Nonsense. In a democracy, we all are or none of us is.
The current prime minister has offered a lot of reasons why people should vote for him.
First there was honesty, accountability, and cleaning up government.
That didn’t go so well, so next came the pipeline economy. Everything will be fine if only we drop the maple leaf and put a barrel of oil on our flag.
But is that really such a good thing?
The province that has most of the stuff is racking up debt at the rate of $11 million a day, and is in hock for $7.8 billion. In 2004, Ralph Klein held up a “Paid Off” sign and Alberta was debt free. Where is all the dough going? Why is Norway’s sovereign fund worth a trillion dollars and Alberta’s just $8.9 billion after subtracting the province’s $7.8 billion deficit?
Added to the pipeline mythology, Harper added the boast about fiscal management and having the best finance minister in the world.
With Jim Flaherty missing most of his projections over the years and now giving a mule kick to his colleagues on the Conservative promise of income-splitting, doubts are beginning to creep in. The provincial premiers, who greeted Flaherty’s latest budget with catcalls, got the dismissive backhander from Wee Jimmy; they could raise their own taxes, the whining little weasels.
Then came balancing the budget, that quest for fiscal Nirvana achieved by stiffing the provinces on transfers and cutting the promised benefits to a lot of vulnerable Canadians, including veterans. No wonder rumour has it that Julian Fantino wants to be Ambassador to the Vatican. In Rome you get absolution for your sins; in Harper’s Ottawa, a trip under the bus.
And now Harper has come up with yet another way to lure your support. According to a leaked election strategy paper, the PM’s new pitch is, ‘vote for me, I’ve got a nice wife’. He does.
Regardless of the changing reasons, he still likes to say that he is the only person qualified to run the country. If you are into anti-social misanthropes, or hard-back partisans, he might be right.
Justin Trudeau might or might not make a good prime minister. But the fact is he has more experience in the real world of regular people than Stephen Harper ever had before putting the country in a jar and tightening the lid.
Compared to Harper, Trudeau is also curiously non-partisan. He told me, “I don’t so much care about living under the right political party as the right values.”
Trudeau was a teacher and both the beneficiary and prisoner of a famous name. He was exposed to the wide world of his father and mother and all that it contained; travel, brilliant minds, education, cosmopolitan horizons, dizzying ups, crushing downs, anonymous hatred, anonymous love, and of course politics.
Stephen Harper was a university drop-out from suburbia who became an office boy in an oil company out west, and then a student again.
Armed with his degree in Economics, Harper moved straight into politics as peach fuzz policy advisor to the newly minted and cash-short Reform Party. He got the job because he was smart and right-wing, but also because he was a cheap hire. And there, in different forms, Stephen Harper has remained for the rest of his working life.
Advisor, office assistant to Deborah Grey, MP, marketer-in-chief of the National Citizens Coalition, MP again, party leader, opposition leader and ultimately prime minister. It is the one thing Stephen Harper shares with Joe Clark; the only job he has ever had is politics. He is the last person who should be dissing anyone for inexperience.
Besides, a lot of the “experience” Harper has acquired along the way is dubious.
Preston Manning hired him out of school, and was repaid by having his acolyte denounce him for a secret party supplement to the leader’s salary. A ticket to Hawaii was purchased for Sandra Manning so that she could see her husband for a brief holiday before the travelling party leader got back on the road. Manning was personally responsible for 50 per cent of party fundraising. Harper was incensed. Manning looks back on that episode as the most hurtful thing in his political career.
Progressive Conservative MP Jim Hawkes hired young Stephen as an assistant, and Harper ended up taking his seat from him with the help of the NCC.
Tom Flanagan played Rasputin in Harper’s rise to power and was cast into the outer darkness for writing a book about it. (The book was even vetted by Ian Brodie, the PM’s former chief-of-staff, but Harper still found something to feel aggrieved over.)
Peter MacKay “merged” the party of Macdonald (and his own father) with Harper’s Canadian Alliance. Ten years later, Senator Janis Johnson is the last Red Tory left standing in Ottawa now that Hugh Segal has blown town. As for MacKay, he is a hollow man except for the ambition. It was not a merger he participated in; the PC’s were simply swallowed whole by Stephen Harper.
So it is both absurd and dishonest of Harper to dismiss Justin Trudeau as too inexperienced to be prime minister. It’s just one more tired marketing ploy that the NCC’s former billboard designer hopes will stick. No thoughts, just slogans.
Consider this. If Justin Trudeau is so completely unequipped to run the country, so woefully inexperienced, why is Stephen Harper training his hate-machine exclusively on such an incompetent rival?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep an eye on Grizzly Adams over in the NDP, if only because Thomas Mulcair has loads of experience and consistently makes mince-meat out of Harper in Question Period?
So why does the prime minister fear Justin Trudeau and ignore Mulcair? The answer comes down to something known as emotional intelligence, and a little of what political consultants call “likeability”.
Harper has zero emotional intelligence, and the likeability of a nerd with a dark side.
Mulcair is likeable and on the rise in that department, and much more attuned to people than Harper. But the quicksilver temper holds him back, fanning a faint suspicion that he might have days when you could mistake him for Harper.
Trudeau’s high emotional intelligence even oozed from his Valentine’s card – he was flirting with the whole country. He is as likeable as a movie star who strayed into the 7/11 store of politics. The man likes human beings. People get the feeling he’s not a sneak. It’s why they light up when Trudeau enters a room and clam up when Harper does. And he’s no silver spoon sissy – just ask Frank Magazine’s ex-newshound.
Trudeau’s handlers, unlike Harper’s, don’t have to control the venue and the crowd to get a good reception. No one has to hold up applause signs. Nobody is asked to leave the meeting because they were seen at a rival party event.
Wherever he goes, Justin Trudeau stops people in their tracks. They want to talk to him or get their picture taken with him. That natural ability to connect with people is probably the last thing that our robo- politics, in which elections are pulled off rather than won, can’t touch; you can’t buy likeability at Hill & Knowlton.
Once upon a time, people thought of political parties as essentially distinct, almost with a heart and a soul, so deep-rooted were the philosophies on which they stood.
Back in 1789, delegates to the French Assembly took their seats according to their view of the society of the day. Those who wanted to preserve it sat on the right; those who favoured change, sat on the left. As Jonathan Haidt wrote in prize-winning bestseller The Righteous Mind, “The terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since.”
Harper’s political worldview, pinched by inexperience and poisoned by partisanship, is Right or Left in every sense of the word. Anything run by him, country, company, or bingo game will be dominated by division and conflict.
The PM seems to sense that Trudeau’s outlook doesn’t come from 1789, and that worries him. He knows that in 2015, people might be ready to exchange the narrow, angry world of the Conservatives for something that looks more like a country again. Dialogue in place of anger, maybe even as much as mutual respect and understanding. Not a bad trade, that.
What is politics for most people but the innocent search for a salesman of hope?
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