Harper; this will be fun to watch ! (Canadian)

Great Debates
1

I woke up this morning and reality finally hit me. Canada is in for change ! But how successful can the conservatives be if they insist on implementing their platform. All the other parties are to the left. Thats right folks, the country voted left and got a conservative government for their efforts. Chaulk one up for the two party system.

So Harper has to be very careful. Remember Joe Who? Any bills in the house being voted on will require a majority of votes (I think it goes that way or at least I’m close) or the government falls. Harper will have to carefully craft his proposed legislation to appease the opposition while handing out bones to government members. Conservative patience will no doubt wane over the next 12 months. Those conservatives with their social agenda will find that their efforts will have been totally useless. At that point, within 18 months I predict, Harper will have to decide to go for broke.

Harper needs to be very smart. He needs to buy time so the country has an opportunity to respect and trust him as a national leader. He needs to show some results. And if he succeeds, he will have formed a majority government when that hidden agenda can be fully unleased.

The fun begins. Harper’s first move is to appoint Derek Burney](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Burney) as chief of staff.

Read this

What a brilliant appointment. Harper’s first major test has been passed. A+ It isn’t easy to form a cabinet and act like a competent government without any experience whatsoever. It’s like if for some weird reason the new government headed by Matt-mcl was made up solely by dopers. Who here knows how to be a Minister of Defense ? Anyone willing to give it a try? Burney will put that magic Mulroney(only conservative prime minister to win a majority, two, since Diefenbaker) touch on the freshman Harper and we are off to the races.
I’ll bet quite a few of those old conservative geezers are gonna forgive the young ones for their treachery in destroying the Progressive Conservative Party. Now that Burney’s got on board there will definitely be others of the old guard willing to consult. If there is one thing conservatives can unite on is their desire to crush the Liberals. Even Mulroney himself who can’t stop talking and reveal his innermost secrets of success and who to watch out for will help I’m sure.

My prediction? Harper will gain a majority in the next election.

2

No, only bills dealing with a matter of confidence, i.e. money bills.

3

Sure, if he doesn’t screw up.

4

Um, maybe you heard about the 2000 US election?

Let me get this straight - there will be no coalition government, the PM will have to deal with a Parliament in which a majority opposes him, right? So either he gets nothing done, he essentially follows Liberal/Green/NDP policies, or you’ll be holding another election real soon, right?

If US precedent means anything, even a brief period of actual responsibility will destroy your Conservatives. Good luck, eh?

5

I don’t know a great deal about The Bloc (except for the obvious things) but it’s pretty clear that they are in a really powerful position right now. Frankly I think they determine whether the Conservatives get a majority next time.

My political viewpoint is fundamentally different than the Conservative party so I am encouraged by the fact that he will need the okay of another party to do anything serious. I have a reasonable amount of repsect for Mr. Harper as well. He did run a pretty good campaign (although I could have done without the Attack ads but they came from all sides) and appears to be intelligent and also seems to want to do what’s best for the country. So despite the fact that I don’t agree with the direction he plans to take the country, I’m sure I’ll survive well enough for the next few years.

I think it partially depends on who the Liberals run now that Martin’s out. If they get someone with some actual charisma and they run a better campaign than the gong show they ran this time I’m not sure it’ll matter what happens until the next election.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure the Conservatives will ever get a majority. I just think there are too many people on the Left half of the spectrum. He may win the next election handily but I think enough seats will be spread accross the other parties that he won’t get the 154 or 5 or whatever he needs.

The only way I see it happening at all is if they do next to nothing socially (by that I mean, abortion, same sex marriage, etc.). If he stays relatively close to the center and the country performs well financially this term he may just pull it off but even still, I’m not so sure. I just think there are too many people who will always naturally vote left (or bloc).

6

If CTV’s Leadership Race article is correct, the Liberals won’t have much interest in bringing down the government for 18 months or so, to provide some breathing room to find a new Liberal leader. So, it should be an interesting time watching the Liberals “play nice” with the Conservatives for the next little while.

