An interesting column at Maclean’s this week, where Paul Wells recasts Stephen Harper’s recent speech at Davos as autobiographical confession:
This passage should be read as thinly veiled autobiography and confession. This week a former senior public servant told me that when the Conservatives came to power in 2006, they inherited structural surpluses, booming oil prices and shrinking public debt, and they acted the way trust-fund kids do. “These were like kids in a candy store who had all this allowance. ‘Wow, we can do all this stuff?’ ”
But don’t take my nameless source’s name for it. Take Jim Flaherty’s. His first budget speech, in 2006, carried the title “Focusing on Priorities.” And what did he describe as priorities? In order: “Providing immediate and substantial tax relief,” he said. “Encouraging the skilled trades.” “Families and communities.” “Investing in infrastructure.” “Security.” “Accountability.” “Expenditure management.” “Restoring fiscal balance for our Canadian federation.” And right down there at the bottom, “prosperity.” So you can’t say it wasn’t the No. 1 priority. It’s right there in ninth place.
In Flaherty’s 2007 budget speech, the word “growth” appeared once.
But sometimes the world changes and the trust fund goes bust. For Harper, that happened in the first week of December 2008, when he had to fight like a street gang to keep the job he thought he’d just been re-elected to. So much changed after that. He won in 2011 by running on the economy after years of running away from it. And now here he was in Davos to tell everyone about “the good, growth-oriented policies. The right, often tough choices.”
Flaherty is my local MP, so I’m well acquainted with his habit of talking like a conservative, but running the finance ministry like one of Pierre Trudeau’s acolytes. It must really be galling him that he has to act like a grown-up for the coming budget. As I’ve said more than once, if you factor out the military and foreign affairs aspects, there were few things that Harper did that wouldn’t have been done just as readily by Paul Martin. And I mean Martin as PM, not in his more successful guise as minister of finance.
Sad but true. Funny that the left keeps screeching about our “far right” / “neo-conservative” / “republican” (insert your own conservative pejorative here) government, but what we have is Liberal right, verses Liberal left.
I support the CPC by virtue of the fact that there is no real right alternative to vote for. I voted PC until I voted Reform, when they started up. I would vote for a real conservative party if we had one, but it is what it is. Pragmatically speaking, better Liberal right than Liberal left, and so much better than Loony Left and Loony Watermelon left.
Comment by Dwayne — February 3, 2012 @ 22:16
Long before he became prime minister, I met Stephen Harper. He seemed to me to be a pretty good fellow — not quite libertarian, but with good instincts on the economic side (and not obviously weighed down with religious baggage). The man who became PM doesn’t much resemble good ol’ Steve.
Comment by Nicholas — February 5, 2012 @ 01:16