All of my problems with Stephen Harper stem from the fact that he's essentially a Liberal. There's virtually no problem that he doesn't see the government somehow fixing.And he spends money like there's no tomorrow. You can argue that perhaps he should in the face of the Great Panic of Ought-Eight, but he was on a spending spree long before everything went to shit. He spent billions of dollars trying to win a majority over three of the weakest leaders the Liberal Party of Canada could find, and he failed spectacularly. The fact that the Grits are so pathetic is the only reason that Harper has a job at all.
Oh, and I'm going to strangle the next person who tells me that Harper's a trained economist. You certainly wouldn't know it from his tax policies.
During the 2005 campaign, Harper promised to cut Canada's hated Goods and Services tax from 7% to 5%, which voters loved because voters are idiots. Predictably, cutting the consumption tax only gutted government revenues while doing nothing to spur economic growth. When the world started ending 13 months ago, all the money was gone and Canada started running a pretty spectacular deficit. Granted, it's nothing like the Bush-Obama deficits, but Americans haven't been connected to reality for years.
Harper, being a better than average politician, can even see the bright side in this. He spent this week running across the country and arguing that this is a great time to go into debt, since interest rates are practically zero. His argument presupposes that there's somehow a virtue in going into low-interest debt and ignores that he pissed away a $13 billion surplus when everyone was farting through silk.
Stephen Harper is Dalton McGuinty, and the Liberals are powerless against that because, well, Stephen Harper is Dalton McGuinty.
Virtually every dumb thing that Harper has done, McGuinty has done, too. Only more so. Any sleazy or incompetent act you can pin on Harper, McGuinty actually invented, which makes it hard for Ignatieff to attack. I don't mean to suggest that Iggy won't try, because he and everyone around him is chronically dishonest.
Did Harper piss away a ton of money on nothing? Sure, but he's hardly wasted eHealth Ontario levels of money, rewarding scumbag lobbyists and consultants. The McGuinty government has actually been burning big piles of money, just for the hell of it.
Want to talk deficits? This week Queen's Park announced that they're projecting a truly staggering deficit of $24 billion. To put that number in context, the biggest deficit in Ontario history before this week was half that. In light of this, Ontario's credit rating was immediately downgraded.
Worse, the McGuinty Liberals aren't even pretending to think of an exit strategy to this mess. Harper and Ignatieff are lying their asses off, but McGuinty can't even be bothered to do that.
Then there's sales tax harmonization. Ignatieff, being a fool, thought that he could gain some traction running against the merging of federal and provincial sales taxes in Ontario and British Columbia, forgetting that Ontario and British Columbia have Liberal governments. Thus far, McGuinty and Gordon Campbell have taken the hit for the HST debacle. Ignatieff making an issue of it wasn't helping them or himself.
Since Ignatieff is practically a foreigner and has surrounded himself with amateur hacks, maybe they need to be told that pissing in the gears of the Liberal machines in Toronto and Victoria isn't a particularly wise move with an election looming. You might need those folks to knock on doors and raise money in the very near future.
Oh, and tax harmonization was a policy created by the Liberal government of Jean Chretien. Annoying Chretien is rarely a good idea. Ask Paul Martin.
Michael Ignatieff's alleged "communications team" spent this week trying to spin the idea that Harper was only spending stimulus money on Conservative ridings, particularly in Ontario. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was true, but a rather surprising figure is telling me that it isn't.
That would be George Smitherman, Ontario's Liberal deputy premier and minister of infrastructure, is saying that the Conservatives in Ottawa a playing everything straight. That leaves the Iggy's so-called strategists to argue that Smitherman is lying, stupid, or both.
Firstly, those morons are creating problems between Parliament Hill and Queen's Park. The latter would very much like to continue getting stimulus money from the former. If said spending is seen as overly political, the fear is that Harper could either suspend or redirect it and blame it on the Liberals.
Secondly, George would very much like to be elected mayor of Toronto next year, and having Ignatieff's "crack team" saying in public that he's lying, stupid or both sort of fucks with that. Furthermore, Smitherman knows that at least one of Iggy's stooges has publicly committed himself to his rival, the erstwhile Ontario PC leader John Tory. He did so on his stupid blog.
George Smitherman is enormously powerful in Ontario, while Michael Ignatieff and his people are only slightly more influential than I am. A third of the federal Liberals' seats are in Toronto, and there almost certainly won't be a federal election before Smitherman declares for mayor on January 3.
The one thing that Furious George has going for him that John Tory doesn't is a good working relationship with Harper's government. That's a pretty strong selling point in a mayoral campaign that I don't he's willing to throw away for a federal Liberal with senior people already committed to Tory. That's doubly true when the Ignatieff strategy is increasingly making Stephane Dion look like William the Conqueror. At least Dion never had a single poll showing him behind Harper in Toronto. Iggy does.
Why is this important? Well, the next federal election is going to fought in Ontario, and to a much lesser extent, British Columbia. When people in those two provinces listen to the attacks on Harper by Iggy and the Stooges, they might start thinking "Hey, that sounds awfully familiar."
George Smitherman is almost certainly going to run for mayor next November and McGuinty is up for reelection the November after that. I assume that both would prefer winning to losing, and having a congenital loser like Michael Ignatieff highlighting their failures by tying them to Harper in the public mind isn't helpful.
I'd be amazed if Smitherman doesn't come out of the gate in January ready to rip the face off of the first federal Liberal he sees, which will be funny in the run-up to a federal election in the spring.
As for Dalton, I suspect he knows a little bit about Ontario's voting history. When there's a federal government of one party, we tend to vote for the competition provincially. It's our own version of the American concept of separation of powers. If the federal Liberals win in 2010, it makes his reelection in 2011 that much harder.
Because he's actually retarded, Michael Ignatieff is attacking his provincial counterparts in Ontario and BC when he attacks Harper. Being in opposition means that you aren't responsible for anything, but Dalton McGuinty and Gordon Campbell aren't in opposition. If Ignatieff stands any chance at all of not being raped in public by Harper, he needs the provincial Liberal machines. They have get out the vote operations and he doesn't.
If Iggy was smart, he would spend the winter deciding what he actually believes, and run on that. His senior advisers are worthless, having only run campaigns where their opponents have blown themselves up. I can pretty safely say that Stephen Harper isn't going to do that. Shit, half of them were in his 2006 leadership campaign, which was humiliated by the likes of Stephane Dion.
To beat Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff is going to have to ignore him. In reducing the relevance of the prime minister, he reduces the prime minister as a candidate. If the Liberals want to run on Harper's record, they're going to lose and make enemies in the provincial parties that they can't afford.
But that means putting out a platform and talking about it relentlessly, while ignoring the Tories. That's inherently risky, which is why Ignatieff isn't going to do it. He might be the most risk-averse leader the Liberals have ever had, and he's surrounded himself with an inexperienced and brain-damaged political staff. And that's why he's going to get murdered if he's not actually lying about an Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition.
But I don't expect Dalton McGuinty and George Smitherman to go down with him voluntarily.
Welcome aboard, Jay Currie readers! Please note that there are no vulva references in this post. My family couldn't be more proud!
... And Big Ups to the Free Dominion folks. Don't worry, you'll learn to hate me soon enough.
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