My decade in the anti-Harper trenches: Mallick

Watching last night’s defeat of Stephen Harper was like finally winning parole after 10 years in jail based on a wrongful conviction. What did we ever do to this strange punitive man to make him put us in a cell?

In 2006, I wondered about it a bit and spent the next decade protesting against Harper in print. It aged me at a great rate. I see from the mirror this morning that I look like 102 and feel like, oh, 107, my eyes glassy from counting and my hands ready to snap off at the wrist from years of typing about Harperman, Harperman. See, there it goes, my little hand is dangling.

I watched Harper give a brisk dull farewell speech last night — I was alone, everyone else having gone to bed after a quick toast (Canadian wine, tough little grape) — and marvelled at his failure to man up at the final moment, as Margaret Thatcher so famously did. He didn’t even have the courage to resign in front of a friendly Calgary crowd, merely asking staff to send out a news release after he’d left, weird as ever.

I wrote about Harper, spoke across the country to lawyers, teachers, book-lovers, students and feminists, wrote for the Star, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, Chatelaine, the Globe and Mail, the CBC and other media. I travelled to Scandinavia twice to find out why in 1997 Harper sneered, “Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term and very proud of it.” Those nations seemed to be doing fine.

I remember being energized in Montreal by the young scholars nurtured by the Trudeau Foundation. I had the sensation that while I scraped away glumly at the coalface, young people were sailing on pure intellect, cheerfully doing what they have always done, fulfilling the ambition of this young country.

What I remember was how violent and frightening the reaction was for many years, especially when the Conservative Party targeted me personally, even using my Star columns to raise funds. And then a few months ago, the death and torture threats and sexual insults simply stopped. It was not possible for me to have blocked messages from every guy with a rifle. Even sturdy Conservatives had lost faith in the leader, the man himself.

Looking back, the hallmark of the Harper government was its dislike of intellectuals, particularly scientists but also anyone who seemed literate or artsy. Or, come to think of it, attractive, urban, female, the list goes on. It’s a huge mistake to define yourself only by what you dislike, just as it is to call out only to your base or to rally with the washed-out Fords.

Politics calls for a general popularity. There’s Justin Trudeau, hoarse in his victory speech, talking about Laurier and “sunny ways,” “the better angels of our nature” and “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” He disliked no one, hugged many, and was surrounded by family including his mother Margaret, who has suffered so — the death of one son, her bipolar disorder — and some riotous children bearing light sabres.

If I could single out one column I still like, it was written in defence of Trudeau and his family after wandering extremist whatever Ezra Levant made a particularly foul attack on the Trudeaus. But this time, I didn’t get hate or filth, I got silence. There’s a limit to the cruelty Harperites will tolerate and Levant had busted it.

I tire. After 10 years of fighting Harperism, my skull is sieve-like and my brain leaking, chunk by chunk, into something like those drip pan arrangements underneath the fridge. Doctor, prescribe me a census, marijuana legalization, an assisted-dying law by the Supreme Court’s February deadline, wise and abstemious Senate appointees, fence-mending at the G20, help for the planet at the Paris climate conference ... it’s a long list.

On Election Day morning, I tried to calm a fussy newborn baby with happy songs. I tried jingles like the WKRP bait shop ad, “Red wigglers, the Cadillac of worms” and the theme song to the Beverly Hillbillies. It didn’t go well. And then I quietly sang O Canada to the baby, naturally replacing “sons’ command” with “daughters’.”

The baby relaxed in my arms and listened quietly, intrigued. “Our home and native land,” “glowing hearts,” “glorious and free,” I sang breathily.

And then the day ended very very well.

hmallick@thestar.ca