Philosophically, I'm really conservative about the things that matter, meaning the economy and foreign policy, and libertarian on the things that don't, which is everything else. For example, I support gay marriage, if only because I can't think of a reason that I shouldn't that doesn't make me feel like a goddamn goober. "Because homos are icky" is hardly a compelling case for the government to do anything other than mind its own friggin' business. A small government does not exist to pat you on the head and give you a cookie you when your precious values feel violated because it would very quickly cease being small.
I couldn't bring myself to vote for the Tories in 2004 and '06 because I had no confidence that Harper would be able to keep his social conservatives in line, which I freely admit that was wrong about. I pointedly refused to support them in 2008 because it had become crystal clear by then that they were Bush Republicans on fiscal policy. Anyone who didn't know that they had already blown through the $13 billion surplus by then just wasn't paying attention or was engaging in factually insupportable wishful thinking.
Once they had held off the then-terrifying specter of an opposition coalition, Harper engaged in stimulus spending that was well to the left of Barack Obama's in the United States and considerably more expensive. If you add up the Conservative deficits from 2009 to today, you find yourself in the neighborhood of about $120 billion dollars - and that assumes that the government is even telling the truth, which is something that they're not famous for when it comes to the economy.
In October of 2008, a full month after the crash of Lehman Brothers precipitated the End Times, Harper publicly stated that he would "never" engage in deficit spending. In fact, he has spent more money in a shorter period than even Pierre Trudeau did at the height of his power and has less to show for it. Brian Mulroney, who I cast my first vote for, spent a lot of money, too, but he also raised more than his share of revenue with the Free Trade Agreement and the GST. Without those things, the deficit wouldn't have been eliminated as easily as it was under Chretien.
Yet many of those who shudder at the memory of Trudeau and Mulroney, and shake their fists at the mere mention of Obama's name want me to reward Stephen Harper for being demonstrably worse than both. Sorry, I've spent far too long establishing my credibility on these matters and I refuse to piss it away just because my favorite colour is blue. And the fact that the Conservative banner matches my eyes is pretty much the only reason I'd have to vote for them.
Worse still, the current Conservative platform is riddled with tens, if not hundreds of billions in new spending and social engineering boutique tax credits (which are basically the same thing) that he has no plausible way of paying for.
And those are just a few of the reasons that I found the most recent Tory ad so entertaining and enraging.
That ad is so riddled with outright lies and willful ignorance that I'm actually impressed that the Tories managed to fit it all in a 30 second spot.
Firstly, Harper didn't "cut taxes," at least not in any real way. What he did do was riddle the tax code with credits, which rewarded you if you spent your money the way the government wanted you to. Oh, and he wanted to give your babysitter a tip. Prior to the Bush-Harper-Obama age, none of these things were considered conservative practices, yet the Tories couldn't be more proud of them. And please don't blame any of that on Harper's minority because all of it was in his 2005-06 platform.
If you ask anyone who knows anything about economics, they'll tell you that consumption taxes are the least productive cuts imaginable. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure that you could design a worse tax cut than reducing the GST. It barely saved consumers pennies on the dollar, which helps paying the bills not at all unless you happened to be buying a house or a car with cash.
But it did cost a fortune in government revenue, which is fine if you match the revenue loss with spending cuts. And that's something that the Harper government pointedly refused to do. As a matter of fact, he campaigned on increased spending in both 2005 and '08. Indeed, he grew the government by nearly a quarter, much of it in 2006, when the Liberal Party didn't have a leader to "force" him to do much of anything.
I'll grant you that all of the above were fantastic politics, but spectacularly bad economics. And Harper pursued it even after it had become clear what similar policies had done to the U.S budget. But let us not forget that this was actually how he won government. Fiscal conservative bitching aside, he wasn't lying about spending, nor do I think that he is now.
But the ad is almost supernaturally dishonest about paying for that spending. When the Tories mention paying for stuff at all, they assume that economic growth and attrition in the public service is going to finance his spending sprees, which is ahistorical nonsense in that it assumes a level of growth that we haven't seen since World War II.
Yes, feel free to mock "tax and spend" all you want, but it's good and goddamned time that somebody points out the Harper-Bush-Obama fiscal model of "borrow and spend" is several degrees worse. It is nothing more than a deferred tax on people that didn't get to vote on our moronic priorities and the accumulated interest almost guarantees that it is going to be a significant tax increase which will retard economic growth at some point and limit the options of future governments.
Look, this election isn't about fiscal responsibility, despite the fact that the Tories would like to pretend that it is. It's a contest to see who can blow through the most money the fastest and have the least to show for it. And under no circumstances will I reward Stephen Harper for not only making that possible, but continuing to encourage it.
Both here and elsewhere, I'm getting quite a bit of blowback for announcing my intention to vote for the NDP. Firstly, it doesn't matter given the riding I live in, where the Liberal cannot lose. Secondly, I'm voting specifically to destroy the Liberals forever. Once they're removed as a ballot option, I believe that you greatly moderate the behaviour of both the Conservatives and the NDP, who no longer have to engage in fringe nonsense to separate themselves from the Grits. Third, I'm hoping that a good trip to the woodshed will teach the Conservatives to start acting like conservatives.
Frankly, I'm not pretending to be particularly influential and I'm not trying to convince anyone to do anything that they aren't going to do anyway. If it were up to me, I'd continue my practice of voting for independents and minor party candidates, but that option has been denied to me this time out.
Having said that, I'm not going to pretend that the Harper Conservatives aren't electioneering hacks with a notable ignorance of basic math. Too many conservatives have pretended that the Tories were something other than what they said they were as far back as 2005. And if I had any interest in rewarding that kind of politics, I'd vote for the Liberals who never pretended to be anything else. I simply have no interest in replacing the Liberals with a Conservative Party that acts and governs exactly as they did in the 1970s.
If nothing else, this promises to be the most interesting election this country has had in twenty years.
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