afransen
Senior Member
From his blog, yesterday:
"Our appeal followed the time-honoured advice for raising money by direct mail -- make people angry and afraid, and set up an opponent for them to give against."
— Tom Flanagan, Harper's Team
Ontario led the country in job growth last month, nearly all of it in full-time work, much of it through a construction boom that produced job growth outstripping the loss of industrial jobs by 50%. Given the troubles of Ontario's main export market it is a stellar performance.
But Stephen Harper needs somebody to pick on, and Stéphane Dion refuses to show up for the fight. So Dalton McGuinty's Ontario government is the latest designated target, and we are all being asked to sit and smile through yet another of the Prime Minister's asinine tantrums.
Today is budget day at Queen's Park. Pierre Poilièvre, the reliably pliable eastern Ontario Tory MP, has been sent to Queen's Park to critique the budget on behalf of the federal Conservative party. (UPDATE: And the Conservative party's website is now doing a limbo dance under its own previously rock-bottom standards.) This merely extends a show that has been going on for a while now. For weeks the Prime Minister's yappy little budget terrier, Jim Flaherty, has been making apocalyptic pronouncements about the Ontario economy and the McGuinty government's stewardship. Ontario is "the last place" to start a business, and it's headed for have-not status, and it was the "strongest economic province in the federation" when his party delivered its last budget at a car-parts plant somewhere.
Now the truth, if anyone wants some, is that unemployment in Ontario is down nine-tenths of a percentage point from the days when Flaherty and his friends were running up a hidden $5.6 billion deficit. But then, nobody should depend too heavily on Jim Flaherty to pick a winner: he has the unique distinction of being the only man in Canadian history who managed to lose to both Ernie Eves and John Tory.
As for Ontario's chances of becoming an equalization-receiving province, here's Don Drummond of TD Bank saying the biggest culprit if that ever happens will be the Harper-Flaherty government. "They seem to be bent on making Ontario's situation worse at the moment," Drummond says.
Of course they are. For then Harper will have created a bogeyman Ontarians can be angry and afraid of, so he can do some fundraising against them. It's what he does.
The Senate, the CBC, assorted arms-length commissioners and regulators having exhausted their amusements for our impatient leader, he has now turned his distracted, essentially random fury on the voters of Ontario. This is because they voted wrong.
They had their instructions. Nearly two years ago Harper went to a John Tory fundraiser and called Tory "the next premier of Ontario." But just because Tory can beat Jim Flaherty doesn't mean he can beat a pro, and Ontarians stubbornly decided to elect somebody else.
Surely by now Ontarians should know that the big guy doesn't like it when his orders are ignored. And his contempt for Ontarians' electoral decisions, when the voters of that province have the gall not to vote Harper's way, is a matter of long record: witness his childish rant in the aftermath of Stockwell Day's 2000 election defeat. (And understand this: if anyone ever manages to beat Stephen Harper fair and square in a general election, we will see a display of gracelessness in defeat without precedent in the history of Confederation. This is simply guaranteed. It is what he does.)
There are two things going on here. One is the baselessness of Flaherty/Poilièvre/Harper's attack on Ontario's budgeting. Oil is at historic highs, the dollar is up a quarter in the last years, the U.S. real-estate industry is essentially imploding, five central banks pumped hundreds of billions of liquidity into the market in a co-ordinated push -- and the problem is Dwight Duncan's business-tax rates? Come on.
The other is the impudence of Harper's control-freakery. We know he likes to run everything, but here's the deal: if somebody signs up to be a Conservative staffer, you can tell them what to do, OK? You don't get to run the Senate. You don't get to push bureaucrats around for kicks. You don't get to muzzle public servants, tell reporters how to cover you, pick the next US president or write Ontario budgets. There's a Canadian constitution that says so, and just because you boycotted the 25th-anniversary celebrations of the Charter of Rights doesn't mean the separation of powers, which isn't even in the Charter, goes away by fiat.
Stephen Harper is such a clever tactician that his little games can be so fascinating we overlook their significance. The significance of this one is, well, significant: he's badmouthing his own country's industrial heartland and running roughshod over the prerogatives of a legitimately-elected government for the sake of cheap political points and to prop up his serial loser of a finance minister. It's not funny.
-------------------------------------------
I was a little surprised. This seemed uncharacteristic of Wells--he normally bemusedly criticizes everyone. Doesn't sound like he's laughing anymore.
