Stop the presses!

[Fransisco]

How bad is it for the Liberals?

You know it's bad when the <b>Globe and Mail endorses STEPEHEN HARPER!</b>

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/the-globes-election-endorsement-facing-up-to-our-challenges/article2001610/

<b>The Globe’s election endorsement: Facing up to our challenges</b>

We are nearing the end of an unremarkable and disappointing election campaign, marked by petty scandals, policy convergences and a dearth of serious debate. Canadians deserved better. We were not presented with an opportunity to vote for something bigger and bolder, nor has there been an honest recognition of the most critical issues that lie ahead: a volatile economy, ballooning public debts and the unwieldy future of our health-care system.

The challenges facing our next federal government do not end there, of course. The next House of Commons must find new ways to protect Parliament, the heart of our democracy. It needs to reform its troubled equalization program without straining national unity. Relations with the U.S. are at a critical juncture. Any thickening of the border threatens to punish all Canadians, while negotiations over perimeter security have implications for national sovereignty and economic security. Wars in Libya and Afghanistan, climate change, Canada's role in the world, the rapid and exciting change of the country's ethnic and cultural makeup – the list is great, as is the need for strong leadership in Ottawa.

Whom should Canadians turn to?

The Liberal Party's Michael Ignatieff has been an honourable opposition leader; he has risen above the personal attacks launched by the Conservatives, he has stood up for Parliament, and he has fought hard in this election. <b>But his campaign failed to show how the Conservative government has failed, and why he and the Liberals are a preferred alternative.</b>

Jack Layton has energized the New Democrats and the electorate, and seems more able than the other leaders to connect with ordinary people. He has succeeded in putting a benign gloss on his party's free-spending policies, <b>but those policies remain unrealistic and unaffordable, at a time when the country needs to better manage public spending, not inflate it.</b> He has shown that a federalist party can make serious inroads in Quebec, but it has come at the cost of an unwelcome promise to impose provisions of Quebec's language law in federal workplaces.

<b>Only Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have shown the leadership, the bullheadedness (let's call it what it is) and the discipline this country needs. He has built the Conservatives into arguably the only truly national party, and during his five years in office has demonstrated strength of character, resolve and a desire to reform. Canadians take Mr. Harper's successful stewardship of the economy for granted, which is high praise. He has not been the scary character portrayed by the opposition; with some exceptions, his government has been moderate and pragmatic.</b>

Mr. Harper could achieve a great deal more if he would relax his grip on Parliament, its independent officers and the flow of information, and instead bring his disciplined approach to bear on the great challenges at hand. That is the great strike against the Conservatives: a disrespect for Parliament, the abuse of prorogation, the repeated attempts (including during this campaign) to stanch debate and free expression. It is a disappointing failing in a leader who previously emerged from a populist movement that fought so valiantly for democratic reforms.

<b>Those who disdain the Harper approach should consider his overall record, which is good. The Prime Minister and the Conservative Party have demonstrated principled judgment on the economic file. They are not doctrinaire; with the support of other parties they adopted stimulus spending after the financial crash of 2008, when it was right to do so. They have assiduously pursued a whole range of trade negotiations. They have facilitated the extension of the GST/HST to Ontario and British Columbia, and have persisted in their plan for a national securities regulator. The Conservatives have greater respect, too, for the free market, and for freedom of international investment, in spite of their apparent yielding to political pressure in the proposed takeover of Potash Corp.

Even more determination will be needed to confront the sustainability of publicly funded health care in an aging society. Health care is suffering from chronic spending disease. If left unchecked, it could swallow as much as 31 cents of each new dollar in wealth created in Canada in the next 20 years. In spite of some unwise commitments he has made on subsidy increases to the provinces, Mr. Harper has the toughness and reformist instincts to push the provinces toward greater experimentation (in private delivery, for instance) and change.</b>

The campaign of 2011 – so vicious and often vapid – should not be remembered fondly. But that will soon be behind us. <b>If the result is a confident new Parliament, it could help propel Canada into a fresh period of innovation, government reform and global ambition. Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are best positioned to guide Canada there.</b>

[Fransisco]

Oop's sorry Tom, I didn't see that you had all ready posted this.

[jensend]

read the comments. maybe the G&M editorial staff are the only people in canada who think harper is fit for the job.

[Fransisco]

Whoa.. just took a quick look at those comments. Lefties heads are exploding all over the place. LOL

[Fransisco]

I've got to admit this election has gotten real interesting. Who would have guessed, even a few weeks ago, that this was going to turn into a showdown between Harper and Layton.

The Libs are on life support and it looks like Canadians are slowly pulling the plug.

[jensend]

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/981291--dismissed-tory-insider-reportedly-furious-after-sun-debacle?bn=1

this will give you an idea of the kind of people and tactics harper employs and how he treats them when things go wrong. the truth is a big victim of harper and when the government lies you have a problem. think of the countries where the government lies to the citizenry and you've got an estimate of harper's vision.

