The Senate expense scandal involving three of his own appointees to the upper chamber – former television stars Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin, as well as brash Aboriginal leader Patrick Brazeau – has garnered national headlines for months on end and caused Conservatives across the country no small amount of grief.
Questions continue to hound Harper over the decision of his former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, to write Duffy a $90,000 cheque with the promise, according to CTV News, that a Senate committee audit report on the senator’s expenses would “go easy” on him.
Last week, Harper lost a vocal backbencher in Alberta MP Brent Rathgeber, who slammed the door shut on his future with the Conservative Party of Canada, telling colleagues he no longer recognizes the party they had built.
“I joined the Reform/conservative movements because I thought we were somehow different, a band of Ottawa outsiders riding into town to clean the place up, promoting open government and accountability,” Rathgeber wrote in his blog last Thursday. “I barely recognize ourselves, and worse I fear that we have morphed into what we once mocked.”
Later this month, some 2,000 Conservative supporters, grassroots organizers and party volunteers will assemble in Calgary for the party’s biennial convention. Conservative MPs expect they’ll get an earful from their membership about Rathgeber’s comments and a deeper questioning of what has become of the Conservative Party.
Former Reform Party leader Preston Manning told The Huffington Post Canada this week that when leaders crusade on issues such as accountability, they are held to a higher standard by the public.
“That’s always the trouble if you get on to moral ground and higher ethical standards. Of course you yourself are going to be held accountable to them, and, if something slips on that front, that really hurts,” Manning said.
The Senate expense scandal is just the latest grievance held by many on the Reform-side of the party, including Rathgeber, who believe the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper sacrificed their core values to become more electable and turn two minority governments into a majority.
Among a litany of complaints and concerns about the Harper government expressed by some members of his base:
That Harper courted newly elected Liberal MP David Emerson to cross the floor and join the Conservatives in exchange for a cabinet post in 2006;
That he broke an election promise to not tax income trusts;
That he flip-flopped on running deficits after the 2008 election. Harper pledged during the campaign that his government would not go into deficit. Less than a month later, however, he said a deficit might be necessary if fiscal stimulus was needed;
That he promised no changes to old age pensions and then introduced legislation that would raise the age of eligibility for Old Age Security;
That Harper asked the Governor General to prorogue Parliament in 2008 so as to avoid a vote in the House of Commons that his newly re-elected minority government would almost certainly have lost;
That Harper suggested that coalition governments were unconstitutional, even though he had said in 1997 that he was in favour of such co-operation by the opposition;
That the government misled Parliament about $50 million spent on new sidewalks and gazebos in Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s Ontario riding before the G20 meeting in Huntsville in 2010. The money had been allocated for the Border Infrastructure Fund, designed to reduce congestion at the Canada-U.S. border;
The slow return to balanced budget – projected for 2015/2016 – after the government erased a healthy federal surplus on stimulus spending;
The government’s apparent unwillingness to make deep and fast cuts to federal programs, and the civil service in particular;
An unwillingness to make sweeping changes to the tax code, such as the introduction of a flat tax or a cap on federal budget spending;
That Harper appointed 53 unelected senators to the Red Chamber – including two who had been defeated in general elections after trying to win seats as MPs – despite his pledge not to appoint any unelected senators;
Harper’s refusal to allow B.C. MP Mark Warawa time to speak in the House of Commons on his motion condemning sex-selection abortion and the government’s campaign behind closed doors to rule it out of order;
How the Tories gutted Rathgeber’s transparency bill on public service wages by raising the disclosure amount to only those earning more than 444,000;
The government recognized Quebec’s nationhood – a concept that Manning had opposed on the basis that all provinces were equal;
That Ottawa bailed out the auto sector in 2009 and continued to provide business subsidies;
That the government created its sixth regional development agency at a cost of $920 million, this time for Southern Ontario, rather than eliminating all of them. (Critics see them as ineffective cash cows)
That the government introduced several omnibus bills despite Harper’s position in 1994, when he argued vehemently against bundled legislation, saying it was not “in the interest of democracy.”
That Harper cozied up to China for trade purposes rather than attack the country’s human rights record;
Harper’s failure to privatize Crown corporations that compete with the private sector, in part or in whole, such as the CBC, Canada Post and its Purolator service;
The government’s unwillingness to overhaul the employment insurance system to end seasonal reliance;
A failure to change the equalization formula, which critics contend penalizes wealthy provinces who subsidize more generous programs in poorer provinces.
Peter Woolstencroft, a political scientist at the University of Waterloo who has studied conservative parties in Canada, said the Stephen Harper of 10 years ago would not recognize himself in the current prime minister.
“He’s been the great transformer,” Woolstencroft said.
