Harper’s credibility has snapped like a dry twig.
May 21, 2013
With yesterday’s insufferable speech to the Conservative caucus Stephen Harper’s credibility has snapped like a dry twig. But can anyone imagine him stepping down for the good of the party?
I watched a bit of Question Period on CPAC. John Baird seemed to have a lot of fun deflecting Opposition attacks on the clearly indefensible subject of Duffygate. Likely he was reciting the Kipling poem If to himself while smiling his way through the single talking point.
After Harper’s weak response to the senate scandal and absence from the House on a critical day, Baird may see his opening.*
How did they dump Margaret Thatcher, anyway?
It just looks as though John Baird, Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair might make for an interesting race in 2015.
UPDATE, May 24, 2013
Maybe Baird isn’t the one. His hilarious slip of tongue has gone viral on You Tube, carrying with it a miasma of other clips which make the guy out to be a bully and a cad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=isxADTDdRBY
Abuse of Power
December 28, 2010
The most upsetting abuse of power that I regularly see from Stephen Harper is his authority to name. It started with his angry reaction to the Dion coalition. Against logic and constitutional law he condemned his opponents as traitors, separatists and socialists, and Canadians by and large bought it.
Then he declared that losers don’t get to lead coalitions, and the media accepted his word on it. His phrase “Canadians don’t care about…” enables him to dismiss concerns which ordinary Canadians in fact do have, but it takes a confrontation with his Stephenness to get an alternative point of view recognized.
I could go on, but my point is that Stephen Harper has managed to become the voice of authority in Canada, and he will be very hard to unseat for that reason. What worries me is how quickly and easily he will convince Canadians that a coalition with Duceppe and the Bloc is a reunification of disparate wings of the Conservative party, should the results of the next election put Harper at a disadvantage.
Like inhabitants of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984, we will doublethink our way into a belief that it was always this way. That, Canadians, is abuse.
January 7th: Sue Riley in The Ottawa Citizen this morning listed the newest perversion of truth to come from the Harper Government. Over the last few weeks in the media it has been well documented that CEOs of companies in Canada make on average 155 times the salary of their entry-level employees. But to justify corporate tax cuts, all Stephen Harper has to do is change their names from fat cats to the new and flashy JOB CREATORS.
Now, magically, Canadians smile upon another Harper initiative to give us hope. Thin gruel indeed for the Tory faithful while this government makes corporations rich at the expense of the very voters who maintain them in power.
January 8th: He just keeps doing it. In an interview with David Akin of Sun Media today Harper spins his government’s foreign policy foul-ups of the last year in a way that had me trying in vain to adjust my bifocals. Didn’t work. Harper’s logic in this interview was “distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction,” to misuse an American master.
He said, “When we, as a country, offer to be part of a international mission to help protect global security then somebody comes along and uses that to try and leverage demands on our domestic airline industry, I don’t think that’s a situation we as a country want to be in,” Harper said. “What this teaches us in future and when we’re looking at other options is: Don’t get in a place where somebody’s going to try and use it to leverage some unrelated issue.”
This, I assume, is meant to justify isolationism: if Dubai, and the whole United Nations, for that matter, doesn’t want to play nice, we’ll just keep to ourselves. Blame the other guys, always. And why not? 30% of Canadian voters will buy it and with that he can form a government because the rest are too put off by politics to care.
January 12th: Newly-minted minister of the environment Peter Kent has redefined the biggest and messiest environmental issue in the country. Kent has taken a page from right-wing gadfly Ezra Levant’s book on the subject and has named the Alberta tar sands with its emissions, animal kills and water quality problems, “ethical oil.” Changing the paradigm from environmental stewardship to a battle between the forces of good and evil renders rational arguments and scientific evidence irrelevant, and seeks to sell Alberta oil to the fearful. This is pretty cheap.
Harper’s hubris
September 26, 2010
Following his party’s defeat in the House of Commons this week, the certainty with which Stephen Harper vowed to hunt down and destroy the Long Gun Registry put me in mind of a quote from Bertrand Russell I saw once on a tractor site: “The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
In the ongoing soap opera on Parliament Hill, no one could accuse Stephen Harper of a comic role. He’s the stuff of tragedy: larger than life, towering above his peers, neither predominantly good nor evil, imbued with a personal vision quite apart from the conventional moral code. It is of this vision I wish to speak.
