John Ivison is an often underrated political columnist who really hits the nail on the head every once in a while. His Saturday column on Ignatieff needing to stop talking about Ignatieff is one perfect example of his perceptive proficiencies.

As every political poll, survey and focus group has told him, Michael Ignatieff has failed miserably to build his image and brand as successfully as Stephen Harper. In fact, he’s failed so badly that only fringe party leader Elizabeth May has a less alluring leadership brand.

And of all the things that have hampered Ignatieff, nothing has been so pronounced as his expatriate days when Canada was little more than a vacation home to return to and renew his membership card. As Ivison writes, “it reminds voters that here is a man who is not like them,” in any way shape or form. Regardless of how many times the man tries to explain it in soft light video with archival footage of Harvard, he only serves to further validate the “just visiting” charge from the Conservatives.

But that’s the fault of the Liberal war room. They don’t seem to be able to perceive that the greatest asset of the Liberal leader isn’t what he provides, but what he doesn’t provide: the cult of personality that Stephen Harper has built around himself.

The Liberals are never going to match Ignatieff with Harper in some political gladitorial showdown, as the prime minister is going to win that match every single time. It isn’t about intelligence or experience or wisdom. Some people just “have it” and with Ignatieff, baby, you don’t have it.

What they’re missing, however, is the chance to juxtapose the Liberal brand as precisely the opposite to what many Canadians have come to dislike and distrust about the Conservatives. Instead of promoting the Liberal leader as the central brand, focus on branding the political party as a group of people all working equally toward some common goal.

Instead of the centralizing power of the Conservatives where all political messages have to be filtered through the PMO and Party HQ, where party candidates and workers have to be vetted for common media interviews, the Liberals could focus on being what the Conservatives are not.

The contrast could be remarkable if done properly. Ignatieff could step back and say that it isn’t about him, it’s about Canada and the kind of vision all 308 candidates have for a Liberal vision of the country. The Liberal brand is obviously enduring enough that it can hold a quarter of the electoral loyalty, despite having a weak leader for much of the past half decade.

Of course, that will never happen. Because part of the reason the Conservative strategy works is that it’s true. Ignatieff didn’t come back to Canada to stand out of the spotlight and campaign for a better Canada on ideas alone. He came back to be coronated as the returning monarch of Canada by virtue of his superior human qualities.

And even if that can’t be articulated on a perfectly logical plane of thought, it is the gnawing instinct of mistrust that is what most likely provides the negative feedback loop the Liberals are receiving in polls.

The exclusion of two apparent Liberal party supporters from a Conservative campaign event in London, Ontario is being blamed on a sinister plot by the PMO to screen out opposition supporters. The story has even led Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to directly accuse Stephen Harper of demanding more rigorous background checks on people showing up at his campaign events than advisers he hires to work for him.

Ignatieff went on to tell reporters during a stop in Newfoundland that “you are in a very un-Canadian place” when people get barred from public meetings for being friends with him on Facebook. One of the women who said she was barred from the event had to pre-register for the rally and that’s how the Conservatives screened her out.

First off, it’s an obvious bit of turnabout being fair play for Ignatieff, who is taking the opportunity to mock Stephen Harper for his party’s own campaign against Ignatieff’s own allegiance to Canada. And it’s clear that he’s exploiting the situation to create his own media spotlight, happily granted by the mainstream press.

Second, it seems to be taken for granted that this was deliberate, and further indicative of the sort of contempt for democratic practices that the Conservatives have displayed in this country’s most hallowed institutions. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

But does it seem logical, or even practical, to screen every person who pre-registers for a campaign event, and then exclude them if they’re seen to belong to another party? Wouldn’t it seem more likely that the party would be less interested in the decided Conservative voters who will do little more than wave banners, and more interested in the kind of people who might be pursued to abandon Ignatieff and add a vote for the Conservatives?

Lost in the narrative of this whole exclusion story is the fact the Conservatives are on a campaign to win over the soft Liberal support that will grant them the majority government they so desperately covet. The idea that Stephen Harper is ordering the PMO to draw up lists of political enemies to exclude them from campaign rallies is about as ridiculous as it gets.

And if these women were excluded because of the Quixotic decision of one or more Conservative staffers, then it seems a little overdone to continue belabouring the point long after the party has issued a statement of apology and indicated it was a mistake. Assigning motives from the highest tiers of power to exclude potential voters from rallies is pretty much the textbook definition of Harper derangement syndrome.

Of course there is another, albeit equally implausible, version of events to this story. As ridiculous as it is to suspect the prime minister of trying to exclude voters from a campaign rally designed to gain more voters, is it at all possible the Liberal party hired young students to go to these rallies in order to make the claim they were denied entry?