7

That’s my greatest fear. If he does what his natural constituents want, there will be a vote of non-confidence and the Conservatives will fall. If he goes with what the Liberals/NDP want, he’ll face a revolt from within his own party. He’s definitely in a tough position.

There are, however, some bright spots. For one, Harper is a fiscal conservative, and the Liberals pretty much are as well. So he may not get as much opposition on some of his fiscal reforms as he’d like.

Another is that a big part of the Conservative platform centers around reforming the system - more openness in our government, better financial controls, etc. There’s widespread support for that, especially from the Bloc and NDP.

Third, the other parties know that Canadians are really tired of having to go to the polls every year or two, and so it’s a very dangerous game to bring down the government over an essentially partisan issue.

Another platform of the Tories is law and order, and it’s probably their most politically popular stance.

They also want to get rid of the gun registry, which will be very popular. Hell, I think the Liberals would have liked to get rid of it, since it’s a huge white elephant. They just couldn’t, because it was their idea in the first place. I suspect there will be an attitude of ‘good riddance’ over that one.

What the Conservatives won’t be able to do is implement their social conservative policies - which suits me just fine.

Harper’s got a difficult road ahead of him, but it’s not impossible. And if he pulls off a good job and becomes more popular with the people, it will be that much more dangerous for the opposition to bring down the government.

8

I meant, he may not get as much opposition as you might think. I have no idea how I mangled that.

9

Just how conservative is this Conservative Party? For instance, does it want to abolish the single-payer health care system?

10

Actually in 2000 the country voted right in congress and got right in congress (at least in the house, I can’t remember the composition of the Senate but I think it may have been 50-50 then 50-49-1 when that Vermont guy went independent and let the dems take over.)

In the 2000 presidential election the country voted moderate and got right-moderate. At least at the time, Bush has moved to the right since then and Gore may have moved to the left now that he never has to stand for election again.

11

No, but it does want to open Canada to private health care paid for with the public dime.

12

Isn’t that what you’ve got now? (As distinct from the British system where doctors are state employees.)

13

It depends - how Conservative would they be if they could get everyone to go along with them? Pretty darned Conservative. Stephen Harper is an almost-Libertarian who made a name for himself as part of a group of free-market economists at the University of Calgary. He’d be right at home at the American Enterprise Institute or even Cato. Other founders of the party are religious Conservatives from the old Reform party and would be right at home in the Republican right. The core of the Conservative Party is really the heart of Alberta Conservatism, and Alberta is pretty darned conservative.

However, within the context of a viable Canadian political party, they have toned that way, way down. Harper is smart enough to understand that Canadians do not believe in the kind of free-market philosophy that he would like, and for that matter there is a bit of split on that regard within the Conservative party itself between the social and economic conservatives. So the party’s official platform is really much more incrementalist and modest in what they want to achieve. For example, here’s some of their 2004 platform goals:

[ul]
[li]Elimination of the gun registry[/li][li]A 2% cut in the GST (Goods and Services Tax)[/li][li]Tougher sentencing for violent offenders and criminals who use guns[/li][li]Ending taxpayer subsidies of political parties and forced corporate/union political donations[/li][li]Fixed-date elections (right now, the sitting government gets to call the election, which gives them a tremendous incumbency advantage)[/li][li]Freer trade, both within Canada and with other countries[/li][li]Middle-class tax cuts, and new deductions for children to help families[/li][li]Cutting corporate taxes, to be paid for by cutting corporate subsidies an equal amount, to level the playing field[/li][li]Transferring more gasoline taxes back to the provinces for infrastructure improvement, rather than putting the money into federal general revenues[/li][li]Improving retirement savings programs for low-income Canadians[/li][li]legislated debt-to-GDP ratio debt repayment[/li][li]Deregulating farming [/li][li]Inreasing funding of Canada’s public health care system, and instituting maximum waiting list guarantees.[/li][li]Strengthening Canada’s student loan program[/li][li]Improving relations with the United States[/li][li]Increasing Canada’s military funding to match the European NATO average as a percentage of GDP[/li][li]Balanced budgets[/li][/ul]

As you can see, there’s nothing particularly radical in there. Most of their platform is ‘good government’ reforms and policy-wonk tweaking to make us more competitive. They actually want to increase public health care funding, funding for R&D and post-secondary education, etc. It’s actually a very sound platform, and I think it will go over well with most of Canada. For example, Canadians show a strong desire to increase our military strength, whereas Martin’s Liberals raided military funds repeatedly to pay for their own pet projects.

