{"id":13372,"date":"2012-02-03T11:06:26","date_gmt":"2012-02-03T16:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13372"},"modified":"2012-02-03T11:06:26","modified_gmt":"2012-02-03T16:06:26","slug":"paul-wells-harper-and-the-tories-acted-like-trust-fund-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/02\/03\/paul-wells-harper-and-the-tories-acted-like-trust-fund-kids\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Wells: Harper and the Tories acted like “trust fund kids”"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting column at Maclean’s<\/em><\/a> this week, where Paul Wells recasts Stephen Harper’s recent speech at Davos as autobiographical confession:<\/p>\n

\n

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. \u201cThese were like kids in a candy store who had all this allowance. \u2018Wow, we can do all this stuff?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t take my nameless source\u2019s name for it. Take Jim Flaherty\u2019s. His first budget speech, in 2006, carried the title \u201cFocusing on Priorities.\u201d And what did he describe as priorities? In order: \u201cProviding immediate and substantial tax relief,\u201d he said. \u201cEncouraging the skilled trades.\u201d \u201cFamilies and communities.\u201d \u201cInvesting in infrastructure.\u201d \u201cSecurity.\u201d \u201cAccountability.\u201d \u201cExpenditure management.\u201d \u201cRestoring fiscal balance for our Canadian federation.\u201d And right down there at the bottom, \u201cprosperity.\u201d So you can\u2019t say it wasn\u2019t the No. 1 priority. It\u2019s right there in ninth place.<\/p>\n

In Flaherty\u2019s 2007 budget speech, the word \u201cgrowth\u201d appeared once.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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 \u201cthe good, growth-oriented policies. The right, often tough choices.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,84],"tags":[697,71,770,258],"class_list":["post-13372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-government","tag-budget","tag-debt","tag-paulmartin","tag-stephenharper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3tG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13373,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13372\/revisions\/13373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}