I mean, is it at all possible that given the political fodder that has been made over the claims of two people in the entire country of Canada, that a calculation was made somewhere in Liberal party headquarters to further the conspiratorial theories that Stephen Harper’s anti-democratic government is out to be mean and nasty to young, innocent students?

Possible? Yes. Plausible? No. But neither is the sort of claims that are being given serious consideration by people who pretend to have serious minds in organizations that pretend to be serious dispensers of news.

The current selection of ideas being proposed by the usual faces in Ottawa has to be among the most deluded I’ve heard in quite some time. The only party that appears to be displaying any fiscal common sense is the Conservatives, and that’s only because they’re not going to open the floodgates again until 2015.

It’s positively bizarre, actually, to listen to the Conservative proposals for the 2011 election, since they all take place in 2015, or the year that Canada’s deficit will magically be balanced. From the announcements he’s made, one would think Stephen Harper was actually running in a different time period than the others. A $500 fitness tax credit and income-splitting are just two of the big ticket items voters can expect a half decade from now.

Whatever spending promises have been made by the Conservatives, however, they pale in comparison to those made by the “Nanny State Professor”, with $8 billion in big-ticket social spending over the next two years. And they’ll somehow be paid for without raising income taxes (which isn’t exactly true, since they plan to raise corporate rates back up to 18 per cent).

The Liberal plan is big on the party’s attempt to corral the family vote from the Conservatives, adding $8 billion in new spending. $1 billion would go toward Registered Education Savings Plans (which personally appeals to a parent like myself, since my RESP isn’t tax-deductible while RSPs are), $1.2 billion would go to daycare, $700 million to better GICs and $400 million to energy retrofits (which is a bit of a policy lift from the Conservatives).

To say the Liberal budget is unaffordable is an understatement, although this seems remarkably similar to the same sort of pie-in-the-sky promises made by the Ontario Liberals when Dalton McGuinty reached out to put a chicken in every pot that was hard done by the Harris era.

It would be one thing if we were running large surpluses for Ignatieff to make these kinds of spending promises, but during a deficit it is frankly irresponsible. The sheer enormity of it all suggests the platform is aimed more at election racketeering than good policy-making. The last thing we need are more social programs that can be expected to balloon in cost over the next decade.

As for Jack Layton, he’s mostly out-to-lunch as usual. He’d create a jobs program that would be funded by returning the corporate tax rate to 19.5 per cent, proving once again that socialists don’t understand the fundamentals of economics.

There is one aspect of the NDP spending platform that deserves a closer look. His $103 million promise to improve benefits for military veterans is admirable, and certainly affordable when compared to the fact the Conservative government is willing to spend $100 million on the commemoration of the war of 1812.

Not that Layton is really in this two-horse race. Nor is Ignatieff, if you look at the polls lately. But Harper is taking some deserved heat for saying today that he wouldn’t meet the Liberal leader in a man-to-man showdown in front of the cameras (though it has been pointed out that Sun TV is willing to accommodate when they launch in late April), giving CBC reporter Terry Milewski the opportunity to call him a chicken to his face.

The Conservatives are also constrained by the fact that they have said on the record they won’t change their budget, so the amount of vote-buying they can manage is limited to things that extend beyond the current budget projections, hence the reason for their bizarre tax promises in 2015.

Perhaps the best thing to hope for is a majority government, not because I believe the Conservatives deserve one, but because it would test once and for all the argument that the government’s fiscal credibility has been compromised by the demands of the opposition. That, and the fact we wouldn’t have to hear about unaffordable universal programs until sometime in 2015.

Photo credit: Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press

I have a feeling that Friday evening went down something like this. Michael Ignatieff got back to Liberal Party headquarters after standing in front of the media and equivocating about a coalition and was quite literally yelled at for being the smartest idiot in Canada.

Perhaps realizing the political damage of his faux pas, Ignatieff got up before the media on Saturday morning and made clear that he wouldn’t be forming a coalition should an election restore us to the same debilitating status quo of the past seven years. But it was too late.

The coalition is on the table now, and the Conservatives will use it to their utmost advantage. In the chess game of politics, Ignatieff left a pawn hanging and the Conservatives have happily gobbled it up to enjoy a material advantage.

That isn’t to say that Ignatieff doesn’t want the Liberals to win a minority government of their own, as unlikely as such a prospect might be at this moment. But I think it’s safe to say that Friday’s press conference told us everything we really needed to know about the possibility of a backup plan if the election goes anything like the polls are currently indicating.

Curiously, the talk in the media today has nothing to do with the Ignatieff coalition gaffe, but an obscure moment in the ancient history of Canadian politics, back when the Liberals were in power and Stephen Harper seemed open to overthrowing the Liberals with a power-sharing agreement.

