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Harper Index
Welcome to www.HarperIndex.ca, an online project with three important purposes:
- to provide daily and background information about our minority prime minister and his colleagues as a research and news source for Canadians.
- to provide a place for analysis and discussion of persuasion techniques used by Stephen Harper and colleagues.
- to offer words and ideas the people who work for public values and the common good - the Left - can use. The Right has learned to be disciplined and focused but too often, the forces of common good are scattered in how we describe our vision and beliefs. We get caught up in facts and figures.
We unconsciously slip into language the Right has developed for its own purposes, like made-in-Canada solution to global warming, support the troops, tax relief. Using these words draws on people's deeply-held beliefs and feelings and gets them thinking like our adversaries. The Harper Conservatives, like their allies, the Bush Republicans, work hard to "frame" the debate in ways that make their greedy and fearful point of view look like common sense, as it were.
Those fighting for public values and common good need to frame the debate in ways that invoke people's angels - the values of sharing, respect, equality, opportunity, hard work and cooperation. This calls for consistency and discipline. At www.HarperIndex.ca we will try to look at how the Harper Conservatives are attempting to frame the debate and make recommendations of how the debate might better be framed to serve the common good.
The charter sponsors of www.HarperIndex.ca are the National Union of Public and General Employees, the online publication Straight Goods and its new non-profit affiliate, the Golden Lake Institute.
