Harper Halted
Sorry for all of my comments in the article but I would have just pulled quotes out and posted the same anyway, which may have looked like I was trying to take things out of context.
And don't tell me ... (you know who you are
), "it's too long to read." A newspaper article. Heaven forefend that links to real documentation, hundreds of pages, be posted to try to clear up some ignorance from certain people who just don't get it -- much like Harper.
May 21, 2005. 10:43 AM www.thestar.com
Harper Halted
Tory leader fails disastrously in his bid to defeat the Liberal government
All he did was bruise his already fractured party further, Thomas Walkom writes
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[Photograph of Harper in profile looking as though he's about to jump off the top of a building at night; grimly looking down at his fate with blankness in his tired eyes. Sorry, a picture is worth a thousand words but it's only available in the print edition with this caption under it.]
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper focused for several weeks on defeating the Liberal minority government. The only silver lining for him may be that he didn’t succeed, Thomas Walkom says.
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For Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, the dramatic confidence vote in the Commons on Thursday was more than a defeat. It was a disaster.
Over the past three weeks, Harper has focused single-mindedly on bringing down the Liberals of Prime Minister Paul Martin and forcing an early election.
But in the end all he managed to do was bruise his already fractured party further, while at the same time reminding voters — particularly in Ontario — why so many mistrust him.
Ironically, the only silver lining for Harper may be that he didn't succeed. If Martin's government had been defeated in the Commons on Thursday, polls suggest the Conservatives might well have come second — again —in the ensuing election.
Somehow, Harper had manoeuvred himself into a classic double bind.
Six weeks ago, few could have predicted this. Then, both Harper and his Conservatives seemed on a roll.
They faced a government that seemed aimless and a prime minister who appeared weak.
Justice John Gomery's sponsorship inquiry in Quebec, with its daily diet of allegations against the Liberals, reminded voters why they were so desperately sick of a party that has been in government for 12 straight years.
Meanwhile, Harper was quietly and systematically working to fix the weaknesses that had derailed him in last year's election. [At the time, "Not enough PC votes" ... due to Harper, the Calgary reform-alliance, was the answer to that one and no kidding.]
Then, the Conservatives had been accused of having a secret agenda [actually Harper came right out and said it over two popular vote polls back to back, a couple of weeks before the election, that made him think he was going to end up with a majority dictatorship and he came right out and said that "finally" whatever this alleged singularity of "Western Canada" isn't, was going to get to "run the country" ... that's a good way not to get any votes east of Manitoba; other than the protest votes against the Ontario Liberal Party, with most Ontarians having no clue who/what a Stephen Harper even was or what "reform" or "canadian" alliance were ... Canadian huh? I mean, eh?
To meet that criticism, Harper held a policy convention in March. Unlike the Alliance and its predecessor, Reform, this convention did not produce a set of clear-cut, controversial positions. Rather, it resulted in a vague and anodyne document — much like the kinds of policy platforms the Liberals and the old Progressive Conservatives used to manufacture.
It was designed not to inspire but to soothe. [With what, lies? We're supposed to believe now that they've turned over a new leaf, when the only member they had from the Ontario section of the Windsor-Quebec City Corridor, former CEO of Magna International, which is worth hundreds of millions dollars more now, had to leave the "conservative" reform-alliance to be able to vote the way the majority of her electorate wanted her to, along with the majority of south Ontario, finally getting some our taxes trickled back?] With luck, the Conservatives hoped, it would help convince moderate voters, particularly in Ontario, that the Harper-led party was not made up of wild-eyed fanatics. [Which is BS media entertainment to sell ad space. It all came down to the new deal for cities, the new deal for Toronto in Toronto and the area to us, and Harper being against it and stating that everything needed more money. Of course everything needs more money, but set priorities that make some sense. Cities can generate more revenues faster than anything. Spreading money around leaves nothing with any money that's of any use. Focus on expanding the tax base and then the cities will be able to pay more for everything, to expand other economies/tax bases. But his support is rural, the real cities are big eastern cities aside from Vancouver (Lower Mainland-southern Vancouver Island region), which is a hard sell: the amount of money that Toronto (City of and the city-region not just the GTA) needs back out of its own taxes could buy a lot of votes elsewhere. But the GTA generates of 25% of the GDP of the Canadas: more than rest of Ontario, Quebec has just over 21%, B.C. just over 12%, Alberta just under 12% and then everything drops off the economic line graphs, bar/pie charts, whatever. Toronto (GTA) generates more revenues than any province in the country and it's not a province. So how is someone who's been dividing "Western Canada" from the rest, trying to make it a singularity united in hatred against "the east", supposed to convince anyone in "the east" now that he didn't mean what he said right before the last election, when he thought he was going to win a majority dictatorship? And what's "the east"? The Atlanic Canadas, north Ontario, north Quebec? Or maybe the Windsor-Quebec City Corridor with almost 60% of the population of the Canadas, paying out 70% of all federal revenues on average; which Harper leaves out. The christian evangelical "fundamentalist" who ran Manning's first disaster of an election campaign, came right out and said that his focus would be on "Western Canada" (which one?) from Stampede Town, is going to support Toronto, Montreal, south Ontario? He and the party he represents, the Stampede Town 'reformers', have been building up hatred against "Ontario" and "Quebec". But 93% of the population of Ontario lives on or south of the 401 (hwy), and other 400-series highways, which exist for a reason, other than Ottawa-Hull/Gatineau. And around economic analyses of Quebec, it's "Montreal and the rest" aside from what's considered to be part of Ontario's economy, a satellite market/economy of Ottawa-Hull. That the smaller portion of Hull happens to be in Quebec is irrelevant. Political lines don't exist on economic maps, when it's exactly how political structures should be laid out.]
