That's His Answer ...

Stephen Harper was lying back then. Either he consciously knew that he was creating almost monumental deficits well before 2008 or he's just too spectacularly stupid to be prime minister. In fairness, I can't really discount the possibility that both are true.

It's not as if he had to look far to see what his economic policies would produce. By the time Harper assumed office in February 2006, President Bush was well on his way to bankrupting the United States with a strange combination of tax cuts and massively increased program spending.

Some of you might want to argue that Bush's wars were largely responsible for the deficits, and that's a debate that I'd love to have. If you take that position, you have to acknowledge that the Bush years were the only time in American history when taxes went down during wartime. As a matter of fact, I can't find an example of that happening anywhere else in the world throughout history, which isn't surprising because it's actually an insane thing to do. It's an almost inescapable conclusion that Bush didn't take the wars or the economy seriously.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost slightly less than a trillion dollars during Bush's tenure. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts cost more than three times that, about $3.2 trillion. Then there was No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D, which between them cost roughly another trillion. Then there were the boondoggle highway and and farm bills, which cost hundreds of billions each. Non-security department budgets, like Education, doubled or tripled in size under Bush. As it happens, the wars might have been the cheapest exercises President Bush presided over.

I would presume that, as a major political leader in a neighboring country, Stephen Harper was paying attention to what was happening down south. Yet he did exactly the same thing.

The $13 billion surplus that Harper inherited not quite three years before was gone by the time he answered the question in the video above, during the 2008 fall campaign. If he didn't know that, then he was guilty of grievous inattention to the economic stewardship of this country. Then, right in the middle of that campaign, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world started ending. The Conservatives, in the persons of the prime minister and his jabbering dupe of a finance minister, responded by denying even the possibility of a recession, even though we'd been in one for several months.

When Parliament resumed sitting that November, Flaherty introduced an economic statement that said that everything was fine and that no stimulus spending was necessary. Then, on a completely unrelated matter, the Liberals and the NDP announced that they would form a coalition that would be supported by the Bloc Quebecois.

That apparently  got the Conservatives' attention. The following March, Harper and Flaherty completely reversed themselves and introduced a budget bulging with Keynesian philosophy and old-timey pork barrelling. And then they had the balls to take credit for that. When you factor in the relative difference in size of our economies, the Harper stimulus was as big or bigger than that of the Obama administration, which allegedly conservative bloggers and talking heads are still bitching about. And a much bigger percentage of the U.S stimulus was tax cuts than was the case in Canada.

Here's what you need to know about why Canada prospered to the extent that it did during the Great Recession. Our banks didn't collapse. That's it. Because credit didn't dry up completely, we weren't hit the way that the United States and Europe were.

And that had precisely nothing to do with the Harper Government - which, again, I think that I'm legally required to call them. The reason that our banks didn't collapse is simple: Canadian governments of every stripe knew for decades that bankers were evil, so they were legally disallowed from being stupid. What Harper doesn't tell you, though, is that the Canadian Alliance - the party he headed before the merged Conservative Party was created - very much wanted to let the bankers be stupid.

Here's the thing, I might be able to let bygones be bygones if the Harper Tories even realized that they had done anything wrong. And they don't. They categorically refuse to acknowledge any intellectual or philosophical inconsistencies whatsoever. To this day they're running around the country touting their stunted and wrong bastardized combination of Keynesian and supply-side economics. Shit, they're proud of it.

Your vote is your vote, and I'm not going to pretend that I'm smart enough or important enough to influence that either way. But there are any number of "principled conservatives" out there that think Harper should be rewarded with a majority for the very Bush-Obama policies that they otherwise proclaim that they hate.

I wouldn't even mind that so much if they would take some pride in ownership in what they're doing. Almost to a person, they refuse to admit that their guy is a whore and has used public money to try to buy a majority for five straight years. Instead, they feed us the almost insulting canard that "he'll be a real conservative once he gets his majority," despite the fact that that's counterintuitive. It's much more likely that the Tories will conclude that nothing succeeds like success and going on like they have, if only because they'll want to keep their majority.

I guess that I could be wrong about that, but there's no evidence that I am, and a five-year record that says that I'm right. These people may as well be arguing that Barack Obama is suddenly going to transform himself into Barry Goldwater on January 20, 2013.

You know, I'd just be a lot happier if a lot of them just came out and said that they were voting for Harper because their favorite colour is blue, and not some charade of "deeply held principle." Is that too much to ask?