Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Premiership of Stephen Harper
per Nyttend and MickMacNee. As noted above, it is standard coverage to have articles on the policies and tenures of national leaders and their administrations/ministries/governments. The SPAM and Canadian election law complaints are completely ludicrous, and the tone of many of the delete !voters is wholly inappropriate and smacks of a dislike for Harper rather than any valid editorial judgment. An election is coming up, so therefore we should have ''less'' coverage of what the officials running for office did or wanted/tried to do when they were in power? That's utter rubbish. If these articles are POV or "soapboxes," obviously that is to be cured through normal editing, though it seems like at least some of that criticism comes from the simple fact of reporting what the stated policy of the Harper government is/was rather than these articles presenting a one-sided evaluation in favor of those policies' effectiveness. When I look at Environmental policy of the Harper government, for example, I see that Harper and the Conservatives were critical of, and eventually abandoned, the Kyoto Accord; there are statements attributed to Harper re: the Accord which are not treated as correct or better policies than the Opposition's, but simply presented as what he said and what the government subsequently did, in a manner that seems fairly neutral to me, not a "puff piece." One of the worst arguments above (and one of the worst that I have ever seen in an AFD) is that these are "directories of tory/Harper policy". I don't know what a "policy directory" is supposed to be exactly (apparently a really tortured attempt to appeal to ), but why the hell wouldn't we want an article describing what a government or political party's policies are? Particularly where it's from a major developed country whose government and laws are the subject of significant coverage and commentary. Re: the "Harper government branding" complaint, that is at best an argument for retitling the articles, if it is in fact incorrect for a Canadian government to be labeled by its presiding prime minister in the same way that we would say the Obama administration, but I haven't seen any alternate proposals for what these should be called. But I don't see any challenge to what seems to me the obvious fact that policies will change from one government/administration/ministry/whatever to another, which is why it makes sense to have separate articles like this
— User:Postdlf, 16:05, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
Stance: keep
Cited policy: WP:NOTDIR (Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not)