Over the last year Stephen Harper and his government have declared war on statistics and the more rational forms of record-keeping. Lump sum payments to wounded soldiers suddenly took the place of a rational system of disability pensions for life. So much for supporting our troops, up until then the mantra of the Harper Government, but the system was simple.
The census is the bastion of all rational public administration in Canada. This summer it had its foundation cracked on the laughable premise that no one should go to jail for the failure to fill out a form. No one has ever gone to jail for not filling out a census form. But without believable, objective data, one can only govern by one’s beliefs and impulses, and that seems just fine for Harper and his inner circle.
And the latest battle to destroy the Long Gun Registry took on the context of a rebellion against an oppressive law which criminalized honest gun owners. What madness is this? The strength of the LGR is the set of rules for the possession and storage of firearms it carries with it. Every time I handle ammunition I remember the rule which requires that the shells be locked up in a separate room. This legislated requirement for the careful storage of firearms and ammunition in Canada undoubtedly saves lives because it makes Canadians careful.
Even Jim Flaherty caught the mania. To the annoyance of his audience at the Canadian Club, last week Flaherty read a rip-roaring speech accusing the opposition parties of a lust for power so that they can destroy Canada. It ended with an extended pirate metaphor so corny that it would have had my grade nine students of a decade ago jamming fingers down their necks in protest. This is hardly fit behaviour for a Minister of Finance of a G8 country, but like Tony Clement, Flaherty does what his boss tells him to do.
So what’s going on in Stephen Harper’s head?
Remember two years ago when Harper and Flaherty devoutly promised Canadians that there would be no recession in Canada? Harper even denied the stock market crash, suggesting it would be a good time to pick up some bargains. Yet these same two plan to run on their economic record and expect a good number of Canadians to believe them.
Stockwell Day disregarded statistics which show Canada’s crime rate steadily declining over the last two decades, and justified billions of dollars in prison expenditures with his claim of “unreported crimes.” How do you know there have been crimes if they’re not reported? I guess Stock just believes there must be some, so we need more prisons.
“This madness erects therefore its own foundation, owing nothing to reason. While holding itself high above reason, it makes itself reason’s counterpart. It is through this madness that subjectivity becomes absolutely sovereign, and the ultimate truth of folly is revealed.” Marina Van Zuylen, Monomania: the flight from everyday life in literature and art. Ch. 5
This mania for the subjective over objective evidence is the downfall of Harper and his government. Certainly a world closed in around a few strongly-held beliefs is more comfortable than one where the viewer is exposed to all of the banal, often hopeless confusion which makes up the normal world with its lack of a coherent narrative. If one can subscribe strongly enough to one’s mania, the world can be a comfortable, rewarding place. One can create meaning within the fantasy world, and appear frighteningly confident to an outside observer. But faced with the statistics of a nature “Which is but an inert mass that does not depend in the least upon one’s creative powers when all it does is remind us of our limits, of our fallen condition, of our imminent return to dust,” the fantasy crumbles and the created ego shatters (Van Zuylen).
Look at the sudden departure of former Harper spokesman Kory Teneycke from Sun Media two weeks ago. In combat with author Margaret Atwood, he pushed the delusion to a point beyond which the fantasy could not go, and he cracked.
I can accept a certain fragility in Canada’s prime minister and his or her government, but not at the cost of ignoring the real issues for which we need a parliament to provide leadership. Columnist David Olive offered the following list of critical issues in October of 2008. Have we made any progress?
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healthcare
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the Canadian mission in Afghanistan
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foreign policy generally (Do we have one? What should it be?)
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squalid conditions in Native Canadian communities
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education reform
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immigration reform
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conventional pollution, specifically the proliferating toxic lakes in the Athabasca tar sands, and the continuing disgrace of the Sydney tar ponds
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the infrastructure deficit
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the widening gap between rich and poor
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the flat-lining of middle-class incomes
The Backwoods Rebellion
July 25, 2010
“I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
With the concluding words of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Samuel Clemmons gives voice to a rebellion against the American culture which plays out in extreme form today in the far right of the Republican Party and the current machinations of the Harper Government and Sun Media. The conflict is between the City with its central government and careful record keeping, and the Backwoods, with its romantic individualist, accountable to no one but himself and his small tribe, driven by memories and myths. It’s a revolt of the right brain against the left, the irrational romantic against the rational pragmatist, and it seems as if the Backwoods is on the offensive in Canada at the moment.