[Fransisco]

Is there some government out there that doesn't lie to its people?

I'm not excusing it, I just don't think one actually exists.

[Fransisco]

Here's another one I wouldn't have guessed. Andrew Coyne is voting Liberal.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/28/a-price-must-be-paid%E2%80%94but-by-whom/

<b>A price must be paid—but by whom?</b>


Voting is a kind of jury duty, and like the jury system, derives much of its strength from the participants’ lack of specialized knowledge of the subject. A specialist can become jaded, or obsessed with finer points; the public has the benefit of distance. My own experience as a political writer confirms this. I will frequently get exercised about this or that controversy, and wonder why the public is not of the same mind. But the public is called upon to judge not only this controversy, but a great number of issues of varying weights, and in the fullness of time, as that particular issue takes its place among the others, it often does not seem quite as all-important to the public as it had earlier seemed to me. And most of the time the public is right.

To vote is to distill a complex array of different, possibly conflicting considerations into one: the parties, the leaders, the local candidates, plus whatever issues are pertinent to you, and the parties’ positions on each. Which makes that perennial journalistic search for the “ballot-box question” such a preposterous enterprise. Every single voter will have his own ballot-box question, or questions. I cannot tell you what yours is, or should be. I can only tell you mine.

For me there are two issues of overwhelming importance in this election. The first is the economy, not only in its own right but for what it means for our ability to finance the social programs we have created for ourselves. The second is the alarming state of our democracy: the decaying of Parliament’s ability to hold governments to account, and the decline, not unrelated, in Parliament’s own accountability to the people.


I can eliminate two options off the top. While both the NDP and the Greens offer appealing proposals for democratic reform, I can’t bring myself to vote for either. It isn’t only their policies—the enormous increases in spending and taxes, the ill-judged market interventions—but their personnel. Simply put, neither party is ready for government.

So the choice for me is between the Conservatives and the Liberals. And as I have wrestled with it, the ballot question that has occurred to me is this: would the Liberals do more harm to the economy than the Conservatives would do to democracy? Or perhaps: would the Liberals harm the economy more than the Conservatives would? Would re-electing the Conservatives do greater harm to our democracy than electing the Liberals? And: which concern should weigh more heavily in the balance?

I give the nod to the Conservatives on the economy, though not by a wide margin. I think their instincts are generally sounder. But their readiness to play politics keeps getting in the way. So while they have a good record in some areas—cutting corporate taxes, opening trade talks with Europe and India, abolishing tariffs on intermediate goods and introducing tax-free savings accounts among them, as well as their deft handling of the banking crisis—it has to be balanced against the politically driven plunge into deficit, the bailout of the auto industry, the cuts in GST rather than income taxes, and an approach to foreign investment that can only be described as whimsical.

The same caution applies to their platform. I don’t doubt they can cut $4 billion out of annual program spending by 2015, without harm to needed services; my only concern is whether they will. Their unwillingness to spell out what they would cut does nothing to allay that concern. More positively, they do seem to have nailed their colours to cutting corporate tax rates. But how much more could both personal and corporate rates be cut if they did not persist in doling out tax credits and subsidies to favoured constituencies?

The Liberal platform, on the other hand, is more consistent, at least in economic policy terms: it is wrong-headed in every respect—higher spending, higher taxing, more meddlesome generally. Its saving grace is that it is only half-heartedly so. The Liberals would raise corporate taxes, but more for show than anything else: lifting rates back to the 18 per cent they were last year is the wrong way to go, but hardly the apocalypse. They aren’t going to get anything like the $6 billion in revenue they claim from these, but neither do they need it. The $5.5 billion in extra spending they propose is barely two per cent of program spending, and would not on its own threaten the country’s fiscal position.

And that’s what it would take to really worry about what the Liberals would do to the economy in the short term. When it comes to taxes or regulations, it takes a long time for even the stupidest government policy—for example, the Liberals’ proposal to shower selected “Canadian Champion Sectors” with subsidies—to really harm the economy. It’s macroeconomic policy that can really run you onto the rocks: running massive deficits, or letting inflation get out of hand. Call me naive, but I do not think the Liberals would do either—even in combination with the NDP. If anything, I suspect they would be at pains to prove their fiscal-conservative credentials, for fear of financial markets’ wrath.

Still, there are differences in long-term direction between the two platforms that are worth considering. Though neither party seems inclined in the short term to brake the torrid growth in health care spending, the broad brush of Tory policy is better suited to spurring the long-term productivity growth that alone can pay for it. And while the Tories’ regulation-heavy approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is in principle more costly, per megatonne, than the Liberals’ cap and trade scheme, the overall costs are likely to be less: because the Liberals are likely to bungle their plan, and because the Tories are unlikely to pursue theirs. Sensible policy will await the return of a carbon tax to political respectability.

So that’s the economy. And on democracy? Here the choice is starker—not because I invest any great hopes in the Liberals, but because the Tory record is so dreadful. To be sure, they introduced the Accountability Act on taking office: incomplete, loophole filled, but progress nonetheless. And they have made fitful efforts to reform the Senate, when not packing it with their own strategists, fundraisers and toadies.

