Margaret Thatcher transformed British political life forever. So did Ronald Reagan in the United States. Now Canada has experienced a similar, dramatic shift to a new kind of politics, which author Donald Gutstein terms Harperism.

Among its key tenets:

• A weakened labour movement – and preferably the disappearance of unions – will contribute to Canada’s economic prosperity
• Cutting back government scientific research and data collection will improve public policy-making

These and other essential elements of Harperism flow from neo-liberal economic theories propounded by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek and his U.S. disciples. They inspired Thatcherism and Reaganism. Stephen Harper has taken this neo-liberalism much further in many key areas.

The success of Harperism is no accident. Donald Gutstein documents the links between the politicians, think tanks, journalists, academics, and researchers who nurture and promote each other’s neo-liberal ideas.

That would mean a nation in which somewhere between a half and a third of its citizens have fallen into poverty or are hovering just above, in low income. This according to latest data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, 400 Americans are worth more than $1 billion.

And the divide will likely worsen, as Congress and Republican-controlled state legislatures continue slashing programs and benefits, firing workers, and further weakening health, safety and environmental protections to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, if that is even possible.

But rather than face the grim reality of a collapsing American society, conservatives question whether people classified as poor by the Census Bureau are really that poor. Are they actually suffering material hardship? asks Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation based in Washington, D.C. Social safety-net programs have gone too far, Rector claims, citing poor people who live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs. Why should they get help from taxpayers?

This analysis comes from an organization in which 72 executives and staff members each earned over $100,000 in 2009, with president Ed Feulner taking home $921,000 and executive vice-president Phillip Truluck $557,000.

Rector is considered the “intellectual godfather of welfare reform” for his role in crafting the 1996 federal welfare legislation which ended “welfare as we know it” — signed by Bill Clinton — and created a permanent underclass of Americans available for low-paid, dirty work.

While income for the rich was soaring, Rector ensured that income for the poor would be depressed even further.

Having a large pool of low-income workers is exactly what Heritage Foundation folk want. It’s what makes the market work, they say.

People are poor because they deserve to be poor. Otherwise they’d be rich like us.

Here in Canada, the Fraser Institute and its radical conservative allies sing from the same songbook. We need vast disparities in wealth and income so the market can work better. Social programs that lessen inequality just get in the market’s way.

As the Fraser Institute’s Niels Veldhuis observed, “taking money from successful Canadians and redistributing it to lower income Canadians will only decrease the incentives for lower income Canadians to become successful.”

Veldhuis himself must be counted as a successful Canadian — and why should he deprive the poor of their opportunity to become successful like him? But with a 2010 paycheque of $168,836, Veldhuis still has a ways to go before he’s really successful and safely ensconced within the one per cent.

(Statistics Canada doesn’t publish data on the income necessary to be included in the top one per cent, but this figure has been estimated at just over $200,000 for 2009.)

Veldhuis and his colleagues have fought mightily to forestall efforts to raise the living standards of the less well off, most notably the minimum wage, the living wage, and unionization. These are policies which, according the institute, impede economic freedom, the right of individuals to choose for themselves and to engage in voluntary transactions.

Minimum wage laws and the right to be represented by a union infringe on the economic freedom of employers and employees, they say. Having a legislated minimum wage must inhibit a prospective employee’s freedom to choose an even lower wage.

If a country has minimum wage laws and a high degree of unionization, it’s not going to do well on the Fraser Institute’s Index of Economic Freedom.

Other indicators the institute says increase economic freedom are deregulation, unfettered free trade, low taxes, privatization, and minimal government spending — the usual suspects.

As expected, Hong Kong, with the highest level of poverty in Asia and the most billionaires per capita in the world, leads the parade of the economically free. Canada ranks sixth, up from seventh in 2010.

Harper has been a staunch advocate of neoliberalism and economic freedom since he was a graduate student at the University of Calgary in the 1980s.

