the Walnut Diary

James Travers’s column in today’s Toronto Star bemoans the loss of civility in parliament, laying the blame squarely at the feet of Stephen Harper and the CPC. I keep thinking of Swift’s Liliputians when I watch Harper at work. Here’s a rope-balancer who isn’t very good at it. He keeps letting someone else have the centre and then has to squawk and flap his arms like crazy to keep from falling, first to the left and then to the right. Ignatieff has planted himself more or less in the centre, so the increasingly strident Harper has to struggle on the margins.

Then Stephen Chase of  the Globe and Mail has an article on Harper’s announcement that the deficit will continue if growth does not eliminate it, even if it takes ten years, as most economists predict, to get over the current $17 billion/year drain (July 21, Ottawa likely stuck with deficits for a decade:  economist).

Funny, when Bob Rae ran a deficit like that in Ontario back in the nineties, he became a pariah, labelled variously a communist, an idiot, a fool, a traitor to his class.  Most tellingly, public employees revised the calendar to include the Rae-day, an ironic tribute to his leadership, and the NDP has never recovered.

So when a man leading a party which attempts to call itself “Conservative” adopts the same strategy, do these labels no longer apply?  To be a “Conservative” do you have to act like George Bush and ignore the facts, using reckless spending and relentless tax cuts to shore up personal popularity until the country is bankrupt?

Where I grew up a conservative spent what he earned and saved a bit for tomorrow.  He shared with his neighbours and cared for the needy.  He had no thought of helping a few friends get rich so he could eat at their tables later.  Not everybody agreed with the conservative, but they respected him.