What’s most shocking about all this is that Harper was involved in the Reform party in its early days, serving as its policy chair and as an MP under Preston Manning’s leadership. If any party on the national scene could claim to be known as the party of principle, it was Reform. One could agree or disagree with those principles, but one could not deny that the party had them.
Brian Mulroney being unable to balance the books, Reform advocated controlling public spending. Mulroney and Jean Chrétien having taken the centralization of power in Ottawa to new heights, the Reformers stood for more power for individual MPs.
Yet Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is — even after inflation and taking population growth into account — the highest-spending government in Canadian history. It has taken party discipline to new extremes, ramming omnibus bills through Parliament and invoking closure on debate like never before. Harper’s is a party that clearly has discarded its principles in order to win power. More importantly, it is a party that has been unable to find its principles again once it won power.
The party that accused Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals of advocating higher spending, higher taxes and high prices has become not only a record spender, but also a party that defends supply management, increases tariffs and hikes employment insurance premiums. Higher taxes and higher prices indeed.
The party that campaigned against Stéphane Dion’s carbon tax — and continues to demonize the NDP’s cap-and-trade policy as a “job-killer” — in fact proposed the latter policy in its 2008 platform. Furthermore, the Tories put forward only heavy-handed regulation as a means of dealing with carbon dioxide emissions today — by far a less market-oriented means of dealing with climate change, one more likely to be a “job-killer” than anything proposed by the NDP. There appears to be no intellectual honesty left on the government bench.
And now we have attack ads directed against newly-elected Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. These ads are guilty of several moral flaws and factual errors. First, Trudeau is shown stripping to circus-like music as if in a fashion show — despite the fact that these actions were done to raise money for the Canadian Liver Foundation. Second, a quote is attributed to him which came out of Trudeau paraphrasing his father’s beliefs, not his own.
But worse than all of this is the sheer timing of it all. Attack ads were already on the go just one day after Trudeau was elected leader — before Trudeau had a chance to unveil a single policy, before he had the chance to appoint a single staffer, before he had the chance to rise in the House to ask a single question.
Behold: the Conservative party — once the party of principle, now nothing more than the party of character-assassination. One can think of no reason why the Tories would resort to such puerile tactics other than the fact that they are themselves devoid of ideas. The Conservatives have exhausted their social agenda — having gone as far as possible on crime while not daring to touch the abortion file — and have proven themselves incapable of balancing a budget or advancing Canada’s global position.
This cannot become the new normal in Canadian politics. Canadians deserve far better than this.
Perhaps the permanent campaign will never stop. Perhaps character traits will prove more important than policy for the foreseeable future. One can only hope, though, that the politics of honesty and principle will return to Ottawa in relatively short order.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Zach Paikin
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