Fake Lakes and Fiscal Mismanagement. . . . .

The idea that Conservatives are 'fiscally responsible' is probably one of the most enduring myths of modern politics. If you actually pay attention to the balance sheets of Western democracies, Conservative parties have no better of a record than others, and in Countries like Canada their record is down-right abysmal. There are various reasons for this poor record at both the federal and provincial level. One reason is the simple fact that regardless of what Conservatives always tell us, Western economies are subject to the regular booms and busts of Capitalism and there is little or nothing, particularly in a global economy, that individual parties can do. (The best they can actually do is the very opposite or what conservatives do, and that is maintain a proper social safety net so that when recessions do come, the most vulnerable will suffer less of an impact) Another reason that Conservatives have a terrible record on fiscal management is that they just can't help giving away the store, so to speak, to their rich friends and corporations through tax cuts, and grants to those who need them least. Their "trickle-down" economics model was discredited long ago but they still keep doing it because that is their MO and their ideology is basically one of selfishness so why wouldn't they carry that selfishness into their fiscal (mis)management strategy?

However, the most disturbing reason that Conservatives are poor fiscal managers, and this is very much the case for this Government, is that they actually want to send the state broke in order to justify the dismantling of the social programs and the processes of democracy that they hate so much. The fact that Harper brought us to the verge of deficit before the recession hit and that he once wrote (apparently in his Master's Thesis) that running deficits is 'always' a bad idea economically speaking and that politicians only do it for electoral advantage, tells you the whole story. All of this suggests that their mismanagement was at least in part motivated by an intentional desire to more or less bankrupt the state and thereby discredit any social efforts on the part of government.

But of course, as is the case in many things in life, a strategy quickly runs away with itself and one loses track, and what started out as a strategy becomes a habit, and you find yourself buying multimillion dollar fake lakes and useless gazebos which quickly create the optics of ineptitude. So eventually Conservatives get voted out of office and leave others to clean up the mess while they walk away with padded pockets, rich pensions, and hefty bank accounts in the Cayman Islands where they don't need fake lakes.

Don't throw the Bums out, put them in prison. . . .

So today in Parliament Gilles Duceppe asked the key question concerning the prohibition of staffers appearing before parliamentary committees. To paraphrase the question it was "is the government ordering its staffers to disobey the law?" The answer is, of course, yes and they know it. The law is very clear, the committees have the right to order any citizen of the country to appear and to fail to do so is contempt of parliament and can be punished by jail time. It is as simple as that and regardless of your politics, it is not more complicated. In fact the Government is already violating the law. The Ethics Committee has sent a summons to Harper's Chief of Staff, Mr. Soudas, to appear before the Committee. But the deliverer of that summons has been prevented from delivering it to its intended target. That is called 'conspiracy.'

It is clear, time and again, that this government has no respect for the law and the principles of parliament. You can argue that the staffers shouldn't be called. You can argue that the committees are partisan kangaroo courts. You can argue anything you want. The problem is that if you claim to believe in the law, to be 'tough on crime,' as the Cons always do, you can't simply ignore the laws that you don't like. By their own standards a number of the Conservative government should already be in prison.

The committees should summon the staffers and if they fail to appear they should hold them in contempt and put them in jail. But I am saying this not because I am a big supporter of a tough on crime agenda. And  I agree with Martin Luther King in the belief that it is as much a moral responsibility to resist unjust laws as it is to obey just ones. But the Conservatives have never believed this and have never had much respect for Dr. King anyway. But most importantly, if the Conservatives were on the other side of the fence, so to speak, they would be going insane over these actions and they would be the first to say that 'you have to obey the law' or the 'will of the House' etc. And if you call them hypocrites in this regard, their only defense is that other people are hypocrites too. I say to those thirty percent who still support the Conservatives, your day of doom will come and when the future governments blatantly disobey the laws and use this government as the example and precedent, then all of you Harper supporters will just have to suck it up and say "well we destroyed democracy in are time so we can't complain now."

G20 Boondoggles and the rule of fear. . . . .

Does anyone else have a nagging and troubling suspicion that Harper's Government may have somehow been involved in the fire-bombing of the Royal Bank in Ottawa recently. The scenario would look something like this: realizing that they had engaged in outrageously imprudent fiscal mismanagement in their on going effort to control absolutely everything, dark forces in the Harper regime might have looked around in a panic for how they might justify their billion dollar boondoggle. Having a bit too much to drink while brainstorming, these dark forces could have found their way out to commit an act of perceived terrorism that required no more than a Coke bottle and a liter of gasoline. And WHAM! Instant justification for spending hundreds of millions of dollars that everyone knows didn't need to be spent but was only another demonstration of their fiscal irresponsibility and tyrannical drive to control everything. Only a short ride from their offices on the Hill, the Royal Bank in the Glebe was a perfect target for their drunken panic. And of course such an event would be entirely in line with the overarching Conservative strategy, which is foster fear and hate as much as possible.

