things with your eyes turned down? GDP per capita. Debt-to-GDP. Annual housing starts. Investment per worker. Shelter costs as a share of disposable income. These were not mere figures in a ledger, but signals of a country with full stomachs, a rising standard of living and peaceful streets.

Their decline lies at the cynosure of this fearful place. Heed their lessons, or you cannot hope to shun your current path.

I appear before you now in a shape that you can see, but I have sat invisible beside you many a day. The passing memory of a straw that works, the automobile left unstolen, the fleeting glimpse of the public park free of tents.

Behold! Sheltered under my cloak I hold two emaciated wraiths, appealing for succor. The first is Accountability. The second is Limiting Principles. No corruption is ever punished, no mistake ever admitted, no incompetence dismissed. You enshrine death and addiction as liberties, but you place no guardrails. Little wonder that upon both these wraiths’ foreheads is written Doom!

And you slander those who tell it ye! And bide the end!

Will Canada be a place that decides what patients shall live, and what patients shall die? What immutable characteristics shall bring official favour, and which official opprobrium? Or what businesses thrive by subsidy, and which fall by regulation? Shall we continue to hear the “expert” pronouncing on the actions of his brothers battling for subsistence in the dust?

I see a subarctic nation of boundless potential left behind by the progress of world trade. I see vacant shop windows. I see capital flight. I see homes unbuilt, babies unborn. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, I see a Maple Leaf with no values left to represent.

Well, if this country is to die, is it not your view that this would be better? A colonialist imposition gone, a carbon footprint deleted? Do not shut out the lessons that these times teach.