The younger Stephen Harper, as head of the National Citizens Coalition, penned a letter arguing that Alberta’s provincial government should “build firewalls around Alberta” to limit a hostile federal government from encroaching upon its jurisdiction. He also urged then-premier Ralph Klein to pull out of national programs such as the Canada Pension Plan and look at ways to reduce the wealth transfer from the province to other parts of the federation.
Harper was a “really right-wing guy,” a true Reformer who believed in the independent actions of members of Parliament and yet has run a “very disciplined” party and one that is very much dominated by the Prime Minister’s Office, Woolstencroft said.
Since the amalgamation of the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance in 2003, Harper has made enormous concessions to the PC side of the party and generally adopted their pragmatic centre-right agenda rather than the Reform party agenda, the professor said.
“A lot of people on the Reform side feel they made all kinds of sacrifices and didn’t get much in return,” he said. Meanwhile, expense scandals have “embarrassed Conservatives because this is what they thought the Liberals would do.”
Outspoken Saskatchewan backbencher Brad Trost told HuffPost that there are many caucus members who would like to reflect, do some constructive self-criticism and get back to fundamentals.
“This isn’t all about winning the next election – we would like to win – but if we are only fixated on winning, we are not starting off with what is good for the country as our first question,” he said in an interview from his riding office is Saskatoon.
“That’s why you’ve got the tension,” he said, pointing to the government’s preference for small tax credits over bold changes to the tax code; piecemeal justice legislation designed for the news cycle rather than “principled stuff,” and a feeling among MPs after the Warawa incident that they no longer have the right to speak freely – despite a party policy stating that they do.
Over the years, Trost said, he has heard Conservative party members question why the Harper government is carrying deficits when former Liberal finance minister Paul Martin got Canada’s fiscal house in order. Martin, as Jean Chrétien’s finance minister, slashed the civil service and drastically cut transfers to the provinces in the 1990s to bring Canada’s fiscal house in order.
“There is irony to it, for all our tough talk we haven’t done half (of) what Martin and Chrétien did,” Trost said.
While the Tories have lowered taxes, pursued free trade agreements and moved to restrict the size of government, Calgary MP Rob Anders said he would have liked to have seen more.
“If people can’t tell the difference between the Liberal and the Conservative, what is the point of voting Conservative?” he asked.
Topping Anders’ wish list is the elimination of the capital gains tax, which the Conservatives promised in the 2006 election campaign to kill. He wants to get rid of the GST and cut “several branches of government.” He would also like to see Harper defund the CBC and get out of the banking business by shutting down the Business Development Bank of Canada, Export Development Canada and regional economic development agencies.
“I would just say cut taxes, that is the way I want to help business,” he said.
He said the Conservative party should focus on its roots – free market ideals, social conservative values, a strong national defence policy and the promotion of the monarchy: “Those are the things that we need to hearken to.”
Anders said the longer the Conservatives have governed, the more the party attracted people “who are not into the issues and not into ideology and more into the pay and perks and the title and status that the job conveys.”
Anders’ former leader, Preston Manning, believes some of what he set out to do with the Reform party has been accomplished, from promoting balanced budgets and increasing Western influence in Ottawa to parliamentary reform. But lots of work remains, he said.
He referred to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s decision to run deficits in the wake of the 2008 fiscal crisis as “slippage” but said he still believes the federal government intends to return to the black. The greatest setback, Manning said, is the tightening of party discipline. Manning wanted to give MPs a voice, allow them freer votes in the Commons and promoted referendums as a way of consulting the public.
“Very little progress was made on that front,” he said, over the phone from his office in Calgary.
Yet, he says he is partly to blame.
“When I was running Reform, I gave members much more freedom than they might have had today, but, of course, some abused it and did some silly things that brought down criticism on us,” Manning said. “That’s back in Stephen Harper’s memory, and he lived through those days, and I think that persuades him to be more on the side of stronger control than letting members do as they please.”
Ontario Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth, who identifies with the social conservatives in the party, introduced a motion last year to get a Commons’ committee to study the question of when life begins. Although Woodworth received support from a majority of the caucus, including several cabinet ministers, the prime minister spoke staunchly against his motion.
“If I were the prime minister, even if I didn’t agree with the motion, I probably would have invested less energy into opposing it,” Woodworth told HuffPost from his office in Ottawa. Harper spoke out to quell criticism that he was allowing his MP to reopen the abortion debate.
The Kitchener, Ont., backbencher said he was disappointed with Harper’s reaction, but he wasn’t surprised. MPs in other parties confided that they were also worried about the political backlash of supporting his motion, he said. He wishes journalists would realize that there is nothing wrong with friends’ having “healthy disagreements.”
Original Article
Source: huffingtonpost.ca
Author: Althia Raj
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