Was abortion a problem? Harper promised that if elected, he would not introduce legislation to curb abortion rights. [And who believes it? Who believes anything that any politician says anymore? Just don't promise us a kick to the teeth. People will believe that from a party based in Stampede Town.]
Were the voters worried that the Conservatives might kill medicare? In April, Harper journeyed to Calgary to publicly tell medicare's sternest critics that national universal public health insurance in Canada is here to stay. [Talk the talk. Anyone can do that. The problem is whether he can walk the walk.]
Was he too wooden on stage? Harper worked on that, too. He told jokes. He was self-deprecating.
"I couldn't become an accountant," he would tell chuckling audiences. "I lacked the necessary charisma." [Not to mention basic math skills if anyone was supposed to believe his last non-platform, but what could be gotten out of him, would have resulted in anything close to a balanced budget even using the most liberal/best economic forecasts around.]
And he imposed discipline on his caucus. There was to be one line, one leader.
Conservative MPs, particularly those from the old Reform/Alliance wing, were told to abandon their practice of making controversial, off-the-cuff comments on matters like immigration. Everything was tightly scripted. [And that showed; reading scripts, acting, playing games, but so what?]
Even Harper's position on same-sex marriage was carefully thought out. Polls show that Canadians are split almost evenly on the question. By opposing same-sex marriage (while accepting same-sex civil unions), the Conservatives figured they had an issue that could effectively differentiate them from the Liberals in key ridings.
Yet, hidden in this newly disciplined party were the seeds of trouble.
Much has to do with Harper himself. He is not a natural politician. He does not suffer fools easily. Nor does he have much interest in people who do not interest him. [Nor does any closed-minded, intolerant person.]
As leader, he has surrounded himself with a coterie of like-minded advisers. But it is a tight circle that other Conservatives say they find near-impossible to penetrate.
"Good politicians are able to make everyone on the team seem valued, even people they hate," explains one well-connected Conservative. "Stephen doesn't have that knack." [And doesn't even know the basic rule of keeping your friends close and [perceived] enemies closer -- or they turn into real ones as Stronach did.]
In particular, party insiders say, Harper had little patience with the couple who by default had come to represent the Progressive [Conservative] wing of the new party — Nova Scotia MP Peter MacKay and Ontario's Belinda Stronach.
In political terms, neither is a towering figure. MacKay, the son of former Conservative MP Elmer MacKay, is best known for reneging on his promise not to merge the old Progressive Conservatives with Harper's Alliance. [We call him the most foolish traitor in Canadian history. And he will be tarred and feathered eventually.
Without any background in politics [which is a good thing] or any coherent platform [which isn't a good thing -- that's the harper's job], Stronach, the daughter of industrialist Frank Stronach, decided two years ago that she wanted to become prime minister.
To make that happen, she won the backing of well-known Progressive Conservatives such as former Ontario premier Bill Davis and took on Harper — unsuccessfully, as it turned out — for the leadership of the newly merged party. [Another fatal blow. Had she won, the anti-east business and particularly south Ontario, would have been put to rest; but not the incoherent platform issues. Instead, even at their first policy convention the "new conservatives" tried to give more weight to representatives from the west. Same old same old.]
During that 2004 leadership campaign, Harper seemed to find it difficult to hide his disdain for Stronach. [And hence, south Ontario. It's how everyone sees it around here and it's nothing new at all. Maybe we should get an anti-west party going and see how many votes it picks up in the west. But we wouldn't have to sit around bitching and moaning about not getting votes in the west, because we'd win and too bad for the western Canadas. Has that happened? Of course not. But why shouldn't the hatred be returned? And all we need is the Windsor-Quebec City Corridor, not the rest of the Ontarios or Quebecs or Atlantic Canadas either -- for a majority dictatorship to represent ourselves and our own interests; particularly in the Ontario section. We're accused of it anyway, so why shouldn't we do it for real?]
Insiders say the relationship remained frosty even after she entered the Commons last year as the novice MP from Newmarket-Aurora. Neither Harper nor Stronach made matters easy.
[I need a [line] andBBCode tag for this. Why haven't they at least come up with...tags? The phpBB group are lazy programmers.