The discussion surrounding Harper’s own “coalition of 2004″ is dominating the journalist gossip stream, as though something Harper considered seven years ago has any relevance to what he believes today. Actually, one would be hard-pressed to find some relevance between what Harper said in October 2008 and what he believes today.

Seven years is a lifetime in politics. What Stephen Harper, or anybody else for that matter, wanted to do in 2004 has nothing whatsoever to do with the present political situation. Why, seven years ago we had an entirely different political makeup in Ottawa. The Liberals were on the wane of a decade-long power-drunk majority that had sapped the enthusiasm of Canadians. The Conservatives were a new amalgamation of formerly fractured elements of rightwing movements and political parties. Michael Ignatieff was a professor at Harvard University.

The truth is that whatever Stephen Harper was considering in 2004 has little to do with the present-day reality of Ignatieff’s “Plan B” coalition with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois. And it might sound like so much Conservative war room propaganda, had it not been for Ignatieff’s press conference slip-up.

There are those who get angry at the maligning of the idea of cooperation, saying that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a coalition in a parliamentary democracy, and that is precisely what Harper was aiming at in 2004. But this is a distortion of the facts.

The only political parties that ever agreed in writing to a coalition involving a separatist party is the NDP and Liberals, and Michael Ignatieff’s signature exists on that document. And even ignoring the unpleasantness of aligning with a separatist party in a greedy bid for power, there’s the fact that such an alliance presented a de facto majority against the Conservatives, who had actually won the most votes of any other single party. In most coalition governments — but certainly not all — the party with the most votes aligns with another from the opposition.

The reason the Conservatives can’t do that is they are already a coalition government, though nobody seems to recognize that. The party is made up of broad elements of social and fiscal conservatives, former Reformers, Alliance Party and Progressive Conservatives. The big tent party was forced to come together in order to avoid the problem faced by the current crop of leftwing political parties all striving for a piece of the 65 per cent of Canada that doesn’t vote Conservative.

Since the country is always likely to be divided between the unified right and the majority of left-leaning voters, there are only two logical options. One is a similar amalgamation of the political left into one party that can bridge the numerous differences present in the NDP, Green, Liberal and even Bloc Quebecois voters. The other is simply the coalition, which seems the most likely given the fact the writ has been dropped yet again.

The intentions of the Conservatives in 2004 remains a bit historically ambiguous, and though I’m sure it’s a fun talking point today for some people, it remains irrelevant. There is only one coalition of any importance, and it’s the one that Ignatieff seems destined to form after the Liberals lose yet another election to a minority Conservative government.

You might have seen this little blurb in the Toronto Star about Tommy Douglas’s daughter claiming that Stephen Harper is eroding the health care system. She reportedly said that while Harper would never admit he’s against the system, the evidence shows that the system is “being starved to death.”

First of all, let’s get some facts straight on this story. Total spending on health care in Canada reached roughly $191.6 billion in 2010, up by $9.5 billion (5.2 per cent) from 2009, according the Canadian Institute for Health Information. This represented a year-over-year increase of $216 per Canadian, bringing total health expenditure per capita to an estimated $5,614. As recently as 2008, Canada was fifth in the OECD for health care spending per capita.

When Tommy Douglas’s vision of Medicare was brought into being in 1962 by Woodrow Lloyd, the federal government offered a plan to fund 50 per cent of hospital costs. By 1966 that became a 50-50 arrangement between the federal government and the provinces. Since that time, and most notably during the Liberal majority governments during the 90s, health care transfer payments has dropped to about 16 per cent.

Spending as a per cent of GDP increased most between 1975 and 1992, rising from seven to 10 per cent in that time. Liberal cutbacks and changes to provincial transfer payments, particularly with the creation of the confusing Canada Health and Social Transfer system in 1996, resulted in a decline in spending.

Put into historical perspective, Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government in 1975 spent $12.2 billion on health care, or roughly $527 per person. In Brian Mulroney’s second year in office that number had increased to $49.8 billion ($1,541.70). At the Liberal handover of power in 2005, total health care spending was $140 billion ($4,333.30). So in just four years the Harper government has increased year-over-year spending by $10.32 billion, or an additional $1,280.70 for every man, woman and child in Canada.

I’m far from one to defend Stephen Harper’s spending habits, but it would seem to me that 27 per cent increase to the total health care spending in Canada over five years is a rather significant improvement, and far from being “starved to death.” Starving the system would have been to increase spending by a nominal increase in the inflationary adjustments.

Let’s not forget that the Canada Health Act is very clear in keeping health care a provincial jurisdiction. How the provinces manage their money is entirely up to the financial responsibility of the provincial leadership at the time. In 2007, the largest cost of health care spending was in hospital costs, eating 28.6 per cent of the whole; physician salaries took up 13.1 per cent; and prescription drugs accounted for 16.5 per cent.

