The Conservative Party has made a lot of hay over the billion dollar boondoggle of the Liberal gun registry, a tool that has debatable benefits for law enforcement agencies, and does more to curtail illegal ownership of 40-year-old long guns in the hands of Toronto Star writers than street gangs.

The Liberal gun registry came to symbolize everything that is wrong with big spending, big government prying into the affairs of law-abiding citizens. There is little doubt that the move led to some migration of support over to the Conservative Party, who originally posed a fiscally conservative, more libertarian kind of government.

Well, those days are long gone now, as Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have managed to shatter all previous perceptions of being fiscally restrained. The 2009 federal budget promised $30 billion in support to the Canadian economy in the form of “stimulus” spending, equivalent to 1.9 per cent of our total economy. But The Fraser Institute later argued that stimulus spending accounted for just 0.2 percentage points of economic growth between the second and third quarters of last year, and nothing from the third to the fourth.

Then there’s the inexplicable $1.1 billion “security summit”, a boondoggle so massive that not even former PMO spokesman Kory Teneycke could contain his disgust. The amount is so far beyond the understanding of most Canadians, that we have become relegated to shaking our heads in disbelief over the wastefulness of spending that kind of money on an international schmoozefest of little real value.

Now the good old Right Honourable Stephen Joseph Harper is signaling a readiness to commit a billion dollars to the G8 maternal health program, sending all that money out of the country for foreign aid at a time when Canada is still reeling from a $40 billion deficit last year alone. At the rate the government bandies about billions of dollars, it might be a relief to get a more fiscally conservative leader back in the halls of power. Even Paul Martin didn’t open the purse strings this wide.

The sad thing is that to find any semblance of fiscal conservatism these days, one would have to open the pages of the Globe and Mail and read former Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan’s latest diatribe on Stephen Harper’s big government.

The fact is that most of the recent controversies surrounding the Conservatives have all been owed to pandering to woollyheaded Liberal ideas of subsidizing green technology, extending the social services blanket to the third world, and cultural events like Toronto Pride. Had the Conservatives cut these extraneous tentacles suction-cupped to the udders of the government long ago, we could have avoided the expectation that the responsibility of the government is provide an endless flow of milk and honey.

The “old” Stephen Harper opposed business welfare and public subsidies. The “new” one loves them so much that he’s set up regional development agencies for such economically challenged areas as Southern Ontario.

Then there’s the fact that the Conservatives are dabbling in appeasement tactics for other government-dependent industries, such as the “green” technologies that have complemented Al Gore’s snake oil tour so well. Rahim Jaffer wouldn’t have been mucking around in the lobbying business if there wasn’t a lot of money to be made in peddling the global warming racket. This, even as Great Britain’s scientific community is undergoing a revolution of sorts on the issue.

I suppose it’s a bit of an addiction to be able to get in front the cameras every day and make spending announcements of a billion dollars. It not only makes the government look like it’s doing something, but that it “cares”. Unfortunately it’s also sending Canada right into the poor house. By the end of the 2009 budget fiscal outlook, Canada will be sitting at least $600 billion in public debt, meaning that up to $20 billion in expenditures each year will come from interest payments alone.

And no matter how many times Stephen Harper says he’s going to decrease the size of the government, review departmental spending, or start tightening the belt, it never happens. All we get is boondoogle after boondoggle. The man who was brought in with lofty ideals about spending restraint and transparency has been just about as contrary to them as possible.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

This is reminiscent of the excellent video from April 24, 2009, in which a YouTuber explained in pennies just how bankrupt the United States is. The above video also does a pretty good job, since people tend to visualize a lot better than they conceptualize. Even without the visual aid, it’s easy to demonstrate just how meaningless $807 million in savings is with this government. They’re spending $179.4 million just to plan and prepare security for this summer’s G8 and G20 summits in Toronto in which they will discuss things such as reducing the public debt.

h/t SDA

From the same person who created this advertisement, comes a new one directed at the Liberal policy on E.I. [h/t Blue Like You]. The message is simple, loud, and clear enough. The system will be prone to, and rampant with abuse, and all sponsored by the Liberal Party of Canada.

Michael Ignatieff has been caught saying a number of rather dubious statements of late. One that infuriated more than a few people was his statement: “We created the country you live in. Never forget it“. This hearkens back to the time of Liberal arrogance, in which you were either a proud Canadian voter of the “natural governing party”, or you weren’t. It could not be any more obvious that this is a shot at the Conservative attack ads which Mr.Ignatieff insists is an attack on Canadians who, like himself, have been out of the country. It is ironic, then, that the Liberal leader would engage in such a partisan and divisive statement, which seeks to exclude those Canadians who helped to create this country, but did not vote for the Liberal party. More than that, it’s ridiculous to hear that coming from a man whose family immigrated here during the Bolshevik revolution, long after this country was “created”.

The other ridiculous statement was made by Michael Ignatieff in the House of Commons on Thursday:

“My party has an unimpeachable record in fiscal responsibility.”

Even the Toronto Star called out the Liberals on that one, quoting Ian Brodie, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Mr.Brodie said that the Liberal brand is not connected to solid economic management, which is why the Conservatives know they can advertise the Liberals as being a party of high taxes and spending. He also said that the Liberals were “repelling voters” in the 2006 election with lectures on how good they were on the economy:

“If I had to sit though another Paul Martin lecture about the importance of competitiveness, productivity and innovation, I would want to stop voting as well,” he said, to laughter from the crowd.

If there is a problem with fighting the Liberals on their credibility with the economy or on raising taxes, as the above video alludes to, it would be the current projection of a $50 billion deficit as announced by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty last week. Because we’re borrowing against our future equity in order to provide stimulus spending now, or so goes the argument, we’re going to start allocating money toward paying down the debt in future budgets. We will not be able to do this without either raising taxes or cutting spending. Which leaves a future government in a very tight spot indeed. Will they be able to make the difficult choices necessary to balance the budget and make debt repayments without raising taxes? I tend to believe they will not. Cutting the GST by 2% has been proven over and over to have been a very costly gesture of fiscal conservatism for the party.

As David Warren writes in his article “In search of real conservatives“, the figure of $1.4 million per job for the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts is a damning indictment against the idea that the Conservative Party will be able to financially manage the future:

Government bailouts are unlimited, more or less by definition. For were a government to say, “You may have $13.5 billion, but after you’ve blown that in, you’re on your own,” it might as well say, “You may have zero.” Once the principle of fiscal accountability is abandoned, it is abandoned.

The political calculation is straightforward. The money is really going to save the seats of a few local MPs, at a cost of so many billion per seat for the next election. The joke is if they lose them anyway, we still have to pay.

[...]

For even if such a party were not in power, its existence as an alternative would put pressure on the governing spendthrift party to watch out. Having a Conservative party that is really a liberal party leaves us no choice but to vote for the actual Liberal party, when we have scores to settle with them.

So even if the Conservatives don’t raise taxes to deal with the mess that they were involved in creating, the next government will, with the result being the same. The taxpayers will pay.