An Albatross For A Long Time

The Conservative Party of Canada is in a bad place. Even Conservative cheerleader L. Ian MacDonald admits that -- as a recent EKOS poll suggests that those who call themselves Conservatives wish that Stephen Harper would rise again from the ashes:

There is no chance — none at all — of the Conservative party turning to Harper to lead it again. For that matter, there’s no sense out there that Harper would even accept a draft, in the highly unlikely event that one were to develop.

And none of his potential replacements look like good bets:

Peter MacKay recently accepted a partnership at a major international law firm on Bay Street, and has two young children at home. As much as he — as a favourite son of Atlantic Canada and representative of the party’s progressive wing — might be thinking about a leadership run, he knows it’s not the right time for him. [Kevin] O’Leary might be good entertainment, but a leadership race is much harder than a TV reality show. He also doesn’t speak French, and it’s a measure of how disconnected he is from political reality that he doesn’t see that as a problem.

Lisa Rait also doesn't speak French; and Kellie Leitch will have a hard time living down her snitch line.  Maxime Bernier could probably get a majority of the population of the Beauce to vote for him. But the rest of Canada is a different story. And, after Justice Vaillancourt's verdict, the whole Conservative machine smells dirty.

No, the Harper Years will be an albatross around the party's neck for a long time.

Image: netheatrergeek.com

Twinkie Nostagia

The demise of the Twinkie, Paul Krugman writes, has unleashed a wave of nostalgia for the 1950's -- a world  many conservatives think of as a Golden Age. But, Krugman writes, the economic policies of the '50's were  a lot different than the conservative prescriptions for our time:

Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.

Nor were high taxes the only burden wealthy businessmen had to bear. They also faced a labor force with a degree of bargaining power hard to imagine today. In 1955 roughly a third of American workers were union members. In the biggest companies, management and labor bargained as equals, so much so that it was common to talk about corporations serving an array of “stakeholders” as opposed to merely serving stockholders. 

From 1947 to 1973 median family incomes doubled. Since that time they have remained flat. 

The problem with modern conservatism is that its memory -- like its clientele -- is highly selective. The 1950's was a difficult time. It was the time of the McCarthy witch-hunts and the time when school children were advised to "duck and cover" in case of nuclear attack.

Modern conservatives live in an imaginary world  -- a world which was not as they imagine it -- and a world which is not as it is.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Something's In The Air

In his review of Stephen Harper's first year of majority rule, John Ibbitson wrote that the prime minister had  been "unbound." And the passage of the government's omnibus budget bill seemed to prove Ibbitson's point. But, as the contents of the bill were made public, something else happened. The public showed signs of discontent.

Frank Graves reported that the Conservatives' poll numbers were dropping in key areas of the country. Up to the passage of the budget, Canadians were bullish on the country's future. But now they are evenly split:

The latest numbers show opinion split down the middle: 45 per cent say that the country is headed in the right direction compared to 46 per cent who say otherwise. A majority of respondents in Quebec, Atlantic Canada and British Columbia say the country is not on the right track.

No doubt, Stephen Maher and Glen McGregor's reports of election dirty tricks have had something to do with the Conservative decline. It's interesting that Postmedia -- until now a reliable echo chamber for the Conservatives -- has not been kind to the prime minister. Even more interesting was a column a week ago by Michael denTandt -- another Postmedia stalwart. Dent Tandt concluded the column with the following observation:

In 2011, this same prime minister based an election campaign - successfully - on the notion that a coalition of "losing parties" holding a majority of seats in the House of Commons would lack the legitimacy to govern. This was, simply, a lie. In 2012 this prime minister, having once argued forcefully against the legitimacy of omnibus bills, forced one through himself, in the process changing more than 70 laws. This summer, Canadians are expected to forget all this, and more, because we live in uncertain economic times. Europe, you know. We go along, to get along.

Stephen Harper is not Maurice Duplessis. But the call to overlook abuses of democracy, for the sake of economic expediency - which is a never-ending murmur, beneath every move the Conservative government now makes - is insidious. It's not tyranny, nor should it be called that. But some days, you can see tyranny from here.

When Postmedia begins to comment on the stench emanating from Fortress Harper, you know something is in the air. And it's an ill wind.