Some of the best and most insightful reporting on the Harper government has been done by Stephen Maher.
Yesterday he wrote:
Stephen Harper took a bold step forward this week to a new kind of
creative, performance-based politics, uncoupling himself from the
mundane world of facts and deftly using confusion as a weapon.
Maher was referring to Harper's attack on the NDP's proposed cap and trade policy, which Maher put into historical perspective:
To understand how we got here, we need to go back to 2008, when
Stephane Dion introduced his Green Shift, a complicated plan to impose a
$40-a-tonne tax on carbon emissions – imagine a meter on smokestacks –
and use the money to reduce income taxes.
The Conservatives attacked the idea relentlessly as a job killer.
Dion defended it inexpertly, and the result was electoral disaster for
the Liberals. Layton, who could see which way the wind was blowing,
side-stepped the attacks by calling for a cap-and-trade scheme, meaning
that industrial emissions would be capped, and companies could trade
their emission allowances on a market. Back then, the position was also
advocated by the Conservatives.
As John Baird said in 2008: “Carbon trading and the establishment of a
market price on carbon are key parts of our Turning the Corner plan.”
In the House on Friday, Baird dutifully attacked the NDP for advocating the same idea.
Harper is betting that the voting public has a short memory; and he believes that, if he repeats the attack often enough, voters will accept his version of reality. Thomas Mulcair has rightly labelled the strategy The Big Lie. It comes right out of Dr. Goebbels' playbook. And it should tell Canadians what Stephen Harper can accomplish with less than 40% of the vote.