To all those government lawyers out there, this is, of course, simply a fanciful and speculative jest. To all of those naive folks who think such things never happen; OPEN A HISTORY BOOK!

The next political error?

As has consistently been the case, in good times or bad Harper and his conservative bullies have never been able to resist any chance they have to be hyper-partisan and to stick it to their opponents in the House. They obsessively hate the fact that other parties exist and they are particularly angry that, because they are forced to work with a minority, the opposition has the ability to set certain terms in the legislative process. After all, nothing bothers a tyrant more than checks on his tyranny. 

So given their history of 'bill in mouth' disease, what will they come up with in the throne speech, which we will hear soon, to further poison the already toxic atmosphere that they have worked so hard to create in Ottawa. We know there will be something. One of the greatest moments of political irony I have ever witnessed was the one where Stephen Harper told the country that the opposition was intransigent and was unwilling to make Parliament work and therefore he was 'forced' to call an election. Harper is desperate to destroy democratic processes in any way that he can in pursuit of his elusive majority and the highest weapon in his arsenal is the creation of a toxic atmosphere that alienates a large segment of the population from the political process completely, thus leaving himself with a core of right-wing voters, making his political demise much less likely. 

Just over a year ago Harper's proposed poison pill was the elimination of the dollar seventy-five per vote funding that political parties receive for each vote they get. This was a blatant attempt to undermine political diversity in the country. This would have happened because the more MPs a party has, the more financial incentives they get to do their work in and out of parliament as well as receiving the greatest incentive, and the one that is in a sense priceless, which is the built in advertising that they get from having a high profile in the House. Even its strongest advocates agree that the First Past the Post system has some problems and the largest of these is that it can leave huge portions of the population completely unrepresented in the Legislative process. The per vote grant is a very small way of trying to correct this problem because a party that receives, say, ten percent of the vote but no representatives can still do some of the work necessary for a political party to continue to contribute to the political agenda of the country. There is talk that Harper may attempt to revisit this poison pill one more time in the next Throne Speech. 

But Harper definitely has something of a dilemma. And that dilemma is that he has done so many small things to undermine democracy and stick it to the opposition that he has very little left to do that would not be so obviously provocative and anti-democratic that it would not bring down serious voter anger upon his head. The last stupid move that Harper made was the prorogation of parliament which created something of a political storm. 

But I am sure that Harper will come up with something to further poison the political atmosphere in Ottawa. The irony is that most of Harper's anti-democratic moves have been small, quiet, behind the scenes moves that few people notice and even fewer understand. Because of this, it has always been Harper's big, public, stupid mistakes that have continued to mire him in a minority position. And any real conservative would understand that not only is he not really a Conservative (only an opportunist), but that if Harper cannot deliver a majority when his had the sponsorship scandal and Dion as opposition leader, he probably will never be able to deliver one. However as a tyrant, Harper was smart enough to completely gut the Conservative Party of any decent potential replacements which makes it nearly impossible for the Conservatives to get rid of him without placing themselves back into the proverbial political wilderness. 

But they will come up with something, either an intentional poison pill or an ill-considered stupid, bull in a china shop sort of move that will send us once again into a political fire-storm. What will it be? 

A few thoughts on reform. .

I think one of the primary political problems facing our country is fairly straightforward, albeit difficult to solve. It can be expressed this way: we live in a society in which compromise and coalition building is becoming ever more necessary but our political institutions continue to exist in the traditional paradigm of excessive centralization of power which not only doesn’t foster compromise but actually exerts pressure in the other direction. The problems of our society are increasingly complex and require greater input from more people and a greater willingness on the part of our politicians to listen carefully to a multitude of opinions and act with greater concern for the various forces and elements of society. However, the traditional power-centered system of our politics is fostering individuals who have very little interest in compromise and simply crave power.

Given this problem, the first question we need to ask concerning any potential political reform is; to what degree will this change promote the kinds of positive changes which will promote a new politics and undermine the old politics?

It follows therefore that this is the question we need to ask with regard to any potential Senate reform in Canada. I am not particularly in favor of Senate reform at the present time because there is no clear vision of significant reforms that will promote a new compromise politics. On the other hand, I also don’t support the NDP policy of simply eliminating the Senate because such a move will just further the concentration of power in the PMO which is the most pressingl example of the problem with the present political paradigm.

The Conservative party has made a lot of noise about reforming the Senate but since we know, a priori, that they have no interest in creating a new compromise oriented political paradigm, we also know that their reforms would not score high on the above question to which we must subject our potential reforms.

