Living in Alberta, it is perhaps bordering on apostasy to say this but voting for the Conservatives in the next federal election is just not something I can understand. I understand it even less if those within our community do so...and there are those who will.

Of course, in a democracy, one can vote for whichever party or individual one wants. That’s an important understanding to have.

However, at the same time others are free to argue why a vote for Stephen Harper and his party is a vote which will ensure a party, that is no friend of the GLBTQ community, has a running chance at continuing to form our government.

It never ceases to amaze me that despite the record of the provincial Tories, and not just under the Klein regime but dating back through the premierships of Getty and even Lougheed, the Conservatives are repeatedly voted back into office. The sins of various Conservative governments in this province are legion. To name a few: destruction of hospitals, environmental issues, cutbacks to social services; a lack of political will to deal with homelessness back when it was, more or less, manageable; and a refusal to acknowledge that lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and our transsexual and transgendered sisters and brothers deserve full recognition under law.

The federal Conservatives are not much better. While I hesitate to climb on to the “Harper’s Secret Agenda” bandwagon - much of that smacks of conspiracy theories - I do think it is reasonable, based on the facts, to suspect there is an agenda that is contrary to what many Canadians would consider reasonable and fair. I just don’t happen to believe it is all that “secret.”

Considerable power is now centred in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). As Prime Minister, Harper and his Office decides what media will know and what will be withheld. He decides what media are present at press conferences, when he holds them, and what questions will be allowed.

This is undemocratic, just as having so much power concentrated within the PMO is undemocratic; we are a parliamentary democracy and, whatever one might think of individual MPs and their effectiveness or even the effectiveness of Parliament (which includes both the House of Commons and the Senate), the fact remains the system is in place to ensure, as much as is possible, that the will of the people is carried out. It is dangerous to allow one department, let alone an individual, have as much authority and power as the Prime Minister of Canada and his staff now hold.

The Dominion of Canada, as we were once known, was founded as a liberal democracy - liberal in this case having nothing to do with party affiliation (small “l” liberal as opposed to capital “L” Liberal).

Liberal democracies are, according to Wikipedia, “...representative democrac[ies] in which the ability of the elected representatives to exercise decision-making power is subject to the rule of law, and moderated by a constitution [i.e. our Charter of Rights and Freedoms] that emphasizes the protection of the rights and freedoms of individuals, and which places constraints on the leaders and on the extent to which the will of the majority can be exercised against the rights of minorities.”

That doesn’t sound to me much like what Harper and the Federal Conservatives have been doing since forming the current government.

Harper even breaks his own rules, with very little if any repercussions. It was his idea to set fixed election dates (a good idea, in my opinion) then almost immediately he circumvents the very ruling he created because it simply suited his purpose to do so.

It was the PMO which dismantled the Court Challenges Program (CCP), one of the few federal initiatives set up to assist various minorities, including GLBTQ, to launch Charter challenges against the federal government.

It was an important initiative as it allowed those of us unable to afford legal fees and all the other expenses attached to defending our Charter rights via the courts, some avenue to do so. Without it, future abuses will largely go unchallenged, even in cases where lawyers would be willing to forego their fees (pro bono).

Under the CCP our battles for inclusion under provincial human rights legislation (Vriend vs The Government of Alberta, 1997), access to survivor benefits (Hislop), access to reproductive technologies, access to gender reassignment surgery, equal marriage, and other rights we now enjoy would never have been fought through the courts. In all likelihood we would not have them at all, or would still be struggling to obtain them by lobbying government...the very government that was denying them to us in the first place.

Xtra, a Toronto-based national queer newspaper (it also includes Ottawa’s Capital Xtra and Vancouver’s Xtra West), has launched a campaign to highlight various reasons to “dump Harper.” It makes for interesting reading (www.xtra.ca).

Amongst some of the accusations are those of Harper’s “fascist” use of suing the Opposition for statements it made regarding allegations by the widow of Chuck Cadman; that the federal Conservatives attempted to bribe Cadman, who was dying of cancer at the time, by offering him a $1 million life insurance policy if he sided with them in voting against the then-Liberal government’s budget amendments. The budget vote amounted to a confidence vote and, if lost, would have forced an election and likely caused the Liberal government to fall. Cadman supported the Liberals.

When the allegations of attempted bribery surfaced, the Liberals grilled the new Tory government of Stephen Harper both in the House of Commons and in public. The Liberals alleged that not only did Harper know of the alleged bribe, he approved it.

MPs are allowed to stand in the House of Commons and, short of personal insults, can ask anything without fear of facing a libel or defamation suit. In this case, Harper took the unprecedented step of suing the Liberals for defamation to the tune of $3.5 million dollars for statements posted on the party’s website regarding the Cadman affair.

The use of libel laws to silence political opposition is undemocratic. It creates a chill whereby ones political opponents are, essentially, forced into silence for fear of being sued for allegations they may make. Constitutional expert, University of Toronto professor Peter Russell, is quoted as saying, “...[U]se of legal action to silence the opposition is characteristic of authoritarian governments.”

Of course, it also bears pointing out that while many Canadians now view Stephen Harper as leader of the Conservative Party, this is not the Progressive Conservative Party of Brian Mulroney or John Diefenbaker and certainly is not the Conservative Party of Sir John A. MacDonald.

This “new Conservative Party” is a hybrid of disaffected former Progressive Conservatives and the Alliance (formerly The Reform) Party. It is far more right-wing than its previous incarnations. The Reform/Alliance Party, it will be remembered, was a highly socially-conservative, anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-immigration, populist right wing party with strong connections to some of the more reactionary elements within the conservative Christian movement.

Neither Harper nor his party are friends of ours. Vote for who you want - that is your right. But know that a vote for Harper is another nail in our closet door.