Clemmons uses Huck Finn’s willful stupidity to satiric effect throughout the novel. For example there’s the time he sells his fortune in pirate gold to Judge Thatcher for one dollar. The Judge can’t fathom what Huck intends by this, but he does what his client asks. Turns out Huck uses this dodge to get his money out from under the control of his abusive father, Pap. Huck has no real conception of numbers, but he understands Pap’s power to hurt.
If we can assume that Stephen Harper has a copy of Huckleberry Finn on his bedside table, then what can we expect from his government’s Backwoods attitude?
1. Huck sees nothing morally wrong with the fibs and deceptions he uses to pull off his cons. In fact he delights in living by his wits and respects only those whom he cannot deceive or who deceive him.
2. Huck rattles around driven by strong emotions, but he’s not very aware of himself. For example he blames himself for “stealing” Miss Watson’s Jim, and when he does not turn his friend in to the slavers, he decides, “I’ll just have to go to Hell, then.”
3. Huck’s is a world steeped in racism, where a suppressed and poorly-documented underclass does the work.
4. “Life is mighty free and easy on a raft.” Huck and Jim have a great time drifting along the lawless Mississippi, surviving on salvaged items and outright theft.
5. Opponents can be panicked into line through fear. Huck works a smallpox epidemic into immunity from questions to cover their passage on the river.
6. When off the raft Huck defers to his friend Tom Sawyer far too much. Tom’s half-understood schemes lead to grandiose and useless decorations, needless hardship for others, great expense, abused and confused citizens and policemen, and most seriously, the utter objectivization of Jim.
But why am I rambling on about Huck, you ask?
I’m concerned about a couple of things you might have missed this week: the purge at Sun Media and the resignation of Dr. Munir Sheikh.
Sun Media has not only hired Tory Teneycke, Stephen Harper’s former director of communications, but this week they fired six moderate columnists from the newspaper chain. Eric Margolis, Greg Weston, Elizabeth Thompson, Christina Spencer, Peter Zimonjic and Michael Harris have been dumped.
I didn’t often agree with Greg Weston’s views, but they did show some balance. Now he and his colleagues are gone, casualties of a Backwoods rebellion against rational thought.
The Harper Government’s attack on the census has all the marks of a Tom Sawyer scheme gone bad. It fell to Canada’s chief statistician, Dr. Munir Sheikh, to show the world what an honourable man does in the face of this mess of illogic and deceit. His letter of resignation was a resounding “No, it cannot” from the rational part of our society to those who would pervert the census into another organ of Conservative government propaganda.
For the census seems rather like Huck’s dollar. It’s the next step which I fear. If aboriginal peoples, ethnic minorities, immigrants and the poor are well-represented on the census, then government is obliged to provide services for them. If the census becomes less exacting and its data less trustworthy, then it becomes much easier to ignore those at the corners of society.
And Treasury Board President Stockwell Day is looming in the wings with a planned re-examination of affirmative action. That’s like conducting seismic tests in the Arctic to see if the seabed is a good place for a whale sanctuary. There won’t be any whales left by the time they’re done, so they might as well drill for oil as long as they’re there.
Arctic oil exploration is much easier if no one knows or cares about the Inuit. The Backwoods man says, “If they aren’t Conservative supporters, why count them? Let the other parties pay for their own research.” This narrow, tribal attitude seems to pervade Sun newspapers lately, and we are the less for it.
If you believe census data (back to that) we’ll soon face a labour shortage in Canada. Americans make extensive use of migrant laborers. Maybe the plan is to look outside the country for an underclass to do the work. An exacting census would make this kind of two-tier citizenship difficult.
Last one out, turn off the light.
January 8, 2010
Tim Powers, Conservative gadfly and Harper apologist, today challenged the Opposition to contribute t0 a set of rules for prorogation. Here’s one which I posted as a comment on the Globe and Mail blog:
Earlier prorogations were often for as little as one day at the end of a legislative session. How about not leaving Canada without a government for over two months at a critical time? That would be one rule.
Let’s say Canadians would like some say in the imposition of the security measures in airports?
What if there is a major disaster between now and March? Parliament can’t come back in a flash. There is no speaker, even. The whole structure came apart with the act of prorogation.
One man rule, then? Are Canadians prepared to face a crisis with PMO press secretary Dimitri Soudas in charge?
“Last one out, turn off the light!” is not a valid governing principle for my country.