Most models of an elected Senate would do little to change the prevailing political circumstances in the country. Let’s say that we have an equal Senate along the lines of the US Senate. Since we would have to have fewer Senators than MPs (because an upper house of 300 plus Senators would simply be too unwieldy), we could guess that we might have, let’s say, ten Senators from each Province and Territory. That would give us 130 Senators. However, since the electoral boundaries would have to be, in most cases, smaller than those for MPs, third parties would be even less represented than they are in the House of Commons and the vast majority of Senators would be Liberals and Conservatives. If votes in this Senate were whipped, party votes then the situation would be largely the same as it is now. The only cases in which it would be different would be when the majority party in the Senate was different than that in the House. This could happen, and if the elections were staggered it could happen on a regular basis. This is the only case in which this type of Senate might promote more compromise because it would generate a situation in which governments would be faced with getting little or nothing done unless they learned to compromise. But there would certainly be nothing built into this institutional structure that would guarantee that this would happen.

We desperately need political reforms in this country; reforms that decentralize power and promote more varied inputs and greater representation. We should absolutely resist any reforms to the Senate which fail to create institutions which embrace and represent these reforms. So far the reforms that have been talked about would simply further entrench powers in negative ways. And I don’t think eliminating the Senate does us any favors either since at the very minimum it does occasionally undermine the arbitrary power of the executive and it creates a group of representatives who are not subject to the continuous whims of electoral politics. As things stand now Ontario and Quebec are resisting any Conservative reforms to the Senate largely because they stand to lose power in a Senate which has equal representation from all the provinces and territories. And attempt to push through reforms without the consent of the provinces risks a serious constitutional crisis. This is the simple fact that the Conservatives overlooked when they campaigned on reforming the Senate. It was foolhardy of Harper to say he would not appoint Senators and going to reform the Senate when any such reforms would require all provinces consent. It was the same foolhardy and politically meaningless promise that the Mayor of Ottawa made when he said he would ensure a zero tax increase when he knew that such a move would require the majority of the city councilors. But Mayor O’Brian is much like Stephen Harper; they both exist in the traditional paradigm of power centered politics and have a pathological need to wield absolute power.

Any significant reforms to the Senate should include an entire package of reforms that lessons the power of the executive branch of government and which extends the ideal principles of democracy. The Conservative have absolutely no interested in the extension of democratic principles so nothing they say about Senate reform should be of interest to true democrats. I am still waiting for a party to have some actual vision on this issue. 

Media and democracy. . .

I find recent event rather creepy an ominous concerning the political climate in Canada. This is not only because I find the governing party deeply corrupt and anti-democratic. What I find particularly disturbing is the fact that the media has gone silent on almost everything of significance. Now there is no doubt that the media can get very tedious with its constant sensationalizing of political stories. But in the past couple of years they have simply stopped talking about any story that makes the Tories look bad. In recent months there have been terrible scandals which normally we could depend on the media to talk about but nowadays these stories barely get any play at all. And it is much more than the giant check scandal. The Tories have done things which, in the past would have not only have forced governments to resign but the ruling party to plummet in the polls. They have now been found to be vetting potential civil servants for their support for the government. This is the kind of thing that brought down an Attorney General in the Bush administration. Here it barely makes it into the media at all. Conservative MPs heckle opposition members when they ask legitimate questions about things like swine flu while people are dying. Government ministers withhold important documents to manipulate votes in the House. The Government is steeped in financial abuses that the media barely covers. 

There was a time when these stories would be constant headlines that even a Prime Minister who doesn't watch Canadian news would be unable to ignore. 

The funny thing is that I am no Liberal but at least when they were faced with a serious scandal in the sponsorship event, they actually had a public inquiry. This government simply ignores serious scandals, blames someone else, or sacks a civil servant. And the media goes merrily on ignoring all of it. Just the isotope incident would normally be enough to bring down a government. I mean, the government actually sacked a public safety officer who was doing her job, following pre-established protocol while trying to avoid a nuclear accident! And then a year later she was proved right and Chalk River was shut down! But the media has nothing to say. 

All of this reminds me of the US media in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. 

The funniest part of all of it is that the Conservatives are setting so many bad precedents that they will lament later on when some other party is in power. All of us will eventually lament the Americanization of our political system, the concentration of power, the lack of accountability etc. etc. And when some new group of Tories are crying foul when the pendulum has swung the other way, I will laugh - then I will cry. 

Harper's real principles. . .

