That Harper Stain

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The Conservatives were hypocrites when they were in government. Now they are hypocrites in opposition. Consider the journey interim leader Rona Ambrose has taken. Michael Harris writes:

Now, Rona has asked for a pre-budget meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Does she want to offer him advice on how to run budgetary deficits? Does she want to show him how to hide the bad stuff in an omnibus bill? Whatever the reason, Rona now believes in the government should consult the Opposition Leader. Where was the outreach when Rona’s bunch ruled the roost? The only thing Stephen Harper ever consulted was his navel.

Then there’s Rona’s volte face on a royal commission into missing and murdered aboriginal women. While in power, she was dead against the idea, just like Steve. Now that Steve has taken to hanging out incognito in Vegas and Fort Myers, Rona’s compassion needle is jumping like a Geiger counter at Fukushima.

During the Harper Occupation, when Ambrose was health minister, marijuana was the devil’s weed. Minister Ambrose made it a moral and “scientific” issue: no legal doobies on her watch, and no support for municipally-run marijuana dispensaries either. Otherwise, all the kids would be stoned before they got to finger-painting.

The Cons put our money where their mouths were — all $7 million of it. They spent the numbers off the credit card on an anti-marijuana-legalization drive, pimping out Health Canada in the process. It was, of course, really just an anti-Justin Trudeau campaign — and people noticed.

And those members of the caucus who are rumoured to be applying for the permanent job all have pasts that make it difficult to believe any change of heart they may confess to:

[Peter] MacKay led his previous party into oblivion through the merger with the Canadian Alliance. Progressive Conservatives like David Orchard have not forgotten how that happened.

The past has such a long reach. How does Pierre Poilievre live down the cash-for-kids gambit, or his partisan-inspired Fair Elections Act, the Harper government’s non-answer to robocalls?

How does Erin O’Toole champion the cause of veterans when his government closed down their service centers and told them they were a bunch of union dupes?

I ask you, how does Kellie Leitch run for leader after standing beside Chris Alexander in front of a sign that said, “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices”?

They are a collection of Lady Macbeths. No matter how hard they scrub, that Harper stain won't be washed clean.

Confidence Men

On  July 4th, while the Americans were setting off fire works and putting out forest fires, Jeffrey Simpson reports that Conservative cabinet ministers were crisscrossing the country, making spending announcements:

Denis Lebel, Minister of Transport, was announcing money for John Lewis Industries in La Tuque, Que., at 10 a.m., then hurried along to Saint-Irénée to dump money into Le Domaine Forget de Charlevoix. Gail Shea, Minister of National Revenue and Prince Edward Island’s cabinet representative, was in Abram Village, PEI, at 10 a.m., then at Coleman, PEI, at 2:30 p.m.

Ministers were at such places as Martin’s Family Fruit Farm in Waterloo; the Town of Blue Mountains; Minto, N.B.; Plum Point, Nfld.; Fredericton. Tough as times supposedly are for the federal government, Gary Goodyear, the Minister for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (an agency created by the Harper government), was announcing a new fund for Southern Ontario businesses.

Remember: this is the government that just cut spending on OAS, on Employment Insurance and Foreign Aid. This the government which shuttered Rights and Democracy and the Experimental Lakes Area. And this is the government which just beat back every amendment to its budget bill with the same refrain: We can't afford it.

It is, indeed, curious that a government which claims to be a universal beacon of sound financial management could be working so obviously at cross purposes. But, then, Simpson provides a little historical perspective:

In the 16 years that Conservatives have been in office since 1963, they have run just two surpluses – the first two years of the Harper government. These surpluses were inherited from the Paul Martin government that, together with the previous Chrétien government, ran nine consecutive years of surpluses.

The Harperites took a $13.8-billion surplus inherited from the Martin government and made it a $5.8-billion deficit in 2008. Since then, the Harperites have presided over $111-billion in deficits.

No, the Harperites are not stellar managers. But they are stellar confidence men. And, yes -- as the ascension of Julian Fantino makes clear -- they are mostly men. And, like all good confidence men, they have a gift for sizing up their marks -- us.

This Is "Freedom"

Modern conservatives like to say that they stand for individual liberty. But, Lawrence Martin writes,

in both Canada and the United States, the conservative parties are now controlled by virulent wings that are prepared to go to aggressive lengths to achieve their ambitions. The danger is that, in the name of freedom, they bring forth the contrary.

Martin then goes on to catalogue the Harper government's attempts to move in exactly the opposite direction from the one it professes:

Last week, the Conservatives were planning to go ahead with a system of national online surveillance. But a national outcry against the plan (originally advocated by the Liberals) will likely force amendments.

Earlier in the month, from a government that took no umbrage at Guantanamo-style justice, came the decision to accept information derived from torture from foreign governments, in some cases. The Conservatives, we recall, have also vowed to bring back long-expired post-9/11 antiterrorism powers that allow Canadians to be locked up without charges.

Freedom of expression has also been in the news. Last week, disgusted representatives from the Canadian science community sent an open letter to the Prime Minister calling for him to stop muzzling federal researchers. Under the government’s extensive vetting system, civil servants and diplomats are less free to voice their views than they have ever been. Also recently, opponents of the Northern Gateway pipeline were pilloried as foreign-financed radicals and, according to one sworn affidavit, as enemies of the state. And during last fall’s Durban summit on climate change, the Conservatives denied opposition members their usual right to accreditation.

Yesterday came the report from Elections Canada that, during the last election, a firm  made telephone calls telling voters that the location of their polls had changed. It was a crude attempt to suppress opposition votes. The firm, Racknine, was under contract to the Conservative Party.

The pattern is pretty obvious. The Conservatives do not practice what they preach.  There is no limit to the liberties they will take to suppress the liberties of individual Canadians. In fact, Martin writes:

The accumulation of dirty tricks is beginning to sound like something out of Nixonland. The last election, we recall, was the one where citizens were hauled out of Conservative campaign rallies for the sin of having marginal ties to other parties.

 Behold the Conservative cabal. "Such men," said Caesar, "are dangerous."

Harpocrisy

Tony Clement was grilled yesterday by a parliamentary committee  reviewing spending for "border security" in his riding. But, as Lawrence Martin writes this morning, "It's John Baird who is on the hook for G-8 money games." The trouble is that Baird sees only a picayune bureaucratic transgression:

It should be noted that the $50-million was more than just a top-up. It was the bulk. The border fund was only $33-million. Baird’s add-on made it $83-million. 

Baird explained that the border fund was used as a way of trying to expedite things. He wanted the legacy fund projects – which included things like new sidewalks, outdoor furniture and landscaping, some of which was far away from the Huntsville summit site – to get rolling quickly. But what kind of morality is at play when a senior minister of the Crown feels it’s justifiable to camouflage a major expenditure under a different budgetary category for the sake of hurrying things along?

Remember, these were the folks who were apoplectic about the Sponsorship Scandal. They howled about the rot which had engulfed the Chretien government. But this, says Mr. Baird, is small potatoes. The two transgressions -- both uncovered by the auditor general -- were not of the same order of magnitude.

Baird is effective at disarming critics and was so again at the hearings. It was like, ‘Ah well, we made some mistakes, we agree with the Auditor-General, we’ll do better next time, let’s move on.’

Baird's  hypocrisy is extraordinary. It's so egregious it deserves a name of its own. Call it "Harpocrisy."