Harper thinks he's the Queen, again....

A while back we had Harper taking a salute meant for the Queen and it would appear now that Harper and his government are looking at aligning the rest of the Canadian Honours System with the PMO and not the Queen (or more specifically her stand-in the Governor General). It would seem that Harper is again either a) confusing the difference between Chief of State and Head of Government, or b) knows the difference and wants to be both, which isn't allowed in our system.

It basically shows that Harper wants to be president of Canada, with all the powers and executive privilege that comes to the office similar to that of the POTUS. Of course Harper's problem is that being born outside of the US of A he isn't eligible to become the POTUS. So he has to try to do that here. He's stymied by our system of government which has the Queen as the Chief of State and leaves Harper the lowly head of government. Since a 21 gun salute is out of the question for Harper, he's trying to get everything else such as the honours system.

By trying to take over the honours system from the GG and put in into the PMO, Harper is doing two things: the first has already been discussed in that he wants to be Chief of State as well as Head of Government and second, to politicize the honours system. The problem with the first is that it concentrates too much power with one person. Doing so is the start of the road to dictatorship, which I'm sure the Tories and their supporters wouldn't mind, as long as it was a Harper dictatorship. The slow accumulation of power into one office is how a large number of dictators past and present have come to power without the use of force. It is unclear that Harper's purpose in doing this concentration is to make him Prime Minister for Life or not. In any event, it is a dangerous road to travel because contrary to Tory belief, they will not be in power forever and someone else will gain control of that concentrated power.

Now on to the second purpose for taking the honours system from the Queen, that of political control. By giving out state honours from the PMO Harper gets to kill two birds with one stone. He gets to show off by handing out medals and secondly he gets to make sure that only the politically pure get them. This means that if Harper is successful, one can see that only loyal Tories will now be installed into the Order of Canada, the Order of Military Merit and so on. Everyone else will be frozen out in a manner similar to the way honours were doled out in the former Soviet Union. This means that the honours system will become like the Senate, another patronage appointment give-away for the PMO. Again in this Harper and his supporters are acting like they'll be in power forever and won't have to deal with someone with different political views having control of the reins.

So the big question in my mind is when Harper finally loses an election, and to the con-bots out there that will happen sooner or later, Canada isn't Alberta and the non-Alberta provinces will tire of him eventually, will he leave office peacefully? His pattern shows a dangerous trend to no.

H/T to Dave at Galloping Beaver.