Now, if Harper could get all that done, would he push for further free-market reforms and more conservative policies? Undoubtedly. But he’ll only go as far as the Canadian people are willing to follow.

14

No. As it stands today, there’s no private hospital I can go to to receive, say, a heart transplant. It’s not far wrong to think of doctors not as state employees, but as self-employed contractors who’ve contracted themselves out to the government. It’s government, not corporate, policy that ultimately determines how a hospital runs.

15

Same as every minority government. If they govern like the last one, they’ll be supported by the other parties on a case by case basis.

The opposition would not dare force another election just yet; the potential backlash could increase the Conservative share. And in any case, the Liberal Party cannot fight an election until they have a new leader.

Then BrianGlutton asks:

I think this a good question to illustrate why “Conservative” and “Liberal” are not easy terms to describe people with.

If the Conservatives were to abolish the single payer health care system in June of this year - which they couldn’t, but suppose they somehow fooled another party into voting Yes when they meant to vote No - the Conservative Party would cease to exist. I mean, literally cease to be a party of significance; their support would drop from 35% to maybe 4, 5 percent within 48 hours of the story hitting the papers, and the party as it stands would effectively dissolve. I would guess that within five years there would be no more party by that name. If somehow a very determned person kept the party alive and funded, they would not win another election for at least fifty, and possibly more than a hundred years.

The Canadian health care system is the single most popular, most widely supported government program in the history of Canada; it is a program that literally defines Canada, the thing that many Canadians will identify as the greatest thing about their country. Asked to vote on who the greatest Canadian to ever live was, they picked the guy who came up with the idea of the health care system. The Conservatives would no more get rid of it than they would cut off their own nuts. It’s considered controversial that they have suggested that maybe you shouldn’t be punished for just entering into a private contract with a doctor to have a medical procedure done on Canadian soil; when a court in Quebec ruled that such a thing should be allowed, rather than forcing the patient to die on a waiting list (I am not making this up) people were up in arms that the public system was “under attack.”

The idea that the CPC would dump public health care is, frankly, completely fucking insane. Not that I’m flaming BrainGlutton, he doesn’t live here; people who DO live here were stupid enough to believe this. It has nothing to do with thier beliefs, really, of Stephen Harper’s beliefs, or of what Conservatives should or should not believe; it has to do with the beliefs of the Canadian people. Canadians want public health care, and it is electorally impossible to do otherwise. You’d be out of a job just as soon as the election could be held.

16

You keep saying this, and it just isn’t true. Harper is a committed social conservative. No, he’s not a social conservative in the mold of the American religious right. He’s not even a social conservative of the sort that Stockwell Day and Vic Toews are. But he is a committed social conservative nonetheless, of the old-fashioned Burkean variety. Describing him as libertarian is just inaccurate.

17

That would be Tommy Douglas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Douglas) of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (now the New Democratic Party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democratic_Party)).

18

Yeah, I screwed up the description again. He’s certainly more socially conservative than a libertarian. I tried to characterize him as someone who would be comfortable at AEI or (almost) Cato. Lots of social conservatives at AEI. Not so much at Cato.

19

I think it’s easy to be misled because his views on social issues are rather different from the religious social conservatives that make up most of the social conservatives around. I also think he realizes more than many of his colleagues that social conservatism is not a winning proposition in Canada and so has been downplaying that side of the Tory platform, partly to make the Tories less “scary”, and partly to avoid raising the expectations of his socially conservative constituents.

20

Close but no cigar, as Ms. Lewinsky might say.

CCF was the Canadian equivalent of “Prairie populism” and had a strong presence in Manitoba. It merged with the political arm of trade unionism and a couple of minor Leftist elements to create the NDP.