There is a consensus among many people, even some conservatives, that Harper has jettisoned most of his political principles for the sake of political expediency. And indeed, it does appear this way. He certainly didn’t create a more open government, and the biggest deficit in Canadian history brought to us by a man who said he would never run any deficit; these are certainly damning events. Coupled with his appointment of so many political cronies to the senate and the radical increases in taxes (income trusts and HST both mean many people are paying a lot more tax under the CONS) makes Harper look more like a political opportunist than a man of principle. Now, die-hard conservatives will rationalize these policies as necessary compromises given the circumstances, but of course principles, by definition, are not abandoned simply due to difficult circumstances, if they are then they ipso facto are NOT principles.

However, I have begun to wonder whether we might look at this a different way. I think that the only principle that Harper came into office with was to destroy the major gains of our social democracy. Harper and his cronies couldn’t stand that Canada was a country with major social programs that worked fairly effectively, it was eating them up inside because of their cut-throat capitalist ideology and their hatred of anything ‘social.’ During the first couple of years the Harper government began to chip away at some very important aspects of our social democracy. For example, they cut all adult literacy programs, many women’s programs, the court challenges program, and they tightened up government so that it is now considerably less open and access to information (one of the prime hallmarks of a healthy democracy) is a joke. They geared all their social policies to ‘results based’ requirements, something that is notoriously ineffective for real social programs. They monumentally overspent in their first two years of government to bring the country to the brink of deficit because they knew that a recession was coming and the last thing they wanted was a fiscal cushion. Then when the recession did come and they were forced into running a deficit, this did not challenge their principles, rather it gave them a new opportunity to reach their goals. They brought forth a budget that had permanent tax cuts and insignificant and temporary infrastructural spending. This strategy has ensured that any future governments are going to be forced to make major cuts to social programs. Voila, the Conservatives have lived up to their principles because their only real principle was to destroy Canada’s social democracy. The Conservatives, by the way, faced no real challenge from the Liberals in laying waste to the country.

Judged thusly, the Conservative have done exactly what they wanted to do and Canada may never be the same. 

Why Harper should not be reelected. . . .

Here are a few reasons why the Conservative Government should not be reelected. 

Total contempt for parliament. The Harper Government has consistently shown that it has nothing but contempt for parliament. It has said on more than one occasion that it will simply ignore certain bills that have duly passed through the House. The most outrageous of course was the directive for the government to abide by the Kyoto standards. Remember also the creation of a hand-book of for committee chairs to shut down discourse and even shut down entire committee hearing if the Conservatives don’t like the direction that the committee is going. The government also broke its own election law for political expediency. This kind of contempt to parliament and open discourse should make us reluctant to elect any Tories to the House let alone let them act as the government of the nation.

Contempt for citizenship. The Harper Government has proven over and over that it has no respect for the principle of citizenship (particularly if you are a person of color). It has even used the courts to attempt to avoid living up to its responsibility to protect our citizens abroad. No party that fails to respect its citizen’s human rights or stand up to defend them against arbitrary abuse of power by foreign governments deserves to be reelected.

Contempt to the Constitution. Harper’s government has shown that it has no respect for Canada’s Constitution. The proroguing of parliament just to avoid losing power was a terrible and dangerous precedent. But the misrepresentation of the constitution to the people of Canada by suggesting that a coalition was tantamount to a coup was an egregious perversion of the constitution. As anyone who understands the British parliamentary system knows, a majority of the representatives in the House elect the Prime Minister and it has been so for hundreds of years. This misrepresentation of the Constitution should preclude the Tories from governing.

Contempt for the Law. Harper’s government ended the court challenges program because it strives to subvert the legitimate role that the courts play in a parliamentary democracy. Though they are happy to use the courts to their own advantage, when courts make decisions that they don’t like they suggest that judges are ‘legislating from the bench.’ However, the courts are an essential part of a democracy and they play the role of checking the power of the legislative branch of government from instituting laws that violate the principles as set out in the constitution.

Contempt for Opponents. The Conservatives have no respect for the basic principles of political discourse and fair play. Instead Harper runs a government of extreme bullies who prefer to belittle and divide than actually discuss political issues. The chief bullies are Pollievre, Kenney, Baird, Flaherty, Van Loan, and Harper himself. They run a constant stream of personal attacks on any and all opponents and their attacks almost never have anything to do with actual policy issues.

Contempt for the environment. The Harper Government has continually been uninterested in any actual environmental policy. It all began with their first environment minister Rona Ambrose. Ambrose has long been a friend of the oil industry in her native Alberta and consistently denied the existence of any kind of global warming. She is also a long time fan of Ayn Rand who consistently claimed that cut-throat, unfettered capitalism could never lead to environmental disaster, and that selfishness is a virtue. (Do a quick google search to see the wacko Randism streak against any kind of environmentalism)

Contempt for Democracy. When facing the threat that the majority of the people’s representatives might actually rule the House of Commons the Conservatives showed their true colors by not only suggesting that the majority had no right to rule but they spent much of their energy marginalizing many of the people’s representatives by labeling them “separatists” and “socialists.” They made it very clear that some people who are duly elected by the people have no business being in the House simply because the Conservative  don’t  like them.

