The blue pages conspiracy blues: Why Ottawa doesn't want you to call
So the new telephone directories are smaller and more compact than they used to be.
What else is new. Other modern products such as computers have been getting smaller and more compact over time as well.
No, it's not the size of the directories; it's what happened to the blue-page sections where governments and their agencies list their contacts.
For one, the blue has gone grey, a bit like the month of July here in recent years.
The provincial government still has full listings in the no-longer-blue pages, as do Eastern Health and the cities of St. John's and Mount Pearl. But if you look up the Government of Canada, there's now just a single page.
The top half gives a general number, plus seven "frequently requested" numbers, all of them 1-800 dials.
The bottom half gives you 15 lines on which you can take notes, presumably based on the answers you get ... or don't.
A much less visible presence
Service Canada says spending $3.1-million a year on listing contact numbers for 115 federal government departments and agencies didn't make sense anymore, when people are increasingly looking the information up on the web.
Still, there's been so much smoke, occasional fire and all-round alarm over the downsizing and withdrawing of federal services across the country in recent years, it's hard not to suspect that the federal government's almost-complete exit from the nation's telephone directories is more of the same.
Vanishing veterans' offices, women's centres, search and rescue sub-centres, government libraries, environmental research stations and programs — the single grey page with its eight stark numbers and 15 lines on which you can doodle out your frustrations seems to fit right in.
Which raises the question, what's made it so difficult to give the federal government the benefit of the doubt these days?
It's the conspiracy.
About that 'benign dictatorship'
Stephen Harper brought it up himself back in 1996 while president of the National Citizens Committee, a "non-partisan Canadian organization," according to his website, "that advocates for individual freedoms and accountable government."
"Although we like to think of ourselves as living in a mature democracy," Harper wrote at the time, "we live, instead, in something little better that a benign dictatorship."
Harper's critics would like him to eat those words, and gag on them.
According to Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui, "Stephen Harper is concentrating power in PMO (prime minister's office) on an unprecedented scale."
Nimble-worded national columnist Michael Harris writes, "most people play by the rules; the prime minister plays with them."
In an article for the Globe and Mail, Gerald Caplan calls Harper's treatment of dissenting voices "Harper's chopping block."
A cartoon in the Edmonton Journal shows a Darth Vader-like figure holding a poster with the words, "Join the dark side." Two men stand in the back, one saying to the other, "Is it just me, or does Stephen Harper need to lighten up?"
Most recently, NDP leader Tom Mulcair talked about the prime minister's "death grip on information."
A move other governments have made, too
All of it adds up to the accusation that Harper, the former champion of individual freedoms and accountable government, is moving the country further down the road towards the very benign dictatorship he warned about.
It should be pointed out that if the accusation is correct, Harper is simply building on what other governments and their leaders have practiced before him.
If 150 years of representative government has taught us one thing, it's that power is a lot easier to broker than democracy. Put another way, if increasing social complexity is making it harder and harder for democratic governance to please the majority, leaders can always opt for staying in control by consolidating power.
The Liberals started this under Pierre Trudeau. The Progressive Conservatives continued it under Brian Mulroney. There were no attempts to roll any of it back when the Liberals returned under Jean Chrétien.
Stephen Harper jumped to it as well, and who can blame him for out-doing his predecessors? Isn't that what progress is all about?
Power isolates, and isolation is not a good place to be. But Harper is obviously willing to pay the price. It could be argued that he deserves to be respected for what he's doing rather than being painted as an enemy of democracy.
In the meantime, there's no question that using the internet to look up government numbers has certain advantages.
If you know the name of the person you're looking for, all you have to do is enter it, and presto!
Of course, whether that person is prepared to give you the information you're looking for is another matter.
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