Soon after I started working for this editorial board nearly a decade ago, I was surprised to learn that I could walk into a room with four or five political candidates in it and make a pretty good guess as to which politician belonged to which party. Of course there were exceptions. But in general, federal Liberals tended to be slick, practised, well trained in the art of not answering questions, and exuding a palpable air of ease and entitlement. They wore cufflinks and big watches. They were either actual incumbents or they seemed to be convinced that they were in God's eyes.That all changed following the Conservative election victory in 2006. Some of those federal Liberals are still around - and some are very good representatives, who just can't help their supercilious demeanour. But under Stéphane Dion's leadership, some very wet-behind-the-ears Liberal candidates trooped into the Citizen's offices to meet the editorial board. The party was evidently in a rebuilding phase, to put it charitably. Under Michael Ignatieff's tenure, the Liberals seemed to be recruiting some better candidates, but that didn't matter - as it turned out, the Liberal catastrophe had a Part Two.
There seems to be a cycle the Liberals and Conservatives each go through: the entitlement phase, the catastrophe, the time in the wilderness, the rebuilding. (The NDP might be a slightly different animal.)
From the people's perspective, there's probably an ideal moment in the rebuilding phase for a party to form government, when a party is eager but not amateurish, experienced but not smug.
If the federal Conservatives had such a moment, it has passed. I fear they've entered the entitlement phase.
This was brought home to me on my morning commute Tuesday, as I listened to the CBC Radio program The Current. Conservative strategist Tim Powers was making the case for the government's approach to crime.
The other panellist, a criminologist, argued that every penny the government spends on policies that are unlikely to do any good (such as tinkering with the lengths of sentences), could be spent on, say, more police officers or cost-effective programs.
Powers responded, "Well, again, there is plenty of public money and more hopefully should be appropriated, and providing more law enforcement officers to do the job out there. But you need the whole package of tools."
I nearly slammed into the car in front of me. A conservative saying "there's plenty of public money"? Has the culture of the Conservative party in Canada really come to that?
The fact that Stephen Harper put Tony Clement in charge of the Treasury Board - the same Tony Clement who presided over the doling out of federal money for prettying up his riding on the flimsy pretext that it would all be for the greater glory of a G8 summit - suggests it has.
They might not be as bad as the Chrétien Liberals - yet - but all the signs are that these Conservatives are just as willing to use public money to buy votes. As economist Glen Hodgson pointed out the other day in these pages, the Conservatives are happy to retain and even inflate this country's complex system of boutique tax credits. Instead of simply lowering the tax rate across the board, they use the tax system to reward those interest groups deemed worthy - at the expense of all the other taxpayers. That smacks of a government that believes in its right to use the public purse as a social-engineering fund. It has forgotten that it's our money, not theirs.
So much for respect for the people. They've gone from jeans and cowboy hats to cufflinks and big watches. But the less noble elements of Reform populism, alas, are still with us. The Conservatives still distrust the people they call elites, although that's getting more ridiculous the more entrenched their power becomes. Indeed, the persistence of a scrappy underdog spirit, combined with the fact that the Conservative party is now firmly in charge, has had some ugly effects (the most recent being Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's decision to write a snide open letter to Amnesty International that seemed designed mainly to demonstrate, through the use of a lot of big words, that he's smarter than they are.)
The federal Conservatives now have a good long time to get even more comfortable.
In Ontario, there can't be any argument about where the entrenched and entitled Liberals are on that cycle. But as satisfying as it is to take a party down a peg every so often, the alternatives can always be worse. The real question is: where are the Tim Hudak Tories? Do they retain a sense of entitlement from the Harris years, or are they struggling to remake themselves, or are they ready to form a government?
I guess we'll find out.
Origin
Source: Ottawa Citizen
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