 

Harper’s government is not just a poor and incompetent government; it is has poisoned the country and subverted the principles of democracy and human rights. Harper poses a genuine threat to our rights and the future of the country and don’t deserve to be reelected. 

Partisanship past and future . . . Clarifications

My recent post on partisanship elicited a number of strong comments, a couple reasonable and justified and a couple of offensive wing-nuts who actually think a group of Jewish trade-unionists run the world. (These comments were justifiably rejected)

As a point of clarification I want to say that the quote that I used to suggest a troubling trend in political discourse on Liberal blogs was in a blog that subsequently contained a number of reasonable points concerning the recent NDP convention. I didn’t name the blog simply because I found the unfortunate words at the beginning of the blog to largely nullify any reasonable discourse because such poison language can hardly be the foundation of a real political debate. It is hardly reasonable to say to someone “you are a no-good, dishonest, lying, stupid, weasel” and then say “but here are some of your good points.”

Though the blogger from whom I took the quote had a number of cogent points later in his post, not only was the possibility for meaningful discourse poisoned,  but it was never my intention to get into a wider debate about specific policies of the NDP some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. My blog is very seldom about policy issues. Though I have attacked specific policies of the Conservative Government, usually when I address politics I am talking in wider terms about political philosophy and the various paradigms in which we operate. One of the reasons that I seldom engage in policy debates is that the people with whom I disagree are working in a different paradigm to the one in which I operate and for policy debates to be meaningful it would require far more space and time than a blog offers.

I have been accused of actually misrepresenting myself as non-partisan because my blog appears on a NDP blog site. First of all, I was completely unaware that I appeared on any NDP related site and have never seen this for myself, but given the nature of the Web I guess it is possible. Second of all, I say to the one or two readers out there who actually read my blog that I have never been a member of the NDP, I would never shy away from criticizing the Party if such criticisms seem warranted to me, and If my blog does appear on an NDP related blog site this should not be interpreted as evidence of some kind of party affiliation.

Finally, my recent post was intended only to address what I see as a growing trend of poisoned discourse in relation to partisanship in Canadian politics. I am certain that I have also been guilty of this at times, and for this I express my regrets. I have always reserved my harshest words for the Conservatives because I think that beyond simply matters of policy the party in its present manifestation represents a serious threat to human rights and democracy in Canada.

Yours in the struggle.

Kirby

Fascism and Western Politics

I recently used the word Fascism and watched a number of other bloggers go crazy, while others suggested that they were disappointed with my rather angry outburst. So, though I admit that the outburst was initially a little strong, (and I rewrote it the same day), there is an important issue here that should be discussed.

Fascism is a word that is particularly provocative and raises the shackles of many, particularly in right-wing circles where they don’t like being accused of any association with this particular political approach. However, it should be made clear, and I have talked about it on my blog before, that despite the excessive emotion that the word elicits, it is a word that applies quite well to many Western Governments and political parties.

Mussolini famously defined Fascism as a significant collusion between Big Government and big business. And it is conveniently forgotten how popular Mussolini was in North America in the 1930s. This popularity resulted in a special edition of Forbes magazine devoted to Mussolini’s politics which suggested that this was the future of Capitalism. This particular edition of Forbes is now almost impossible to obtain but it makes clear how Capitalists and Conservatives felt about Fascism.

Then in the 50s an American academic and statesman named Bertram Gross wrote a remarkable book entitled Friendly Fascism which outlined how, despite the war, the US had slowly instituted fundamental principles of Fascism through the back door, though with less of the blatantly racist and militaristic rhetoric of the European fascism of the 1930s.

Since Bertram’s book, the fascist mechanisms in the US and other Western countries have dramatically increased and the connection between big business and big government has continually expanded, though in many cases this relationship is so cozy and inherent that it goes unnoticed. Another writer who has talked about this is of course Gore Vidal who documented the military-industrial complex of the US in a startling fashion. Noam Chomsky has also added a great deal to this discourse as have Howard Zinn and a number of other writers. 