The importance of the economic freedom project to the Harper government was revealed when the Fraser Institute released its 2010 list. This occurred at a Fraser Institute lunch-hour policy briefing at Ottawa’s Rideau Club with guest speaker Peter Van Loan, Harper’s then Minister of International Trade, who was busy working on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union.

Van Loan applauded his government’s “commitment to free trade, open investment rules and lower taxes.” Free trade is key to economic recovery, he declared. “In Canada, prosperity and quality of life are dependent on trade with the world.”

He reminded his audience of the “fierce debates about North American free trade and the voices from the fringe telling us that it would somehow erode our sovereignty.” Van Loan declared that “we need to continue building a broad base of support for the importance of a competitive, globally engaged Canadian economy of the future.” He ended with an invitation: “So let’s work together to continue convincing Canadians … of the importance of economic freedom.”

And as Canada’s standing on the economic freedom index rises, so do the number of billionaires and the ranks of the poor and struggling.

It is a letter addressed to the prime minister and his minister of finance Jim Flaherty, as well as the other party leaders and finance critics.

Signatories include the presidents  of the universities of Toronto, British Columbia, Manitoba, Western Ontario and Dalhousie. They are joined by representatives from health care, and arts organizations, United Way, foundations and gift planners.

The letter is also signed by Tom d’Aquino, former president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and Catherine Swift, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, indicating both big and small business support.

The signatories celebrate the success of the Harper Economic Action Plan, which is the first curious point since that plan was more about marketing and Conservative Party brand management than actual economic stimulus.

They then “commend” the Harper government for focussing on cutting the deficit, not by raising taxes or reducing transfer payments to the provinces, but by “significantly” cutting spending on education, health care, social services and arts and culture.

They seem to be cheering Harper and Flaherty for the severe budget slashing widely anticipated in the forthcoming Conservative budget.

This may be the beginning of George W. Bush-style “compassionate conservatism” in Canada. As former Bush chief speech writer Michael Gerson explained, “compassionate conservatism is the theory that the government should encourage the effective provision of social services without providing the service itself.”

We understand you need to slash spending on health care, education, social services and arts and culture, the letter says. Let us provide those services. We can do it if you give the wealthy another tax break when they donate the proceeds of selling shares in their private companies or pieces of their real estate empires to our charitable members.

Let us—and not duly-elected governments—decide which programs and services are worthy of support.

There’s less accountability this way. The wealthy will end up determining Canada’s social policies.

If Harper accedes to this request, he no longer has to reinstate the funding once the ravages of the recession recede.

He’ll probably do it. One of his first actions as prime minister was to amend the Income Tax Act to exempt from capital gains tax gifts of shares of public companies to charities.

This is just the next step in the “long march” back to the nineteenth century.

Change by increments, that’s the Harper way.

Two initiatives in a new deregulation agenda.

Canadian business—big and small—is on a deregulation tear and Harper seems more than willing to push the file on every possible front.

The mandate of the Red Tape Reduction Commission is to identify “irritants” stemming from federal regulatory requirements that have a “clear detrimental effect on growth, competitiveness and innovation.”

If growth, competitiveness and innovation are code words for increased profits, then all federal regulations must be detrimental.

The commission is also tasked to ensure the environment and the health and safety of Canadians are not compromised by deregulation.

While the commission is stacked with members who have a vested interest in getting rid of “bothersome” regulation, no one has any expertise—or indeed any credibility—on health, safety or environmental matters.

Treasury Board President Stockwell Day, who believes that Adam and Eve walked with dinosaurs so how can man make laws that go against God’s will? leads the initiative. Bob Moore, Minister of State for Small Business and Tourism, who has no experience with small business, chairs the commission, which includes four additional Conservative MPs from rural Canada and libertarian MP Maxime Bernier, who is probably the most outspoken enemy of regulation in Parliament.

Also on the commission is the president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, who is perhaps the real chair of the commission.

The private-sector members of the commission represent rail-line construction and maintenance, peat moss extraction, mechanical contracting and uniform manufacturing industries.

Nary an environmentalist or health and safety expert in the lot, but many who would seem to benefit from deregulation.

