“…The problem with experts is that they don’t always tell the government what it wants to hear. The past year has seen a nonstop parade of bad news from the experts, who have shot down one article of Tory faith after another: crime rates are falling, not rising; harm reduction for drug addicts works; climate change is real and serious; a voluntary census is useless.

The key to the Conservatives’ survival, then, is to make sure enough Canadians continue to think with their guts and prevent the more reliable part of their intellect from becoming engaged. Their first line of attack is to shut the experts up, which is why the government has effectively silenced everyone from the economists at Industry Canada who aren’t allowed to talk about their research on productivity to the muzzled NRC scientists who had the temerity to say the wrong things about climate change.

But the ultimately more effective instrument is the control of language itself. The Tories have spent the past year rolling out a few slogans, most of them aimed at framing the terms of debate for the next election. And so we’ve heard the Prime Minister repeatedly tell us that “losers don’t get to form governments,” that the Liberals will form a coalition with “socialists and separatists,” and, now, that anyone who supports the long-gun registry is a member of an urban elite. It’s a straight-up appeal to the gut, aimed at short-circuiting more sophisticated thinking…”