Conservatives’ downfall could be Stephen Harper’s dismissive tone: Walkom

Interesting choice of Minister Alexander as example:

Tone is something different.

What may eventually defeat Harper is that his government appears mean-spirited. It doesn’t just disagree with its critics. It mercilessly derides them.

Take, for example, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander’s defence of the government’s new citizenship bill. This sweeping bill would allow the government to revoke the Canadian citizenship of dual nationals deemed by the government to have acted against the national interest.

As such, it would include in its purview not only many new immigrants but those native-born Canadians who, through no action of their own, still hold the nationality of their parents. The Canadian-born child of an Egyptian-father, for instance, is automatically accorded Egyptian citizenship by the authorities in Cairo.

The Canadian Bar Association has called the proposed revocation provision “unfair and discriminatory.” Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati makes a convincing argument that it is also unconstitutional.Alexander’s substantive response has been that many other NATO countries reserve the right to revoke citizenship from the native-born.

But what has stood out is the minister’s take-no-prisoners tone. In the Commons, he called the Canadian Bar Association’s well-argued critique “hopelessly misguided.”

And when opposition MPs queried the bill, his response was to call into question former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who, he said, had eliminated treason as grounds for citizenship revocation “at a time when the Liberal Party was playing footsie with Moscow.”

Conservatives’ downfall could be Stephen Harper’s dismissive tone: Walkom | Toronto Star.