Whatever happened to Conservative policy?
The poor campaign by the Conservatives wasn't the only reason why they lost the campaign. Whatever happened to conservative policy? Every since the five major priorities of the 2005-2006 campaign, the Conservatives have been running on empty. Take the CBC. In nine years of office all they did was one minor budget cut. They did nothing to change how the CBC operates. Or the military. They started off strong, but there was no commitment to improving the military and now the ratio of military spending to GDP is at a 30 year low.
The policy on prostitution was ridiculous. Yes, try banning prostitution.
In my book, Conservative Confidential: Inside The Fabulous Blue Tent, I talk about how I felt the Conservatives were timid in that they would not address conservative issues like equalization, the merit-principle, fairness for men in family law, bilingualism, supply management, corporate welfare, flattening the tax system, etc. And, yet besides being timid - they were also arrogant.
I mean what party with any intelligence would use Paul Calandra as its main spokesperson? He knew little about the issues and could only repeat the given talking points. I would cringe when he was on the 5 PM political shows. Yet, the Conservatives thought he was the right person.
Perhaps part of the problem for the Conservatives is that there are very few conservative think tanks in Canada. The Fraser Institute does some very good work, but who else is there. The Manning Centre does almost nothing and that leaves the MacDonald-Laurier Institute as the other really good conservative think tank. That's it....
posted by GayandRight @ 5:45 PM
3 Comments:
I would have loved if Harper had implemented a conservative agenda. I can't say for sure it would have been politically successful, though, which is likely why he didn't implement one. But it's worse than that. Rather than less corporate welfare we got more. Rather than a simpler tax code we got a more complicated one. Though the code is more complicated, at least we got lower taxes - but NOT because Harper lowered the size of government. Not at all, federal program spending as a percentage of GDP was 12.6% before Harper took office and it's 13.2% as he leaves. Even on bilingualism it was Harper who extended it by creating a new requirement that all officers of Parliament must now be bilingual. On support for Israel the rhetoric moved decidedly more pro-Israel, but not a single one of Canada's actual policies became more pro-Israel. So many times I'll read blogger brag about how Harper tackled the deficit - the deficit he created, largely for Keynesian stimulus! We were in surplus before Harper was in office and that continued for a couple of years under Harper. But he leaves office with a bigger debt than when he started. The government was, of course, a total failure on the social conservative agenda ... but I'm glad for that. It is very, very difficult to chalk up conservative wins for this government, and almost all of them can be balanced out by losses. On the two most important measures it's a wash: we have lower taxes but we have larger government.
Funny. According to the left, the media, and 70% of the people on the street Harper was a rabid right wing idealogue.
As for the campaign 60% of Canadians could not tell you the difference between debt and deficit
And according to you Fred and your friendly trolls Harper was either not conservative enough or too conservative
You guys should look up cognitive dissonance
Harper displayed a right wing xenophobia but didn't implement much of a conservative agenda. It's hard to argue otherwise when he increased the size of government.
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