They Know A Phoney When They See One

The folks on the Rock are very good at spotting poseurs. The Toronto Star has reprinted an editorial from the St. John's Telegraph which captures what Stephen Harper's trip to the North illustartes:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in virtual campaign mode as he began his regular summer trip to Canada’s North earlier this week. His targets? Well, everyone else, of course.

“Their instincts are all bad,” he said about the Liberals and New Democrats. “Tax-and-spend proposals so extreme they would make the worst European budget look solid in comparison. . . . Big government bias that would build bureaucracy at the expense of families and communities.”

Their platforms are, he charges, a collection of “dangerous ideas and vacuous thinking that would reverse the progress we have made.”

Ah, yes, all that progress — the stripped-down government that didn’t ever actually arrive. Between 2006 and 2012, the party that isn’t for building the bureaucracy actually built it by 14 per cent, according to the parliamentary budget officer — adding 34,000 public servants in that time.

Newfoundlanders know that talking about pogress and actually delivering it are two different things:

The Harper Tories are our best bet for a stable economy, because the other parties are such spendthrifts?

Sure, if you don’t stop to think that the Tories came along with the biggest budget deficits in Canadian history, not to mention Senate appointees like Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy who have shown in spades that the politics of self-entitlement are not restricted to the federal Liberals.

Or that, despite promises of budget surpluses some time in the future, the fact is the current Tories seem more skilled at bait-and-switch — promising restraint, delivering deficits — than anything else.

It's all bait and switch -- something the Harperites do very well. But all that proves is that they are phoneys.