Last year I wrote a long blog discussing why the Harper Government is essentially fascist as outlined by Mussolini, Gross, and Vidal. This is not hyperbole but a serious political discourse which most people in the West are unwilling to engage in simply because they don’t want to admit the fundamental ways in which Government has become aligned with business. Furthermore it is not hyperbole to talk about the ways that supposedly moderate parties like the Liberals under a leader like Ignatieff could be seen as inheritors of the friendly fascist tradition. Besides Mr. Ignatieff’s obvious support for Western militarism (including the militarism of the State of Israel), Ignatieff has defended torture, and uses a political discourse that is at times frighteningly Euro-centric and stands up for many of the basic assumptions that neo-conservatism stands for.

Though a blog does not afford the space to properly address the intricacies of these issues, we ignore them at our peril. Democracy in the Western nations is increasingly in crisis: participation rates are falling, public discourse is narrowing (largely as a result of media ownership), access to political office is becoming increasingly more difficult, political discourse is creeping ever closer to business discourse, and Conservative parties are continually attacking basic human and labour rights. I recommend Gross’s book as well as several books by Vidal in order to realize that suggesting a link between Western Governments (and Parties) and Fascism may sound provocative but is by no means hyperbole. Conservatives (and even Liberals) may bristle at the connection but if they ignore it they are not being honest about political discourse. 

Harper's a Bully: Ignatieff's a coward!

Well, for all those Liberal rumor-mongers who spend the last month condemning Jack Layton at the merest suggestion that he might vote to keep Harper’s Government alive, it is time to eat your words. Because while the NDP has consistently voted against this Government in matters of confidence, the Liberal Party has proven once again that it is little more than a rubberstamping committee for Stephen Harper. Harper must be in a constant state of political orgasmic ecstasy. He surely can’t believe his luck; to have three spineless and weak opposition leaders in a row is a political dream come true. It would be laughable if it were not so pathetic! We watched the Liberal polling numbers go up over the past few months but now watch the numbers begin to creep the other way until the Liberals are back in the 20s again. The reason, of course, is simple. Harper operates in politics like a bully. But there is one thing people dislike more than a bully, and this is someone who acts as though they are tough enough to stand up to the bully only to back down at the very moment of conflict. This creates a kind of visceral impulse of disgust which lowers the would-be hero to a state lower than the bully. Being nasty and hostile is always distasteful in politics, but being cowardly is surely worse. If I were a Liberal today I would be hiding my head in the sand and ripping up my membership card. 

PS. A number of Partisan hacks have tried to leave comments on this posting suggesting that Layton tried to make a deal with Harper, and that Layton is a weak hypocrite etc etc.... as though in the absence of any actual deal between the NDP and Harper, Liberal hacks just make one up out of thin air! It is pathetic! I am not Partisan in any sense, I am no fan of Layton and have always made a point of criticizing him where critique is due. But this fact is simple: the NDP, whatever you think of Layton or NDP policy in general, is the only party in the House that has consistently voted against Harper in confidence matters. IT IS A SIMPLE FACT! The rest is spin. 

What do our Politicians stand for.

In the lead up to the Liberal convention conservative pundits are ratcheting up their rhetoric against Ignatieff in an effort, one supposes, to stem the growing tide of his perceived popularity. Thus far, however, with few obvious targets on which to centre their negative rhetoric, the reoccurring theme of Conservative talking points has been the simple claim that Mr. Ignatieff doesn’t seem to stand for anything. “Sure, he’s smart,” they concede, “but what does he actually stand for?” They ask. And then comes the inevitable reply that he doesn’t stand for anything and that he is all show. Now here is a monumental irony in action. In the lead up to the  2006 election the cornerstone of the Conservatives campaign added up to little more that “We aren’t the Liberals!” On the heels of the Sponsorship scandal the Conservatives estimated that this is all they had to do to get elected. In the next election they stood for so little that they even tried to avoid publishing a platform and only did so a few days before the actual voting day under the pressure of media scrutiny. The platform, by the way said little of any substance. In the end the Conservative Party under Harper’s tutelage has centered almost all of their electoral efforts on attacking the Liberals rather than defining themselves. This  has led to the continual display of irony in which whenever they are embroiled in a problem or scandal their only defense seems to be the refrain that “The Liberals used to do that, and usually worse than we.” The only issues that the Conservative have consistently pursued have been ‘Crime’ and ‘Taxes.’ In the case of crime, this is a typical right-wing scare tactic. The system of law enforcement in Canada, the one that is so woefully lax according to the rhetoric of the Conservatives, has ushered in a gradual decline in Crime over the last thirty years. In this case the media helps to inadvertently promote the Conservative rhetoric that  the country is about to fall into chaos of gang-violence and murderous rampages. However, given the decline in crime, we must conclude that overall the system is working more or less the way it is supposed to. (One could, of course, make a more profound critique of the system’s emphasis on incarceration and lack of preventative social policies. But the point here is simply that the Conservative critique is based on an entirely false premise that crime is rampant and on the increase. ) Somewhat ironically, one of their only actual legislative efforts on crime is to eliminate the long-gun registry, a move that is strongly opposed by police forces across the country. The other issue that the Conservatives have tried to make theirs is taxes. They have tried to represent themselves as the party that has and will decrease your taxes, trying to benefit from the widespread perception that Canadians pay an exceptionally high rate of tax. The main part of their tax policy has been to lower the GST by two points. This is a move that most economists disregard as, at best, totally irrelevant to most people, and at worst, entirely wrongheaded. Even a number of Conservative Party insiders have admitted that the decision to lower the GST was not based on sound economic policy but on a public relations effort. The Conservative also attempted to portray themselves as tax fighters in other sectors like personal and income taxes. Anyone who has filed taxes over the past couple of years knows that in most income brackets taxes have stayed the same or even increased.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that while the Conservatives are trying to portray Mr. Ignatieff as little more than a tweed blazer with no genuine political ideas, the Conservative are even worse than bereft of ideas and that their only idea is to misrepresent themselves, their opponents, and the state of the country. Harper himself cannot even rise to the level of being a tweed blazer; he is only a sweater-vest with a disturbing grin. Next time someone asks what their political opponent stands for, whether Liberal, Conservative, or otherwise, ask them what they really stand for. 