"Our appeal followed the time-honoured advice for raising money by direct mail -- make people angry and afraid, and set up an opponent for them to give against."
— Tom Flanagan, Harper's Team
Ontario led the country in job growth last month, nearly all of it in full-time work, much of it through a construction boom that produced job growth outstripping the loss of industrial jobs by 50%. Given the troubles of Ontario's main export market it is a stellar performance.
But Stephen Harper needs somebody to pick on, and Stéphane Dion refuses to show up for the fight. So Dalton McGuinty's Ontario government is the latest designated target, and we are all being asked to sit and smile through yet another of the Prime Minister's asinine tantrums.
Today is budget day at Queen's Park. Pierre Poilièvre, the reliably pliable eastern Ontario Tory MP, has been sent to Queen's Park to critique the budget on behalf of the federal Conservative party. (UPDATE: And the Conservative party's website is now doing a limbo dance under its own previously rock-bottom standards.) This merely extends a show that has been going on for a while now. For weeks the Prime Minister's yappy little budget terrier, Jim Flaherty, has been making apocalyptic pronouncements about the Ontario economy and the McGuinty government's stewardship. Ontario is "the last place" to start a business, and it's headed for have-not status, and it was the "strongest economic province in the federation" when his party delivered its last budget at a car-parts plant somewhere.
Now the truth, if anyone wants some, is that unemployment in Ontario is down nine-tenths of a percentage point from the days when Flaherty and his friends were running up a hidden $5.6 billion deficit. But then, nobody should depend too heavily on Jim Flaherty to pick a winner: he has the unique distinction of being the only man in Canadian history who managed to lose to both Ernie Eves and John Tory.
As for Ontario's chances of becoming an equalization-receiving province, here's Don Drummond of TD Bank saying the biggest culprit if that ever happens will be the Harper-Flaherty government. "They seem to be bent on making Ontario's situation worse at the moment," Drummond says.
Of course they are. For then Harper will have created a bogeyman Ontarians can be angry and afraid of, so he can do some fundraising against them. It's what he does.
The Senate, the CBC, assorted arms-length commissioners and regulators having exhausted their amusements for our impatient leader, he has now turned his distracted, essentially random fury on the voters of Ontario. This is because they voted wrong.
They had their instructions. Nearly two years ago Harper went to a John Tory fundraiser and called Tory "the next premier of Ontario." But just because Tory can beat Jim Flaherty doesn't mean he can beat a pro, and Ontarians stubbornly decided to elect somebody else.
Surely by now Ontarians should know that the big guy doesn't like it when his orders are ignored. And his contempt for Ontarians' electoral decisions, when the voters of that province have the gall not to vote Harper's way, is a matter of long record: witness his childish rant in the aftermath of Stockwell Day's 2000 election defeat. (And understand this: if anyone ever manages to beat Stephen Harper fair and square in a general election, we will see a display of gracelessness in defeat without precedent in the history of Confederation. This is simply guaranteed. It is what he does.)
There are two things going on here. One is the baselessness of Flaherty/Poilièvre/Harper's attack on Ontario's budgeting. Oil is at historic highs, the dollar is up a quarter in the last years, the U.S. real-estate industry is essentially imploding, five central banks pumped hundreds of billions of liquidity into the market in a co-ordinated push -- and the problem is Dwight Duncan's business-tax rates? Come on.
The other is the impudence of Harper's control-freakery. We know he likes to run everything, but here's the deal: if somebody signs up to be a Conservative staffer, you can tell them what to do, OK? You don't get to run the Senate. You don't get to push bureaucrats around for kicks. You don't get to muzzle public servants, tell reporters how to cover you, pick the next US president or write Ontario budgets. There's a Canadian constitution that says so, and just because you boycotted the 25th-anniversary celebrations of the Charter of Rights doesn't mean the separation of powers, which isn't even in the Charter, goes away by fiat.
Stephen Harper is such a clever tactician that his little games can be so fascinating we overlook their significance. The significance of this one is, well, significant: he's badmouthing his own country's industrial heartland and running roughshod over the prerogatives of a legitimately-elected government for the sake of cheap political points and to prop up his serial loser of a finance minister. It's not funny.
-------------------------------------------
I was a little surprised. This seemed uncharacteristic of Wells--he normally bemusedly criticizes everyone. Doesn't sound like he's laughing anymore.
