Next on the chopping block: left-wing blogs.

Aren't people supposed to get more conservative as they age? If so, why am I finding myself going increasingly liberal?
I expected an election last fall. This fall, I'm demanding one. Harper has gone stale.
Well, truth be told, Harper always was stale. But now he's going toxic.
It was, in the end, a small thing that turned me against the Conservatives: small on the surface, but oh so telling. On Friday, it was announced that the PromArt program would be killed by spring, saving a piddling $4.7 million.
PromArt is a federal grants program under the aegis of Foreign Affairs. Its purpose is--was--to promote Canadian culture abroad.
Now I'll grant you, I'd question some of the grants that have gone out. I'm not sure, for example, how a band called "Holy Fuck" promotes Canadian culture here or anywhere. But rather than put some simple restrictions in place--in order to be deemed eligible for funding, profanity and gross indecency must be entirely absent--Harper instead chose to kill the entire program.
It was actually acknowledged that part of the reason was ideological: the Tories simply don't share the political views of some of the grant recipients. So, plus a few points for honesty and candour, but minus a few hundred for forgetting more people voted against you last time out than for you.
It's one thing for a minority government to act as if it has a majority. That's a sound political tactic, particularly when you have a Leader of the Opposition (such as, oh, I don't know, Stephane Dion, maybe) who has no balls and no spine. It's entirely something else to forget you're the government of an entire country, not just those few who voted for you. Indeed, when you have a minority, you really ought to be trying like hell to appeal to those who didn't vote for you.
The subtext here--pshaw, arts? nobody'll miss it anyway--rubs me entirely the wrong way. Visual art, music, literature--people have had these things for as long as there have been people. (Literature need not be written down, you know.) I honestly believe that the arts are part of what makes us people. And they certainly can "promote Canadian values and interests" abroad--the same way the Olympic opening ceremonies--for which, incidentally, the English language lacks an adjective sufficiently superlative--promoted China to the world. It's just a little cut...$4.7 million is quite literally pocket change to the Canadian government. That they would deprive touring artists of even pocket change says volumes. Volumes I don't want to read.