Only Nixon could go to China. And only Paul Martin could slay Canada’s multi-billion-dollar deficit in the 1990s and emerge a political superstar, albeit temporarily, as a result.
Therein lies the tricky political calculus faced by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and the rest of the Conservative cabinet, as they lay the table for Budget 2012, now expected to be brought down in late March or early April. The delay – federal budgets are typically presented in late February or early March – has been attributed the sheer complexity of determining how deep the cuts will be, and where they will fall.
Here’s another theory: Having been mule-kicked by a public backlash over Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ disastrous handling of Bill C-30, the so-called online snooping bill, and now embroiled in a burgeoning scandal over fraudulent phone calls made during the last federal election, the government needs daylight between this and any future controversy – including blowback over budget measures that will be harsher than anything we’ve seen since the Conservatives took power in 2006.
Only Nixon, an avowed red baiter and sworn enemy of Communists everywhere, could get away politically with shaking hands with Chairman Mao, which he did on a vist to China in 1972. And only Martin, a Liberal social reformer who waxed effusive about all the wonderful things government could achieve, could gut federal departments and slash transfer payments to the provinces, as the former finance minister did in his deficit-slaying budget of 1995. Had he seemed to relish the task, he never would have gotten away with it, let alone been praised for it.
Extend the logic to Harper: Only a government that wields its tough love, “more in sadness than in anger,” can be absolved politically for the hardships it imposes —whether that be thousands of lost civil-service jobs, an older retirement age or a curtailed CBC. Yet that’s what cuts of between five and ten per cent, more in some departments, necessarily entail. It would be one thing for Liberals, who never met a big government program they didn’t love, to make such cuts. It’s another entirely for Conservatives to do so.
Like many horribly damaging political mistakes, the Toews backlash hit the government unawares, like a truck broadsiding a car.
The initial error—Toews’ now-immortal slam against his critics (he can either stand with us or with the child pornographers) was compounded by a half-hearted apology, then by a quixotic and self-pitying letter to constituents, then by his bizarre admission that he hadn’t closely read his own legislation. All of that has been a train wreck for Toews personally and politically.
But the broader damage, to the government, is more significant. For Toews’ resorting to stiff-arm, hyper-partisan tactics fits into the one narrative that has been most damaging to Stephen Harper, since before he became prime minister. That is, that he is a bully with dictatorial leanings, who presides over a cabinet of bullies, who shove their way to victory when persuasion doesn’t work.
There could therefore not be a worse poster child for the Harper government, as it prepares to deliver a harsh, belt-tightening budget, than Toews. Yet he is now the minister top of mind. The Robocalls story—fraudulent campaign phone calls, traced to a firm that worked for the Conservative Party across Canada, including in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s own riding of Calgary Southwest—further reinforces the narrative that the Conservatives will do anything to win.
That story, broken Wednesday by my colleagues Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor, will provide opposition fodder for weeks to come.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Michael Den Tandt
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