{"id":7395,"date":"2011-01-25T12:14:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-25T16:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=7395"},"modified":"2011-12-13T10:36:18","modified_gmt":"2011-12-13T15:36:18","slug":"margaret-wente-harper-has-found-the-sweet-spot-in-canadian-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/01\/25\/margaret-wente-harper-has-found-the-sweet-spot-in-canadian-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Wente: Harper has found the “sweet spot” in Canadian politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Margaret Wente<\/a> is sympathetic to her Liberal friends:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019ve been feeling kind of sorry for my liberal friends. They can\u2019t stand Stephen Harper. They wince when they hear his name. And yet, in spite of his disagreeable personality, his grip on power is stronger than ever. He has lasted an improbable five years. He has run the longest minority government in Canada\u2019s history and held office longer than Lester Pearson. Aaargh!<\/p>\n

On the radio Monday, a Liberal academic was explaining just what makes Mr. Harper so despicable. He\u2019s been stealing Liberal policies! Now that\u2019s dirty. Everyone was certain he would move the country to the right. Instead, he moved the party to the left. He racked up stimulus deficits by the billions and expanded the size of government. He pleased the people by handing them deductions for their kids\u2019 hockey gear. He even quashed an unpopular foreign takeover — only the second veto of a foreign bid in 25 years. The Financial Post<\/em> went nuts. Who does this guy think he is — Maude Barlow?<\/p>\n

Put another way, for everyone who\u2019s attacking Mr. Harper for being too conservative, someone else is attacking him for not being conservative enough. In politics, this is known as \u201cfinding the sweet spot.\u201d Both the Liberals and the right-wing National Citizens\u2019 Coalition, which he used to head, are accusing him of reckless spending. Even Peter Mansbridge challenged him for failing to live up to his small-c conservative ideals. (I wonder how the conversation would have gone if Mr. Harper had slashed the CBC.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Wente may well be right, but I wonder how long Harper can keep the small-c conservatives happy while he does a very credible imitation of Paul Martin’s Liberal government. They wanted a change, but this is a change in labels, not in actual policies.<\/p>\n

To be fair, Harper has<\/em> been able to provide a more distinctive foreign policy than Martin would have done: his outspoken support for Israel is more than enough to set him apart from his Liberal predecessor. On domestic issues? The difference is much more in tone than in substance. On some issues, Michael Ignatieff is running to the right of Harper<\/em>, which unnerves his own party no end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Margaret Wente is sympathetic to her Liberal friends: I\u2019ve been feeling kind of sorry for my liberal friends. They can\u2019t stand Stephen Harper. They wince when they hear his name. And yet, in spite of his disagreeable personality, his grip on power is stronger than ever. He has lasted an improbable five years. He has […]<\/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":[6,28,53],"tags":[431,71,458,770,266,258,379],"class_list":["post-7395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-media","category-politics","tag-conservatism","tag-debt","tag-parliament","tag-paulmartin","tag-protectionism","tag-stephenharper","tag-stimulus"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1Vh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7395","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=7395"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12556,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7395\/revisions\/12556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}