the Walnut Diary

Last Friday the Finance Minister’s update created chaos on Parliament Hill.  While journalists waited for a stimulus package to lead worried Canadians into the New Year, what they saw was a series of partisan attacks upon public servants, working women, and the opposition parties.  To compound their amazement, Flaherty predicted a surplus.  T.V. newsmen openly laughed at the math used to produce that set of numbers, but all through the weekend every Tory M.P. interviewed grimly stuck to the party line distributed by Chief of Staff Guy Giorno and condemned opposition bail-out plans “written on the back of an envelope.”

Minds of a historical bent immediately flipped back to the Harris-Eves years in Ontario when the route to a balanced budget lay in selling Highway 407 to an Arab consortium and the Bruce Generating Station to a British utility.  The subsequent mess this crowd made of power generation in Ontario remains, with Walkerton, the enduring legacy of that government.

So Flaherty’s done it again.  As ex-M.P. Garth Turner put it this week in his blog, “He did nothing to create a single job for one Canadian worker.  But he walked us closer to the brink of deficit, started to sell off the furniture, and forced a needless war with his political opponents at a time when the country needs all oars in the water.  http://www.garth.ca/weblog/2008/11/

Then Friday afternoon Stephen Harper waxed indignant because of “a plot to overthrow Canada’s government hatched by the opposition.”  This stand was a little hypocritical for Mr. Harper, unless he somehow forgot a 2004 letter to the Governor General bearing his signature along with those of Layton and Duceppe in which he tried exactly the same tactic against Paul Martin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Harper).

Sunday Harper unveiled a taped phone conversation which suggested that Layton had been hatching this scheme for a long time.  Uh, Steve, that’s what the opposition does, according to the BNA act.  What’s illegal is when you record such a conversation without their knowledge.  That’s a criminal offense.

In his victory speech six weeks ago Harper expressed his hope that this parliament would work smoothly to benefit all Canadians in a time of economic uncertainty.  So why did he attack the right to strike of public servants, block pay equity legislation, and attempt to bankrupt the opposition parties by cutting off the $1.95 per vote public subsidy brought in to replace outlawed corporate sponsorship?

No one else in Ottawa could at a single stroke unify the three opposition parties, women in the work force and the public service of Canada, but Flaherty managed to do it and save $28 million in the process.  This is either hubris or stupidity.  I’m not sure which.

The best minds in the world right now predict a worldwide recession which may well degenerate into another depression as bad as the one in the 1930’s.  The world looks to President-elect Obama as much for his calm and his apparent understanding of the circumstances as for his actions (Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money).

In the face of this we have this pair of buffoons: a personal injury lawyer (Flaherty) and a longtime Imperial Oil employee (Harper), who apparently see a world economic crisis as a great time to score points on their opponents.

Canadians were wise enough to keep Harper and company to a minority.  The way the rules work, if a minority government fouls up — and it’s pretty clear they have — the Governor General is bound to replace the regime with another viable government, if such a coalition can be found.

Ask an auto worker if you’d rather have your interests represented by a bumbling-but-honest Liberal with a hearing problem or by someone who as finance minister publicly announced that “Ontario is the last place to invest.”  The route out of a recession is generally through infrastructure spending, but Flaherty’s position on that one has been, “Cities should stop whining and repair their own crumbling infrastructure.”  Furthermore, he offered that the Feds “are not in the pothole business.”  Flaherty doesn’t sound like the man to assure financial markets.  Oh yeah, there was that flip-flop on income trusts that caused the stock market to dive and even made the U.S. news.  Alberta’s Ralph Klein took Flaherty and Harper to task on that one:  “The only thing a politician has is his word.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Flaherty

If Klein is right, Harper’s on mighty thin ice, indeed.  He promised a fixed term after he defeated Martin, then he broke his own law.  He promised financial accountability until the travel invoices from ministers and their staffs hit the papers.  Flaherty broke Treasury Board rules for so many single-source contracts to cronies that even the Wikipedia online editors despaired of recording them all.

I have already waxed indignant about Harper’s cribbing of speeches from other politicians, so I won’t go back to it here, though at the time I expressed my belief that those who plagiarize eventually have things come apart on them.  Stephen Harper doesn’t appear able to see beyond partisan combat and his own interests.  Canada desperately needs an inclusive leader who can help us through the next few months or years.  Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty proved last week that they are not the men for the job, and they must go.