Coleridge, Conservatives, and Meritocracy

Continuing on with the themes that I have been addressing lately, I was recently reading a very interesting book by Mario Praz,  a Italian scholar of English Romanticism, entitled The Hero In Eclipse In Victorian Literature. He has an interesting discourse concerning the move of the first generation of Romantic from a radical to a conservative paradigm. Much has been made out of this issue over the years. But while I agree that Wordsworth and Southey clearly turned into conservatives, I have always been reluctant to make the same judgment concerning Coleridge. (As indeed other writers have. Basil Wiley for example contended that Coleridge was the precursor to modern ‘socialism’ or the welfare state) 

I have thought a lot about why I think Coleridge is different from many of his contemporaries. Like many of his peers, Coleridge harbored a great deal of fear concerning the threat of the mob which was so evident in the years after the Revolution in France. But fear of violence does not a conservative make. But this begs the question, or course, ‘what constitutes a conservative?’ I have thought about this question in relation to a thinker and poet like Coleridge and it is a very interesting problem. In the end I have concluded that Coleridge may have believed that social change should be gradual and that the there is a certain amount to be feared from revolutionary upheavals, but this didn’t make him a conservative. What really constitutes a conservative in the modern era (and by this I mean the post-enlightenment), is a belief, often hidden or unspoken, that the world is essentially a meritocracy.

 There are various breeds of conservative ideology but I think the vast majority of conservatives share this basic outlook, even if they are reluctant to admit it in public. Some conservatives will pay lip-service to different programs of equalization but in the end they really think that people are where they are because of their merit. Coleridge wasn’t’ a conservative because he never embraced this notion. Coleridge, perhaps because of his own weaknesses, recognized that there are many reasons that one might achieve above or below their possible merit. This also explains why many people become more conservative as they get older; because as they reach a certain level of achievement they are easily convinced that it is precisely their merit that has taken them there. This is exactly why Southey and Wordsworth, Coleridge’s friends and contemporaries became conservatives, while Coleridge himself did not. This ideology is more easily embraced in a modern democracy because there is less in the way of traditional power and tradition that keeps people from achieving their goals. However, what non-conservatives realize is that in a milieu of democracy and capitalism, it is one’s ability to sell oneself, regardless of actual ability in one’s field, that brings you to ‘success’ in our society. One could be the greatest piano player in world, for example, but without the right sales and or connections, all this merit will be for naught. But conservatives want us to believe, particularly in today’s context, that even if some are born with more wealth than others, we all basically have the same opportunities and if we ‘make’ it or fail to ‘make’ it, it is our merit that counts. And conservatives have managed to sell this fabrication well enough that they can even begin to chip away at programs that help to eliminate barriers to success because so many are convinced that we are already operating in a meritocracy so we don’t need, unions, women’s rights organizations, legal defense funds to challenge potentially discriminatory laws, free universal education, etc, etc. Of course, one might argue that men like Stephen Harper, for example, don’t really believe that we live in a meritocracy but that they are using this falsehood to sell their capitalist agenda. Perhaps, but this is neither here nor there. The fact is that many people do buy this ideology and it has become the cornerstone of much of what constitutes conservative ideology. 

