By Klaus Rohrich
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Recent polls confirm that virtually all Canadian politicians are clueless as to what the country's voters are actually looking for. Perhaps the most clueless of all is Stephen Harper, whose recent shift to the left (or as the former mainstream media calls it, the centre) has resulted in his numbers plummeting. While this could be seen as good news for and by Canada's three other political parties, it hardly qualifies since their numbers are also in a nosedive.
I've often wondered why it is that Canadian politics takes on a one-size-fits-all persona when it comes to whatever party is in power, as there doesn't appear to be a great deal of philosophical difference between the Conservatives of today and the Liberals of last year, even though the Conservatives campaigned and won a minority based on a platform of traditional conservative principles. Yet once they took office and noticed that things weren't going too badly, they immediately backtracked and shifted positions to what can only be described as Liberal policies.
Rather than broad-based tax cuts that have resulted in an overall improvement in the economy of other jurisdictions, Harper is giving back 1% on the GST, which will do little if anything to stimulate economic activity. The other items that were defined as "tax cuts" by Harper's finance minister, Jim Flaherty, amount to nothing more than tax credits to selected taxpayers, provided they engaged in the social engineering exercises to which those tax credits are attached.
While the dismantling of the shamefully wasteful and totally ineffective gun registry was one of the mainstays of the Harper election platform, it's clear that there are no concrete plans afoot to dismantle that white elephant.
As for reducing government spending, the "new" government's first budget had the largest spending increase in the history of Canada. In addition, despite election promises to reduce the size of government, the Harper government is growing in leaps and bounds, as they attempt to cash in on the climate change hysteria by hiring hundreds of new functionaries to enforce the climate change legislation that's about to descend on the country's unassuming head.
It doesn't take a PhD in political science to ascertain that the country is in a foul mood and no one trusts politicians any longer. Harper's honeymoon was short, not because he was "scary" or had a "hidden agenda". It was short because he punked out on everything. He bribed Quebec with "nation" status and cash; he turned his back on his base and began wooing the lunatic fringe left with policies that sounded like they came straight from the Liberals' play book.
The Ottawa punditocracy refers to Harper as "icy" or "distant" and cites that as his main character flaw and blames his slide in the polls on those traits. Frankly, I think I speak for most Canadians in saying that I could care less how many babies Stephen Harper has kissed. I care about the man's policies. Most of his base supported him because of those policies. For him to now abandon them in search of a larger voter base with leftist legislation leaves me cold. If I, and I presume most voters that supported the Conservatives, had wanted Liberal policies, we would have supported Paul Martin, ineffectual though he was, at least you could predict what his programs were going to be.
Steve Harper is in freefall because he has betrayed his base. Like Humpty-Dumpy of storybook fame, when his freefall ends with a "splat", it'll be back to the drawing board for the Conservatives and it serves them right!
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