Take Commissioner Gord Peters, who owns Cando Contracting in Brandon, Manitoba. In 2010 his company built a rail yard on CN right-of-way just outside Edmonton to store 225 petroleum tank cars owned by Imperial Oil.

Residents living nearby claim the yard was built without notifying them. No environmental impact assessment or socio-economic impact assessment were undertaken. Nor were there any opportunities for residents to comment on the project.

According to federal government regulations, rail yards are not permitted within 300 metres of homes, yet this yard is just 68 and 163 metres from the closest residents. And two protected wildlife conservation areas are about 30 metres from the yard.

Residents say they “are stuck with the noise, smell, health impacts, visual impact, devalued properties and ruined quality of life. Many laws, policies and guidelines have been breached during construction and operation of this rail yard.”

Sounds like just the kind of guy Harper would like to put in charge of protecting the environment, health and safety.

While Harper was busy setting up the Red Tape Reduction Commission, negotiations for the border agreement were kept secret from Canadians, except for those Canadians who were “supportive stakeholders,” like the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Canadian Chamber of Commerce and Canadian Trucking Alliance. These Canadians were kept in the loop and all three organizations issued positive statements when the deal was finally made public.

The deal is framed in terms of borders and perimeters, but deregulation is a key element.

The agreement mandates the establishment of a new agency to be called the United States-Canada Regulatory Co-operation Council, to “streamline” regulations governing product safety and quality.

Intellectual cover comes from the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI), a Calgary-based organization that promotes Canada’s military machine. Its million-dollar budget is provided largely by the oil and gas industry. (Greater integration of Canada’s oil and gas industry into the American market is also part of the border agreement.)

Senior research fellow Colin Robertson is the institute’s public face for deregulation and deep integration. Look through his 37-page report, “Now for the Hard Part,” and you’ll find numerous references to the need to remove red tape, only Robertson uses more colourful language. He urges government to “take a blowtorch” to unnecessary regulatory differences.

Robertson complains that these “outdated and downright silly differences” need to be vaporized. But a look at some recent deregulation issues shows that many regulations are neither outdated nor silly.

Food Policy. The Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute calls itself non-partisan, but is controlled by the agrifood industry. In a very recent report it claims Canada has lost its status as a food-producing superpower and needs a drastic overhaul of its agricultural policy.

Key to this goal is an overhaul of the regulatory system. Regulation is stifling innovation, the report claims, and needs to be speeded up. But the risk associated with accelerated review is not considered.

Genetically engineered foods. A private member’s bill, C-474, introduced by NDP MP Alex Atemanenko, would have required a new layer of scrutiny in the approval process for genetically modified seeds before they could be exported. The National Farmers Union and Canadian Organic Growers supported the bill, but the GMO seed industry—led by Monsanto and Syngenta Canada—pulled all the stops to oppose it. The industry’s lobbying arm, BIOTECanada, held 50 meetings with federal politicians and government officials. Exactly one week after the new border agreement was signed, Conservative and Liberal MPs joined forces to defeat the bill.

Pharmaceuticals. A front-page National Post story just before Christmas 2010 claimed that red tape was stifling pharmaceutical research. Clinical trials for new drugs and procedures were “being seriously hindered by regulations that push up costs, consume valuable time and do little to make the studies better.”

The charges were levelled by Dr. Salim Yusuf, a professor at McMaster University, in the journal Clinical Trials. The Post did not mention Yusuf’s links to pharmaceutical companies, but a disclosure on Theheart.org web site says that “Dr Yusuf has received grants for clinical research and educational activities, and has served as an advisor or consultant for AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmith Kline, sanofi-aventis, and King Pharmaceuticals.”

It seems more than coincidental that so many deregulation initiatives and issues flooded into the public forum in such a short time.

In fact, January 10-14 was Red Tape Awareness Week, a promotional stunt of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Harper co-operated by establishing the Red Tape Reduction Commission during this week.

What other kind of lobby group could obtain that kind of attention?