Stephen Harper is facing the end of his short lived term as Canadian Prime Minister thanks to his naked attack on the Canadian democratic system.

Opposition leaders Stephane Dion (Liberals), Jack Layton (NDP) and Gilles Duceppe (Bloc Quebecois) signed an unprecedented agreement today to form a new coalition government and oust Harper's Conservative's from power in the wake of their move to strip political parties of federal subsidies.

The proposed coalition emphasizes Harper's failure to address the current economic crisis as the prime reason for their actions, but the real catalyst in forming the coalition was Harper's move to consolodate his overhwelming financial edge over his rivals by stripping them of a key source of funds.

The federal political subsidies are a balancing measure put in place to ensure that the narrow interests of any one party cannot unduly sway the direction of the country. If Harper could successfully remove this balancing measure, it would likely be the decisive edge that would have allowed the Conservatives to spend their way to a majority government in the next election. They would then be free to begin their real work of changing the Canadian political system to an American model where spending and money dictate policy.

This has been the explicit goal of the modern conservative movement in Canada since it was first created a few short years ago, a fact outlined in startling and disturbing clarity in the 2004 National Post article by Adam Daifallah titled "Building a conservative Canada -- from the ground up":

The only way to affect such a (conservative) change is through an overt campaign to shift the Canadian political goalposts to the right. Redefining a country's national attitude of mind is not easy. But the American experience has shown it can be done.

U.S. conservatives have, over the last four decades, built a powerful institutional infrastructure. Well-endowed foundations, funded by various titans of industry, were established to erect think-tanks, underwrite conservative publications and promote a greater appreciation of conservatism in the national discourse.

The success of this experiment has been astounding. Conservative ideas, once thought to be on the extreme fringe, were popularized, beginning with the 1964 presidential candidacy of Republican senator Barry Goldwater. The result has been a tangible shift in the American Zeitgeist that made possible the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

If conservatism is ever to take hold here, the U.S. model must be replicated.

As a matter of political policy and ideology, the Harper Conservatives are not interested in the opinion or values of the Canadian people. They have an explicit agenda to change those values to match their own, and they realize that the shortest route to attaining that end is changing the political institutions that represent Canadian values, beginning with the federal government itself.

It won't work this time. Meanwhile, Harper will try to frame the opposition move as a political game, forgetting (as only the right can once they begin to lose) that it was he who set this playing field to begin with.