——–
January 8, 2010
The war of words heats up. This morning John Ivison in an article in the National Post (http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2414457)
coined the term herbivores for those individuals expressing dismay on the Internet over the latest prorogation escapade. Call us herbivores if you wish (meaning “cattle”), but our numbers are growing.
John Ivison’s comment may be a story in itself. His fawning profile of Stephen Harper in the National Post was not unexpected. When he called me and others like me “herbivores” because we express our objections online to prorogation, that’s when he crossed the line. No doubt the Harper camp and its adherents view those who oppose their plans as subhuman, but I object to the reference. When those who have seized power view others as objects, can the cattle cars be far behind?
Prorogation: the view from Leeds-Grenville
January 4, 2010
For a column in the Review Mirror Rod Croskery asked candidates in the forthcoming federal election for their views on the recent prorogation of Parliament. At press time responses had arrived from MP Gord Brown and Liberal candidate Marjory Loveys.
MP Gord Brown’s office responded:
Thank you for your email.
On December 30, the Prime Minister announced that the next phase of our Economic Action Plan will be launched, following the Olympic Games, with a Throne Speech on March 3 and a Budget on March 4.
The call for a new Throne Speech to launch the 3rd Session of the current Parliament is routine. The average Parliament comprises three or four sessions (and three or four Throne Speeches) and some Parliaments have had as many as six or seven Throne Speeches.
This is the 105th time in Canada’s history that a new Throne Speech will launch a new session of an existing Parliament.
The economy remains Canadians’ top priority and our top priority and a new Throne Speech allows the government to respond to the country’s economic priorities.
The three economic themes of the new session will be: (1) completing implementation of the Economic Action Plan introduced in the last Session, (2) returning the federal budget to balance once the economy has recovered – which is a priority for Canadians – and (3) building the economy of the future.
As well, the new Parliament allows us to re-introduce important legislation. Since a Bill can not be introduced twice in any Session, a new Session is required to further a government’s mandate.
I trust this answers your questions.
And I hope you and yours had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Mark King
Legislative Assistant
Gord Brown
Member of Parliament
—
Liberal Candidate Majory Loveys:
Rod:
Thanks for the opportunity to comment on the issue of Mr. Harper’s premature prorogation of Parliament.
There are several aspects of Mr. Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament and close it for over two months that have been much discussed already.
First, it will enable the Conservatives to use their new-found majority in the Senate to gain more control of the Senate, including the Senate Committees. However, if this were the only objective there would be no need for a two-month Parliamentary shut-down.
Second, prorogation will delay many bills forcefully promoted by Mr. Harper as urgent and crucial, for example bills to reduce crime. His past bluster can now be seen as just that.
Third, Parliamentary scrutiny of the Afghanistan Detainee issue will cease. There has been much speculation that this was the real motive behind Mr. Harper’s decision, and I agree with this assessment.
However, in my view the impact of the duration of the closure of Parliament deserves more attention.
This two-months-plus closure will render Parliament mute until March. During this time Parliament will be unable to quickly respond to any emergency that arises, and the budget will be written with no input from the general public or our Members of Parliament.
If events create the need for Parliamentary action – for example to deal with a work stoppage that is causing hardship for Canadians – the process of recalling Parliament, electing a Speaker, etc. will slow any response. For this reason past governments have learned to prorogue Parliament just a few days before it is scheduled to be recalled. Mr. Harper did not take this precaution. He clearly does not care if Parliament is Missing In Action for months on end.
More importantly, before each budget Parliamentary Committees normally hear from a broad cross-section of Canadians and debate the ideas they hear. Their advice is given to the Minister of Finance well before the budget is written.
Mr. Harper’s stated intent is to recall Parliament on March 3 and have a budget the very next day.
Given this timetable, our elected MPs will have no opportunity to advise the Minister of Finance on actions to help us deal with the effects of the recession, deal with the deficit or improve our pensions. And the Canadian public will have no opportunity for their voices to be heard and participate in an open and transparent discussion on their proposals.
This means that Mr. Flaherty will hear the opinions of big companies who can hire lobbyists and the select few he invites to his meetings; those without an “in” with the government or big bucks to hire well-connected lobbyists will be shut out.
It is the unnecessary length of time that Parliament will be closed that will impact Canadians the most. It suggests that Mr. Harper is placing his partisan interests in shutting down uncomfortable questions about his decisions on our Afghan mission ahead of the interests of Canadians. Perhaps he even sees not having to listen to the likes of us about budget proposals as an added bonus.