Harper and History

The unusual  events of history brought Stephen Harper to power, and soon I believe history will take that power away from him. First Harper was lucky enough to come across the rather ineffectual Peter Mackay who was willing, despite written promises to the contrary, to give the entire Tory party away. Then the Sponsorship scandal landed right in his lap coupled with an unusually honest Prime Minister in the guise of Paul Martin who, instead of brushing it under the rug, was willing to start a genuine independent investigation. (Unlike Harper who would never have investigated  such a scandal) And with the Sponsorship issue in the air, Harper had no need to run a genuine election campaign but just kept telling us that the Liberals were ‘corrupt’ and we should get rid of the bums. Yet even with one of the worst scandals in Canadian politics Harper still couldn’t come close to a majority. They managed to play this out for nearly two years, and any time they were caught in their own scandals they simply pointed at the opposition and told us that the Liberals did worse things. Then they broke their own electoral laws and in a vain attempt to get their much sought after majority. But despite their relentless attacks on Dion which worked remarkably well on a gullible electorate, the Conservatives were still unable to win a majority. Then came Harper’s two biggest mistakes; a denial that there was a looming economic crisis, and his disastrous fall economic statement which finally exposed the depth of his partisanship. But the real spanner in the works for Harper is the economic slowdown which he reacted to by abandoning his entire economic oeuvre.  In his master’s thesis Harper condemned all deficit spending as an attempt by governments to get reelected. Now suddenly when his political power was threatened, he is a great convert to government intervention. This conversion seems hollow to just about everyone. But despite the abandonment of his so-called principles, the economy will wrench Harper from power as it has done to so many politicians before him. Oh, the Conservatives will fall back on their old tactics; they will begin relentless attacks on Ignatieff, but one can only cry wolf so many times and these attacks in the midst of a depression will appear to most people as particularly unseemly. Bullying will only take you so far even in politics. Indeed, the conditions of history will oust Harper from power just as it brought him to power. 

Political Hypocrisy

It is always the hypocrisy in politics that makes me crazy. People will rationalize and justify things that are done by the party or parties that they sympathize with, but if the party they opposed did the exact same thing they will criticize them with visceral aggression. The recent events are a very good example of this hypocrisy. Harper prorogued parliament because he didn’t have the confidence of the House. If a Liberal had done this Conservatives everywhere would be going crazy telling us all that this is a typical example of the Demagoguery that is in the very nature of the Liberal Party. We would never hear the end of it! This is what drives me crazy. It is just pure hypocrisy.

People’s reactions to labour disputes are another common example of political hypocrisy. People will fight and complain about their own working conditions no end, but if some group of workers is willing to go on strike to defend their rights for better working condition, then anyone who is inconvenienced by this strike will go on alarmingly about how greedy and inconsiderate the workers are and how they shouldn’t even have the legal right to strike.

Political hypocrisy is consistently evident in the always problematic area of political promises. Politicians constantly make promises that they either have no intention of keeping or should know that they probably cannot keep. And political supporters always rationalize these broken promises. The Liberals didn’t eliminate the GST even though they said they would. They knew that they probably would be unable to keep such a promise. And their failure to follow through was rationalized by Liberal supporters and has been an area of criticism for Conservative ever since. And remember when the elected members of the Reform party said that they would never take the MP pensions? When they opted to accept the pensions, most of their supporters just quietly forgot their promise. Now we have Harper who said he would never appoint unelected senators, and is now about to appoint twenty of them right after a precedent setting proroguing of parliament. No problem, quick rationalization and the Conservatives actually blame the Liberals for the broken promise, suggesting that they have left Harper with no choice. This is rich! Not only do they break promises they blame their political opponents for forcing them into it.

In many cases the politicians simply make promises that they know they won’t be able to keep. This demonstrates political opportunism and lack of leadership. Our mayor here in Ottawa made a big deal of running on a promise that he would ensure Zero city tax increases. Now, besides the fact that this is an irresponsible promise because the city taxes should at least keep up with inflation, the mayor has no power to keep such a promise since taxes are determined not by the Mayor’s office but by the council in general. Then, when taxes predictably rise, the mayor’s supporters don’t blame him for making a promise that he had absolutely no way of being sure that he could keep, instead they blame the council for undermining the mayor. Similarly Harper has, for years now, been making a big deal about the fact that he would NEVER run a deficit. This is a promise that anyone who has any sense of how the federal budget works knows you might not be able to keep. If a government looses tax revenues half-way through the year because of a sudden economic downturn, they have already made spending commitments which will result in a deficit, pure and simple. But when the Harper government goes into deficit do you think its supporters will blame Harper for a broken promise? Will people say that he should never have made such a promise because as a trained economist he should have known better? No, Conservative supporters will say it’s not his fault, it is just the economic forces beyond his control. But of course if the Liberal did the same thing Harper would be on television everyday telling us what hypocrites and poor leaders the Liberals are.

How exhausting!