We’ve been hearing about Stephen Harper’s “hidden agenda” for nearly a decade and it’s about time for some of it to finally come to light — what’s the point of having a hidden agenda if you never actually implement any of it? Andrew Coyne thinks he’s detected the real thing:
It is becoming more difficult to accuse this government of having a hidden agenda. Not because it hasn’t tried, mind you. But while it remains as obtuse as ever about its intentions, the signs of an agenda are by now unmistakable. Where before it had attitudes, or at best stances, it is beginning to sprout what look remarkably like policies.
To be sure, they are modest, even piecemeal. They are often poorly communicated, where the Conservatives deign to communicate them at all. More often they are simply dropped on the unsuspecting public without consultation, or jammed through Parliament with little debate or scrutiny, quite apart from monstrosities like the omnibus bill.
But put them together and they have all the markings of an agenda:
- Reform of Old Age Security, not only raising the age of eligibility by two years (starting in 2023, and phased in over six years) but offering higher benefits to those willing to keep working past the standard retirement age.
- Free trade agreements, now being negotiated with virtually everything that moves: Europe, India, Japan, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the ASEAN group.
- Reform of immigration policy, across every category: skilled immigrants, refugees, investors, entrepreneurs, with an emphasis on recruiting immigrants with demonstrable economic prospects.
- Reform of employment insurance, announced this week, to give repeat users, in particular, fewer excuses to refuse available work.
- Moreover, the government is at last beginning to implement the Red Wilson report on productivity, four years after it was delivered, with recent reforms opening the door to foreign takeovers in the telecommunications sector (for companies with less than 10% of the market), and raising the threshold asset value for automatic review of foreign takeovers to $1-billion.