In leaving Parliament unable to quickly respond to emergencies or to listen to the public and debate their concerns about the recession, the deficit and pensions, he is preventing our elected Members of Parliament from doing their work.
I can only conclude that Mr. Harper sees Parliament as an inconvenience rather than an essential voice of the Canadian people.
Note: These articles made their way to the Brockville Recorder and Times in its Friday, Janary 8, 2010 edition.
The new “Conservative”
July 21, 2009
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.
In a delicious bit of irony apparently lost on the Ottawa press corps, Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff inferred Monday that Prime Minister Stephen Harper may have to make up the time lost when he prorogued the House last winter before the Liberals allow summer recess. He didn’t say it in exactly that way, of course.
Instead he showed his disappointment with the wayward Stephen’s most recent economic report, but he chose to return the assignment for revisions before flunking it. Stephen must realize, however, that if he doesn’t do some major work before Friday, he and his party will spend the rest of June in the House until he upgrades his work to a level acceptable to the professor and the Canadians he represents as Leader of the Opposition.
“If the PM has something good to help the jobless, I will support it. I’m prepared to make compromises which will help the unemployed. I’m looking for co-operation, not confrontation, but I’m ready to vote against the estimates on Friday, and yes, the full Liberal Caucus will be present in the House for the vote.”
As well as criticizing the E.I. gap, Ignatieff noted that the current estimate has dropped any mention of a plan to get the Canadian economy out of deficit, and this shows a significant lack of leadership. Further, the spending statements and projections contained in the report failed to provide specific information Canadians need to know.
Ignatieff seems particularly concerned with the current medical isotope crisis. He mentioned that he has spoken to the supplier in Australia. “I asked, ‘O.K., can you scale up here?’ He responded that we can’t guarantee our supply will reach Canada.” “This is a big deal. Tell us honestly what the situation is. This is a very serious failure of leadership by this government and I can’t let this go on longer. This is a public health matter, not partisan politics.”
A journalist asked if Ignatieff would advocate taking funds from infrastructure spending to boost E.I. payments. He responded by saying that on the subject of infrastructure spending, the Harper government leaves the impression of an adolescent with a garden hose spraying a backyard. On the other hand, the numbers in Harper’s own report make it clear that the most effective stimulus spending during the recession has been E.I. payments: they provide immediate and effective help. “If Harper can convince me a large rise in E.I. would cause a big problem of public finance, I’ll listen. But I want to help the unemployed. I’d like to discuss this with the P.M. He knows my phone number. I’d like to work with him on this.”
“I don’t seek an election, but we need accountability and I want some answers. He promised changes in three months in his last report. Now he mentions some plans to look at E.I. in the fall. What counts is getting action to help the unemployed. If he’s got something good to help the unemployed, let’s get it out now, not later, after the seasonal workers have missed the benefits.”
“Any sensible person understands that Canadians want to work. There are 58 regional variations across Canada on E.I. The P.M. won’t get away with saying that in three months he may come back to it.”
Accused of giving Mr. Harper a way out, Ignatieff responded: “We just had an election. I’m just trying to work with the government to make Parliament work. I don’t want him to give in to me, I want solutions that are good for Canadians.
Tory cabinet minister John Baird had spent the quarter hour before Ignatieff’s speech today in front of a CTV camera attempting a pre-emptive strike on the Leader of the Opposition’s credibility by using the word “games” a lot. Ignatieff came back with, “I won’t put a grade on this economic statement. The stakes for Canadians are way too high for that. This is not a game. What Opposition is for is to ask real questions and seek real answers on behalf of Canadians. The big prize here is to make Canadians feel we have a pretty good system of government here which can work for them.”
A CBC commentator concluded, however, with another games metaphor: “The ball’s in Harper’s court.”
Canadians are unlikely to share the pain of parliamentarians if Ignatieff makes them sit through the month of June and even longer while they finish the work of a session cut short by last winter’s prorogation. Serves them right.
Harper takes a page from Obama’s notebook
January 27, 2009
I wrote this as a parody of Obama’s inauguration address and thought I might use it as a column in The Review Mirror. My wife said it was too creepy, so I wrote something else. Then I read the text of Harper’s throne speech. His Obama-write-alike was a bit shorter and a lot less candid.
