Winnipeg Free Press September 17

Is warm and fuzzy Prime Minister Stephen Harper real?

The nasty, ultra-partisan and controlling bully who spent millions on an unprecedented 20 months of non-stop attack ads to destroy his chief adversary is gone?

In his place is smiling Stephen. He wears sweaters, plays cards with his kids, cuddles kittens and hugs babies but lets his agriculture minister to flout the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and ignores the law of the land to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board.

He tickles the ivories at the St. John’s airport but allows his staff to use his RCMP security detail to strong-arm journalists out of questioning range when one of his war-room stalwarts embarrasses him.

Thanks to a former PMO staffer, he has a song on the Internet. Here’s a sample of I’ve Got a Crush on Harper: “Never trusted anyone more… So tall and sexy, you’re so fine… ” But Canwest News reports his office “has such strict controls over messaging that it pre-approves and revises comments attributed to… ministers… and even vets words that are to come out of the mouths of university officials.”

He’s also saying “my goal is to make conservatism the natural governing philosophy of the country.”

His past as president of the anti-government National Citizens’ Coalition and co-author of the infamous Alberta “firewall” letter, plus many other neo-conservative treatises, is well-known. Canadians should be wary.

In a speech to Civitas in 2003, Harper staked out a radical right agenda.

He accused the liberals and the left of “moral nihilism.” He called group rights “tribalism.” And he made clear his abhorrence of all taxes. “There are real limits to tax-cutting if conservatives cannot dispute anything about how or why a government actually does what it does,” he said. “We do need deeper and broader tax cuts, further reductions in debt, further deregulation and privatization.”

The slogan, “Tory times are hard times” began with the Depression. It’s back. In less than three years, Harper has squandered a balanced budget and fiscal surplus that Canadians shredded much of their social safety net to achieve.

When the Conservatives took power in February 2006, they inherited a $13.5 billion surplus from the Jean Chrétien Liberals. Yet, by the first two quarters of this year, Canada was teetering on the brink of a deficit. Harper had frittered away $12 billion — almost all the recession cushion created by Canadians’ sacrifice — just to pay for his two-point cut to the GST — mere pennies at the cash register for most Canadians.

Last month, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that Canada is slated for the second weakest economic growth among the major industrialized countries — the worst performance since the last time the Conservatives were in office. Harper is following Brian Mulroney’s footsteps. Between 1984 and 1993, Mulroney ran up nearly two-thirds of the more than half-trillion-dollar national debt accumulated in Canada since Confederation. In his last year in office, his government posted a $42-billion deficit and a half-trillion-dollar national debt.

Fiscal 2006-07, Harper’s first year, marked the tenth year of consecutive federal surpluses. The federal debt plunged from $562.9 billion in 1996-97 to $467.3 billion in 2006-07, lowering the federal debt to GDP ratio to 32.3 per cent, less than half its peak of 68.4 per cent in 1995-96.

All that is now in jeopardy. Canadians need to ask how bad it could get under a second Harper regime.

The U.S. is a textbook illustration of the folly of deregulated, supply-side (tax-cutting) neoconservative economics. The U.S. national debt now stands at $9.5 trillion dollars. Its annual deficit is now over $400 billion. This week, world markets are paying the price for George W. Bush’s radical free-market-deregulation philosophy.

It’s unbelievable that the very ideology responsible for the fiscal and financial meltdown is now being marketed as best positioned to address it. Republican John McCain in the U.S. and Harper in Canada are favoured because they have “the experience and the leadership to get us through hard times.”

Economist Armine Yalnizyan authored The Rich and the Rest of Us: The Changing Face of Canada’s Growing Gap for the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives in 2007. It reported the income gulf between Canada’s rich and poor is at a 30-year high. The only people to prosper have been the richest 10 per cent of Canadians. And this despite the unprecedented boom of the 1990s.

Asked to explain why citizens keep voting for parties who author their woe, she responds: “Markets aren’t designed to protect us from risk. It’s strong leadership by government that reduces and pools risk in hard times. Unfortunately, this is a tough sell today, because, if the neoconservatives have achieved anything, it’s to shift attitudes towards thinking that governments are the problem, not the solution. Their marketing has been forceful and effective.”

Is the new warm and fuzzy Stephen Harper real? Maybe, at least until Oct. 15.

This article was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 and is filed under Canadian Issues and Politics, federal election 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.