A piece in iPolitics by my colleague Elizabeth Thompson suggests that the Tories’ instant attack ad against Trudeau after his leadership victory was a world class belly-flop. You know something has backfired when the person you “attacked” uses the ad to raise pots of money to fight you. About all the Tories have accomplished is to make themselves less popular and foster the fervent hope that James Moore won’t be taking off his shirt in public to aid his favourite charity any time soon.
In a word, instead of defining their political enemy, the Conservatives have defined themselves. Through years of incumbency, the Harper crowd has become an increasingly grumpy cabal of aging incumbents full of spite, malice and, of late, a bloated sense of entitlement. The Senate housing debacle shows how comfortably the party has settled into the easy chair of power.
With each display of bad manners and bad judgement in their zeal to damage the new Liberal leader, they will draw attention to the elephant in the room: their own increasingly dismal record in office. From orange juice to panda bears, things are beginning to slide.
Governments-in-waiting, whether led by smooth chins or patriarchal beards, get elected by default. Governments get defeated on their records. Which explains why the Harperites are reflexively following the David Frum school of thought these days: When you reach the point where you can’t improve your own numbers, the only way to stay in the game is to drag down the ratings of your opponents — even when the next election is years away.
At this moment in the Harper majority, the record is decidedly dog-eared and the polling ominous. According to pollster Frank Graves, the Liberals under Trudeau are on the rise. Even the immigrant vote the Tories worked so hard to win may be slipping back to the Grits. Meanwhile, Harper continues to degrade Canada’s democratic institutions in his pursuit of presidential-style governance. What passes for parliamentary democracy these days is budgets without the numbers, omnibus budget bills bigger than the Bible, and closure.
The system has become so politicized that even the top civil servant in the land is telling other civil servants that they can’t have budget information. Having already stifled scientists and bureaucrats, the info-minders in the PMO are now muzzling members of Mr. Harper’s own caucus. When your own zombies turn on you, you have to ask: What the junta is going on?
Stephen Maher made the point in a recent column that Harper’s assault on Canada’s parliamentary democracy may not matter. It certainly didn’t in the last federal election when Michael Ignatieff repeatedly accused the PM of endangering our democratic institutions. Bolstering his case by referencing Harper’s contempt-of-Parliament, Ignatieff hoped that concern for a democracy at risk would resuscitate his party’s lowly fortunes. Instead, the Grits sank like a stone and Harper won a majority.
Maher points out that while Ignatieff was talking about democracy, which people didn’t want to hear about, Harper was talking about something that did interest them — the economy. Remember all those speeches about how we were doing better than everyone else in tough times, how we were becoming an energy “superpower”, how our banks were better, how the government was creating jobs hand over fist?
Well the only place you hear that kind of stuff these days is in Stephen Harper’s favourite form of communication — taxpayer-funded government ads in which the PM gets to grade his own paper and write his own report card.
In the real world, the economy is about as rosy as midnight in a coal mine. The Conservatives have racked up the biggest deficit in our history. They continue to spend gobs of money on military acquisitions with a procurement system that is hopelessly broken, according to the last man who ran it, Dan Ross. Now they are reversing the spending spree and axing jobs and services.
They are also catering to a corporate sector with a dubious track record these days. The most recent example was Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird playing bill collector for Bombardier in Baghdad. Perhaps the former head of the PM’s security detail will have better luck.
Having become overly dependent on the resource sector, the country is feeling the squeeze now that oil prices are dropping and alternate sources of energy are being developed. Personal indebtedness for Canadians is at an all-time high and the finance minister is publicly giving banks raspberries over interest rates he doesn’t like. As one senior public servant put it, “If Flaherty is the best finance minister in the world, why are his numbers always wrong five months out?”
And so, back to the PM’s contention that Justin Trudeau doesn’t have the right stuff to govern. When a politician in Canada starts taking credit for the economy, or claiming that someone else isn’t qualified to be in charge, it is a nonsense both ways.
For starters, Canada’s great natural wealth is the reason the economy is fundamentally solid — not the brilliance of some Great Navigator who sees more deeply into the economic fog than anyone else. As go commodity prices, so goes the country — especially since the crushing loss of manufacturing positions in Ontario and the boom in low-paying service jobs.
Second, the reality of globally integrated economies means effective control by any domestic government over its economy is seriously restricted. It depends on boom-or-bust in the economies of major trading partners, the relative strength of other currencies as countries devalue in order to get an export advantage, and even the probity of the banking system. After reading Matt Taibbi’s latest piece in Rolling Stone on HSBC, the largest bank in Europe, the gloom over the stunning dishonesty of the financial sector only deepens.
Third, what stability there is in the Canadian system of governance comes not from politicians, but the vast professional public service that acts as their handmaiden. It is the wisdom contained in the briefing books patiently built up over decades of experience, not the vision of the temporary custodians of political power, that determines good public policy.
So when Stephen Harper harps on the idea that Justin Trudeau isn’t qualified to run the country, it pays to remember that the same thing was said about him when he was considered to be a dead-end opposition leader without sufficient personality to be an accountant.
In the end, politics is the business of taking money from one group in society and delivering it to another. We know to whom the prime minister likes to send it. Justin Trudeau may have other recipients in mind.
It’s not Trudeau’s inexperience that bothers Stephen Harper. It’s his values.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
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