{"id":8993,"date":"2010-03-12T00:00:24","date_gmt":"2010-03-12T05:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=8993"},"modified":"2010-03-12T00:00:24","modified_gmt":"2010-03-12T05:00:24","slug":"what-is-stephen-harper-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/03\/12\/what-is-stephen-harper-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Stephen Harper Reading?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"harper\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bruce Meyer has a review<\/a> of Yann Martel’s What Is Stephen Harper Reading<\/em>?<\/a> Frye not surprisingly is included in Martel’s list of recommended works:<\/p>\n

The works that Martel has chosen to send to the Prime Minister are wide-ranging in their content and their reader impact. Some have a Canadian angle, from Milton Acorn’s collection of poems The Island Means Minago<\/em>, or Tomson Highway’s hilarious The Rez Sisters<\/em> to Voltaire’s Candide<\/em>, in which it is said that the \u201cFrench and English are fighting over a few acres of snow.\u201d Others are rather deep but essential reading for any individual who seeks to lead, such as The Meditations<\/em> by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If heavy-duty fare is not to Harper’s taste, there is, buried within the selection, a curriculum of books that would do a high-school student a world of good: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse<\/em>, Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination<\/em> (do you think a busy prime minister would take books with him to a desert island?), William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar<\/em>, George Orwell’s Animal Farm<\/em> (though the temptations of barnyard politics should have been foreseen by Martel), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> and Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal <\/em>(just in case funding cutbacks lead to unforeseen menu changes).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harper has both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in economics from the University of Calgary, so it’s hard to imagine that he’s read many of Martel’s recommended works beyond what might have found its way onto his high school reading list more than thirty years ago.\u00a0 And as he “governs” without Parliament whenever it’s politically expedient for him to do so — witness two dubious prorogations of Parliament in one year — it’s a stretch at this point to think of him reading much beyond tracking polls and various public relations scenarios intended to convince skeptical Canadians that he really is just a cuddly moderate.\u00a0 Thanks to Harper, we only occasionally have full parliamentary representation in this country.\u00a0 But in its place we do have tightly-scripted government funded feel-good ad campaigns!\u00a0 It’s difficult to conceive of Harper as being anything other than a narrow special interest politician with big oil behind him.\u00a0 But please note that Canada is a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol<\/a> and has legal obligations to meet its targets.\u00a0 And yet, Canadian greenhouse emissions currently exceed <\/em>by 35% <\/em>our commitment to reduce them. <\/em>That is, we are 35% above our Kyoto targets to reduce below 1990 emissions levels.<\/em> Under Harper, we are not reducing our emissions.\u00a0 We are increasing them.\u00a0 The Alberta tar sands produce some of the most environmentally degrading oil it is currently possible to produce.\u00a0 With just .5% of the world’s population, we account for 2.5% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, with a rise that has topped out at 20% during the Harper years.\u00a0 Per capita, we are among the very worst carbon polluters in the world.\u00a0 <\/em>It’s therefore not hard to see who Stephen Harper is and what he really represents.\u00a0 Whatever he’s reading, it’s clearly not what he needs to be.<\/p>\n

Is this also a good time to point out that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is likely to have read most of if not all of the books that Martel recommends?\u00a0 Ignatieff, in contrast to Harper, is the recipient of 11 honorary degrees thanks to his extensive scholarly output over the years, including teaching posts at Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and Harvard.\u00a0 Ignatieff has written a number of books, which include scholarly works, popular works of social concern, three novels and even a couple of screenplays.\u00a0 You can see Ignatieff’s bibliography here<\/a>.\u00a0 There is no bibliography of books written by Stephen Harper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruce Meyer has a review of Yann Martel’s What Is Stephen Harper Reading? Frye not surprisingly is included in Martel’s list of recommended works: The works that Martel has chosen to send to the Prime Minister are wide-ranging in their content and their reader impact. Some have a Canadian angle, from Milton Acorn’s collection of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Is Stephen Harper Reading? - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/03\/12\/what-is-stephen-harper-reading\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Is Stephen Harper Reading? - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Bruce Meyer has a review of Yann Martel’s What Is Stephen Harper Reading? 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