This is not about a few words on the internet as one poster put it. It is about a thirty year career of Harper. There have been several responsible jopurnalists who have made the same claims about Harper over the past few years. There is nothing new in this and it is not Rebel's statements that should be received with so much scorn.
Look at the claims objectively.
Neither is the matter of the photographs a light one. It is one more of those autocratic moves that Harper has got away with simply because there is always something new and there is a mental fatigue in the populace that brushes aside new revelations. How else could a contempt of Parliament not have led to the end of his government and his personal placing into an ignominous place in history already/
As for psychopathy! There have been studies that conclude that more than 4% (some higher) of corporate CEOs are psychopaths and that the proportion is higher among politicians. I have not seen any figure placed on that because of the limited number of high ranking politicians.
However, Rebel is correct in the elements of psychopathy and that Harper displays some of them.
Unusual is that a psychopath remains at the top of his Party for any extended time since his state becomes clear to his own Party rather quiickly. But it happens and I think Rebel is correct in this. There are, however, degrees of the descent into that mental wilderness and Harper does not have some of the full blown traits. He does, however, have some other minor ones such as being a loner and delusional.
It's nice to have members here who aren't caught up in the same mindless games that dominate our political forum these days.
Indeed it's been years of actions and statements by Steven Harper and his "government" that lead me and others to have a strong suspicion of his more sociopathic qualities.
One of the first actions he took as PM was probably impulsive and was definitely undemocratic by bringing in a former Liberal cabinet minister and nullifying the choice of the voters in Vancouver-Kingsway(It was David Emerson not david Wilson as I thought). This in the context of the new PM and his party supposedly replacing the cynical abuses of power of the previous Liberal government with one that was accountable, transparent and respectful of our Parliamentary traditions.
Harper waited to see what the reaction would be and when the consequences weren't severe began a long chain of events that have brought us to a position of an almost opaque federal government carrying out extensive policies that have already deprived many Canadians of many of their freedoms and future opportunities.
These are the actions of a person almost devoid of a conscience, not a responsible and accountable democratic leader. The reason that Harper began his program of limiting media scrutiny in the first place in 2006 was to enable this. We don't get the press scrums outside the cabinet office and the spontaneous questions from the press to the PM that can catch him up and reveal his inner workings. What would we see in that case, I'm willing to bet that if placed under the kind of scrutiny that previous PMs had to endure we'd see something that would leave most Canadians cold. A man who really doesn't care about anything at all, except being in power.