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`You may have lost tonight's battle,
but you've done it in order to
win the war'
Stephen Harper, speaking to his Conservative caucus
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"Belinda was high-maintenance," says one Conservative. "She wanted to be stroked, consulted, included in everything." :shock:
Harper, however, rarely obliged. He was particularly irked when Stronach publicly criticized his decision to seek an early election. :shock:
MacKay, even though he is nominally deputy leader, was also left outside the charmed circle. [FOOL! I could have told you, you stupid moron. But he deserves what he gets; to be forgotten and to go back to Nova Scotia to work on his pappy's farm.]
His actions too, particularly his very public criticisms during the March policy convention, are said to have irritated the Conservative leader. :shock: [What doesn't irritate the harper?]
It didn't help that MacKay and Stronach were involved (or, to use her words from January, "We date. Omigod.").
When testimony about alleged Liberal kickbacks exploded at the Gomery inquiry last month, the Conservatives seemed united behind Harper [and his harping, wasting our time and money; he's not a lawyer, has no education in law and is certainly not Justice Gomery, who is not just a qualified lawyer; which is why he's called Justice as opposed to "Leader of the Official Opposition"].
But underneath, in both party and caucus, fissures were forming. They exploded into the open this week with Stronach's dramatic defection to the Liberals.
That defection gave Martin the crucial vote he needed to win Thursday's confidence vote.
But Conservatives say Stronach's action also unnerved many in her old party. Even some who saw her as a Conservative of convenience took her departure as indicative of how Harper and his clique viewed so-called Red Tories.
"It says to people that moderates [as opposed to being intolerant] aren't welcome," says one party member.
In hindsight, mistakes are always easy to spot. Still, the way in which Harper's Conservatives managed to transform the gold of Gomery into a lead weight around their own necks is quite a remarkable story of political miscalculation.
To Harper and his advisers, Gomery's hearings into the sponsorship scandal only confirmed what they had always believed [with no right to; innocent until proven guilty and not by opposition politicians whose sole job is try to discret and embarrass the government]: The Liberals were corrupt fiscally and morally. They had no right to govern.
For a good many voters in Ontario, the Atlantic provinces and British Columbia, however, the terrain looked slightly different.
To these voters, the Gomery revelations proved something they too had come to believe — that all politics (and particularly all Quebec politics) are corrupt.
If all politics are corrupt, then, in a curious way, Liberal culpability in the sponsorship scandal is mitigated.
The view among a good many Ontario voters could be expressed this way: If it hadn't been the Liberals, it would have been someone else. [As in, we're fed up with the whole rotten mess of insults to the words "structure" and "systems" in this mess -- starting with our local "represenatives" and the Ontario feds. No amount of banadages is going to fix anything.]
The upshot of this was that the sense of national outrage against the Liberals, which spiked in mid-April, was shortlived.
As Harper continued to rail against Liberal malfeasance, the mood in much of the country swung from sympathy for the Conservative position to irritation with Harper.
His vigour was interpreted as stridency — which reminded voters why they had been reluctant to vote for him a year earlier.
Harper argued (correctly, in my view [-- um the author of the article; my comments are in brackets[] not parenthesis]) that Martin's deals — with Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the New Democrats, Ontario and Stronach — were desperate attempts to hold on to power.
But the more he [Harper] talked, the more suspicious the voters he needed became. Polls show that by the end, a good many voters thought it was Harper who was[/is now even more] desperate, not Martin.
The second great miscalculation Harper made was to announce that he no longer supported the Liberal budget.
On the face of it, this should have presented no problem. When the budget came down in February, it was treated by most of the public with a polite yawn.
But budgets determine how governments spend. And key interest groups were very much interested in the spending this budget promised.
The premiers of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia were desperate for the money laid out in the budget's Atlantic Accord. Big-city mayors wanted the aid [TAX RETURNS AND PITTANCES] promised them. The child-care lobby was anxious to make sure that a national daycare scheme was not derailed again.
When the Liberals turned to the New Democrats for support [vice versa, the NDP went to the "liberals" to jockey for position] and promised $4.6 billion more for universities and housing, this revised budget seemed even more attractive to many Canadians.
Harper tried to deal with all of this by promising to uphold any agreements with provincial governments that the Liberals had made. Criticisms continued.
So, at the last minute, he [The Reverend Harper, Mr. Dithers] reversed himself again and agreed to support the original Liberal budget — including the Atlantic Accord.
But by then, the damage had been done. For many voters, what was at stake on Thursday was a budget they now thought they rather liked.
Ironically, Harper had forced Martin to come up with something the Prime Minister had not been able to produce on his own — a coherent rationale for his government's existence.
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved.
Sorry for all of my comments in the article but I would have just pulled quotes out and posted the same anyway, which may have looked like I was trying to take things out of context.
And don't tell me ... (you know who you are
), "it's too long to read." A newspaper article. Heaven forefend that links to real documentation, hundreds of pages, be posted to try to clear up some ignorance from certain people who just don't get it -- much like Harper.
