This typical character assassination piece explains why an American liberal should be wary of Canada (The New Republic often adopts the mentor's tone - "You you should think this and do that...", apparently targeting those in the college educated audience, who are used to believe everything that a professor says.).
According to the article, the Canadian long-time prime minister Stephen Harper is a rather scary figure:
"It all starts with Harper, a churchgoing evangelical, who has perhaps the most doggedly right-wing temperament of any twentieth-century Canadian prime minister. A veteran of the conservative movement, Harper has been president of a prominent Canadian libertarian lobbying group and helped get the insurgent, Western Canada-based Reform Party off the ground in the late eighties by arguing for the deregulation of oil prices and lowered taxes, and against gay marriage and abortion. He’s an admirer of Friedrich Hayek and William F. Buckley. And he has devoted his life to pushing Canadian politics to the right."
Further in the article the author finally gets to the real reasons why he is suddenly so displeased with the Canada: Canadians dare to disagree with President Obama:
"Harper has been relentlessly pro-tar sands—his ambassador to the U.S. is lobbying hard to get approval for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move 700,000 barrels a day from the tar sands to Gulf refineries in Texas, adding to the roughly 2 million barrels Canada already sends south every day. (Indeed, Canada has become America’s biggest oil supplier.) Recently, Obama postponed the pipeline decision until after the 2012 elections, responding to concerns over the effect of potential spills on a Nebraska water reservoir and the pipeline’s abetment of America’s oil addiction.
Harper has been right-wing on the global stage as well. In April 2010, his government announced that its contribution to the G8’s maternal health initiative would not include funding for abortions, putting it at odds with the Obama administration. The decision reversed a long-standing practice of funding abortion out of the foreign aid budget, and was particularly striking given that there are no legal restrictions on abortion in Canada. Harper also carved out a stance to the right of Obama on Israel when he objected to any mention of Israel’s pre-1967 borders in a G8 leaders’ communiqué in May. This prompted a grateful personal phone call from Avidgor Lieberman, Israel’s ultra-right-wing foreign minister."
These hints are very obvious - Keystone XL pipeline has been a contentious issue recently, since the Republican Congress tied it to the extension of the payroll tax cuts, which the Obama administration supports.
On the issue of Israel Obama's statement about "pre-1967 borders" was as a minimum controversial, and a radical change of the previous US position. It would be more correct to say that Obama has carved a stance to the left from all other Israel's allies. It is hard to blame Harper for being consistent in his country's policies, rather than simply toeing the Obama's line. The mentioning of Lieberman, whom TNR openly calls "near-fascist", is a clear example of finding guilty by association (In addition, the a phone call from a country's foreign minister, after its ally has demonstrated support in an important international resolution, is probably a standard diplomatic practice.)
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