The summer has had something of everything for the prime minister. He got to play on the world stage as leaders grappled with the noisome problems of Greece, Spain and the entire Eurozone. He seized the opportunity to tell European leaders how they could improve themselves by emulating his government’s wise economic management that has made Canada the strongest performer in the whole free world. The reactions of Angela Merkel and Co. to this helpful advice were not recorded, but gratitude must surely have been one of them.
Down in Mexico, Harper scored a one-on-one with U.S. President Barack Obama and emerged with an invitation to join the negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership. He didn’t even have to beg very much for the invite.
Back home, he exercised his parliamentary majority to do what he had been unable to do with a minority: to get his legislative program approved. The hated firearms registry has been zapped. The Canadian Wheat Board, another ideological irritation to free-enterprise Conservatives, has been stripped of its monopoly. His anti-crime package has been approved; offenders great and small will spend more time in jail, judges will lose their discretion in sentencing, and more prisons will be built. His omnibus budget bill has been jammed through Parliament. Seniors will wait longer for their pensions. The unemployed will find it harder to collect benefits. Companies that build pipelines across environmentally sensitive terrain won’t be hassled as much as by public hearings and other regulatory nuisances.
He exorcised the embarrassing Bev Oda from his cabinet, and he did it without fanning the flames of ambition among backbenchers who are panting for elevation to the privy council. No new ministers were created and he served notice there will be no cabinet shuffle until 2013, when it will be time to rearrange the deck chairs in preparation for the 2015 election. The backbenchers got the message: if they want a promotion next year, they’d better keep quiet and play Harper’s favourite game of follow the leader.
The high point of the summer to date was the Calgary Stampede. The Ontario-raised Harper is not a comfortable westerner. He still looks awkward in cowboy duds; he remains a suit-and-tie guy, not a Stetson-and-boots dude. That doesn’t matter. He has learned how to work his adopted hometown crowd, how to deliver a political potboiler to delight his partisans (meaning just about everyone in Calgary these days).
Harper is no John Diefenbaker on the stump, but his speech to 900 excited Tories at a Stampede barbecue featured some of the rhetorical excess that marked the Chief’s performances. Canada, he declared, is a “great country rising.” It will emerge from the global financial crisis with a balanced budget while other countries are crushed.
“I’m determined that Canada will continue to outperform Europe, the United States and Japan, that we will not fall into the long-term difficulties that those economies are facing,” he said. “…Canada will not slip back the way so many other developed countries are slipping back.”
It was great barbecue fare and the crowd devoured every triumphal morsel.
Almost the only clouds in Harper’s sky this summer are those darned opinion polls that persist in showing the upstart New Democrats running neck-and-neck with the Conservatives, or even slightly ahead. But the next election is more than three years off. Three years is an eternity in politics. Who would have thought three years ago that the New Democrats would be the official Opposition, that the Liberals would be leaderless and on life support, or that Stephen Harper would be leading a majority government and dispensing economic advice to the rest of the world?
Anything can happen, and probably will.
Original Article
Source: the record
Author: Geoffrey Stevens
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