But the long train of offences against democratic and parliamentary principle—from proroguing Parliament, twice, to evade Parliament’s reach; to withholding documents essential to parliamentary oversight, even in defiance of Parliament’s explicit demands; to intimidating parliamentary officers and politicizing the bureaucracy; to such breaches of trust as the Emerson and Fortier appointments, the taxation of income trusts, and the evisceration of their own law on fixed election dates—are simply unforgivable.

Add to that the coarse, vicious brand of politics, the mindless partisanship for which the Tories have become known: equal parts terrorizing their own MPs and demonizing their opponents. And add to that the extreme centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office, the trivialization of even cabinet posts as sources of independent authority, never mind the barracking of committees . . . Enough.

But much of this went on when the Liberals were in office, too, didn’t it? Yes. That’s just the point. To compare the Harper Tories to the Chrétien Liberals, and to the Mulroney Tories before them, and to the Trudeau Liberals before them, is hardly to excuse them: quite the opposite. The decline of democratic politics may have begun under the Liberals, but it has continued under the Tories. And it will accelerate if there is no price to be paid at the ballot box for such behaviour.

And yet, although the Liberals have tried to make accountability an issue in this election, they have signally failed. Does this mean the public has spoken? Perhaps once again I’ve attached too much importance to a single issue, at the expense of the big picture.

I don’t think so. The Liberals never gave the public much reason to translate their misgivings about the Conservatives into votes for them: a particular imperative, given their own record in office. It’s not enough just to implore people to “rise up.” You have to give them some hope that things will get better. But instead of the sort of large, concrete, attention-grabbing proposals that would really stamp the issue on the public mind, the democratic reform chapter of the Liberal platform is notably thin: reform of question period, a study of online voting, a vague nod to empowering committees.

So I will continue to make the case that we have a duty to perform as voters. Any election is in part a trial of the incumbents. Do we, the jury, find them guilty or not guilty, in this case of offences against democracy? And if we find them guilty, there has to be a penalty.

But what about the economy? In punishing the government, do we risk punishing the country? No. Economies have enormous recuperative powers: as Adam Smith said, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” We can afford a period of Liberal silliness. What we cannot afford is the continuing slide of Parliament, and parliamentary democracy, into disrepair. Conventions once discarded, habits of self-government once lost, are much harder to regain.

If we return the Conservatives with a majority, if we let all that has gone on these past five years pass, then not only the Tories, but every party will draw the appropriate conclusions. But if we send them a different message, then maybe the work of bringing government to democratic heel, begun in the tumult of the last Parliament, can continue. And that is why I will be voting Liberal on May 2.

[liberty]

Harper is by no means alone when it comes to lying to staff, voters, etc. Every major political party does this on a regular basis, and if that is your standard for deciding who to vote for, then you logically can't vote for any of them.

I've been around the political field long enough to know that politicians lie because their policies are a deliberate mess of contradictions. Why? Because voters like to be presented with lots of "goodies" and get visibly angry when anyone raises the issue of the actual cost of such "goodies". How do you deliver on a contradiction without lying? Someone has to be disappointed.

Please lower my taxes, but at the same time be sure to increase spending, as long as the money is spent on something that helps me! Cut spending if you have to, but only on causes that I don't like! What do you think people on the other side of those issues are saying? Exactly the opposite. Hence the cycle of lying.

Without the benefit of a philosophical framework to sort out bad ideas from good ones, we are left with a dog-eat-dog society where everyone is just someone else's lunch.

[liberty]

Speaking of contradictions, Coyne's piece is full of them. That's why I don't find his case for voting Liberal particularly convincing, especially when he openly states that a short period of Liberal rule will be characterized by "silliness". Silliness is that last thing I want out of a government. The dire consequences of that cannot be dismissed with a verbal shrug. If you want real silliness, vote NDP and get yourself a caucus full of vacationing barmaids.

[cottonpicken]

Imagine if the left wasn't split 4 ways.

[sawfly]

as far as the national post
dissing the ndp in Quebec .
to be expected , for Harper's
Gazette

the globe and mail
supporting Harper That just reeks of desperation.
The establishment is nervous .
liberal/Conservative big business
could always count on their party being in power no matter what brand.

now the threat of a 2 party system.
one of which is not in their back pocket. Woo scary
because they may eventually ,form a govt. even more scary

Even if Harper gets his majority,
it has been enjoyable watching everyone squirm . even conservatives are uncomfortable with the demise of the Liberals

Layton/NDP may not be ready to
govern now and the promises are a bit expensive. But 4 years from now, as official opposition and a cross Canada Party. Who knows?

Bob Rae would feel pretty stupid

[FarmRanger]

<i>" and the promises are a bit expensive. "</i>

and the Little Boy Bomb caused a bit of a
disturbance in downtown Hiroshima.