We are here to mark the continuation of our journey to a majority. This is fitting because it in this city, in the office of the Governor General of Canada, that we took the step to prevent the death of this government. It was here that an oil man from Alberta and a Quebec T.V. host gathered to prorogue parliament and avoid the destiny to which my career seemed doomed.
It was a risky thing, asking the Governor General to prorogue the house. There was no guarantee that she would go along with my request. More than once she asked me if I was crazy, but after a long while she agreed and I found a way to avoid the prospect of defeat.
We had to put it all on the line – our political lives, our fortunes, and our integrity – for our government’s right to do the job that fully 22% of Canadians chose us to do. To govern this country with the set of ideals that continue to light the world. That lower taxes are best. That our lives, liberty and happiness come from laws which protect us from people who are not like us. And that a Conservative government, by and for conservatives, can endure. It was these ideals that led us to close down the House until we had time for our propaganda to work, producing documents and leaks which were imperfect, but over time, with the help of polls, could be made to work.
We are here today not simply to pay tribute to the Finance Minister for his work this fall, but to pick up his work again. The trials we face are very different now, and much more severe than expected. Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast. An economy that is faltering. A coalition prepared to overthrow the government. A war we have no prospect of ending responsibly, a continent turning away from its love for Alberta oil.
And yet while our problems may be new, what is required to overcome them is not. What is required is the same procedural and propaganda tricks which worked to defeat our opponents two times before. What is also required is a new policy, not just in our nation, but in our own lives, to spend, spend, spend like a Liberal, and in so doing to buy as many votes as sixty-four billion dollars can purchase before voters again go to the polls.
That is the reason I called the election in the fall of 2008. I did so in the belief that the time for a majority was slipping out of reach, that the time of the interests of the few would give way to the interests of the many before we could bring it about.
And so I broke my own law. I believed that we can only face the future if we control the vast numbers in Canada who do not believe as we do. Then and only then can we bring back a Canada where oil is king and the lights shine bright only west of Thunder Bay.
This is what I believed, but Mme. Jean, you have made this belief real. You proved once more that a man and his vision for this country can change it. And as I prepare for this session of parliament, I know that I will not be traveling alone. Guy Giorno, Patrick Muttart , Darrell Reid and Jasmine Igneski are with me. Kory Teneyckeare’s propaganda machine grinds merrily along even as I speak, and Don Cherry can be counted upon to pour out his heart each Saturday night on CBC.
Theirs are the voices I will carry with me every day in the PMO. Theirs are the strategies I will be thinking of when I deliver the changes you elected me to make.
When affordable health care fades from the memory of Canadians, I’ll think back to the massive deficit of this budget and how it gave me the justification to sell off health care to the private sector.
When we extend the Canadian Mission to Afghanistan for another five years to protect the Auto Pact, I’ll think of my visits to the troops for photo ops, and how they gave me the boost to win two successive minority governments.
These are the stories that will comfort me in the days ahead. They are different stories, told by men and women whose journeys may seem separate, yet you showed me time and again that no matter where we come from or what party we vote for, we are a common people of soaring hopes and fearful dreams and quiet greed, who ask only for what was promised us as Canadians: cheap fuel, good hockey, and a lottery win to let us retire.
I recognize that the coalition is an enormous challenge which must be solved quickly. If we can survive as a government for the next week, we should be fine.
But we should never forget that we are the heirs of that first band of patriots, Ronald Reagan, David Frumm, Mike Harris, George W. Bush, who refused to give up when liberalism seemed unstoppable, and who somehow believed that they could make the world just like it was, before Trudeau.
For the Common Sense Revolution did not end when Mike retired. It was never something to be won only on an electoral battleground or fulfilled only in our budget documents. It was not simply a struggle to break free from the evil Liberal empire and declare a Tory Canada. The Common Sense Revolution was — and remains – an ongoing struggle for the minds and hearts of the voters to live up to our founding creed of small government, lower taxes, and no same-sex marriages.
Let’s build this government that is responsible to its founders: Imperial Oil, Suncor Energy, Matco Investments, The Royal Bank of Canada, CTV, The National Post and the Canada West Foundation. Let’s all of us do our part to rebuild the status of Alberta Oil and the National Post as the foundation of this country.
Let’s all of us do our part to rebuild this country. Let’s make this deficit not the end of Tory frugality, but rather a brief interval in which we buy enough votes to ensure a majority in two years. Join me in this effort, and let’s seek a better world with a balanced budget and lower taxes in two years’ time. Thank you.
the Walnut Diary 