From the Horse's Mouth

 This from one time Harper chief of staff and academic mentor Tom Flanagan on Harper's anti-democratic instincts:

The Conservative campaigning approach has been built around two realities: a low ceiling on the popularity of right-of-centre viewpoints in Canada, and a low-engagement political environment. That's governed pretty much everything this government does, in and out of campaigns.
Mr. Harper's proposed solution to this political conundrum was best seen in 2008. In that campaign, he parlayed to a near-majority by creating conditions where three quarters of a million Liberals stayed at home, rather than vote for the caricature that had been made of Mr. Dion. Mr. Harper made the Conservatives big by making the Liberal vote small. This year's campaign has sought a reprise of that success. But seeking to work around the low conservative-minded ceiling by working a low-engagement environment hasn't just pervaded the 2011 campaign. It's been the basic story of Mr. Harper's government, something I've argued in other posts (Ringside: March 29) and elsewhere.
The core strategy, using low engagement politics to equalize a low support ceiling, is mirrored not only in campaigns, but also in the government's public policy strategy. Lacking sufficient public support for a conservative shrinking of the federal government, Mr. Harper's administration has ducked debate on such matters, and instead has simply gone about quietly withdrawing Ottawa from several areas of national life. It has avoided a debate where the majority would prevail against it. Generally, the quiet deconstruction has worked. People, we've been told, just don't care. Well, sometimes. Other times, many of the government's most awkward moments have come when quiet burials -- prorogation, long-form census, Kairos funding -- suddenly drew unwelcome attention.
This brings me to the final pillar of the Harper Conservative strategy: populist centralism, which is my neologism for Mr. Harper's frequent nudges of our Westminster parliamentary system towards some de facto species of direct election of the prime minister. This populist centralism has not only accelerated the long-term, multi-party subordination of cabinet to the PMO; it has arguably resulted in the wholesale sidelining of the Legislature in favour of the Executive. That's something new.

The favoured tactics of Latin American autocrats. This government cannot go soon enough!