According to the 2010 federal budget, $24.8 billion went to the provinces in the form of health transfer payments, second only to social security. An additional $2.9 billion was transferred in provincial program expenses. (It might be worthy to note that Canada spent $20.9 billion on national defence).

Health care spending accounts for between 37 per cent to 50 per cent of provincial budgets now, and that number continues to rise as the provinces depend on larger transfer payments from Ottawa. The logical solution, then, would be to amend the Canada Health Act to allow for a more flexible delivery of health care at the provincial level and remove the dependence on the federal government to control the problem.

Well, the above video is the latest attempt by the Liberals to reply to the campaign-style ads that the Conservatives have floated on YouTube. I’m not sure whether either party have aired their ads on television yet, but it certainly seems as though the rhetoric has been amplified toward a spring election.

The Liberal ad might be effective for people who believe the simplistic explanation that corporate tax cuts are a bad thing. I don’t know. I do know that I argued in favour of the 4.5 per cent tax cuts the federal government has made since 2006 being the main reason why the Canadian economy has rebounded more quickly than the rest of the G7.

I’m well aware of the Conservative deficit and the deficit spending that has little to nothing to do with the economic recovery, the burden of which will only create further problems on the balance sheet later. I’m also aware that dropping the corporate tax rate by another one and a half percentage point in 2012 will reduce the immediate revenue to the federal treasury by an estimated $6 billion. So the Liberals certainly aren’t lying on that point.

But where the Liberals, and the NDP and Bloc and Greens for that matter, seem to fall short in their reasoning is that the corporate tax cuts won’t create any economic stimulus. On the contrary, corporate tax cuts are most likely the strongest kind of economic stimulus, as it gives companies an opportunity to keep employees, make investments, hire new workers, or just simply decide not to move to a more favourable tax jurisdiction.

Which means that as far as the Liberal attack ad goes, it’s not much of an attack at all. Hammering on the Conservatives for cutting taxes is like being mad at a dog for barking. It’s what sound fiscally conservative policy should be.

If the Liberals wanted to mount a less self-defeating attack, removing “$6 billion tax cut” in big letters from their ads would be a good place to start. The second thing would be to question the spending practices of the Conservative government, and it would be no more difficult than quoting the Fraser Institute’s Niels Veldhuis.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, the so-called stimulus that was spent during the recession will have a compounded debt of $110 billion by the time the Conservatives expect to balance the ledgers in 2015. The federal debt at this juncture will be $626 billion, or fully $63 billion more than the Liberal government drove it to in 1997 when Canada’s debt hit a record high.

The problem is that although the Conservative government has taken a fiscally sound plan in cutting corporate taxes to 15 per cent, it continues to outspend all previous governments in growth and overall expenditures. In fact, in the five years that Stephen Harper has been Prime Minister, spending has increased from $209 billion under the Martin government to $278 billion for fiscal 2010-11, an increase of 25 per cent.

According to the Conservatives’ own estimates, when the budget will finally be balanced 2015-16 spending will be 25 per cent greater than it is now. It isn’t sustainable, even if revenues do recover to the point where we can begin to run modest surpluses again.

The problem is that the Liberals can’t exactly attack this plan, since they’re busy making large spending promises of their own. While they would cancel the 1.5 per cent corporate tax cut in 2012, they would implement a program aimed at expanding Employment Insurance, at a minimum cost of $1 billion every year. That’s not an alternative. That’s a worse scenario.

There are numerous methods and ways to balance the budget more quickly than the Conservative plan and without causing any panic. Among those are eliminating liberal spending programs like regional economic development agencies, corporate subsidies and handouts, so-called environmental subsidies and “loans” like the one handed to aerospace giant Pratt & Whitney Canada.

Privatize inefficient public companies, including the CBC, and end taxpayer support for the ones in competition with the private sector. Freeze hiring for the public sector and wages for two years. Reduce the Equalization program, which sees $8.5 billion sent to Quebec annually. Force them to develop their own revenue stream by tendering drilling rights in shale oil like British Columbia. Eliminate the vote subsidy. Claw back the departmental increases in spending to immigration and scrap the appeals process for denied refugees.

None of these choices should be considered too difficult when carrying a half-trillion-dollar public debt. When the government returns to surpluses sufficient to pay down the debt, then personal incomes tax cuts should follow. There’s a clear way forward. Now we just require the courage to walk in that direction.

Of all the esoteric rules in Ottawa to hunt down, Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis seems to have found the winner. Apparently, the MP has emailed the ethics commissioner over the only Conservative Party TV ad that isn’t offensive, because it appears to have been filmed in the prime minister’s office.

Presently the rules forbid parliamentarians from using the House of Commons “as a prop for election and party purposes.” But, in a surprising defence of the ad, Kady O’Malley notes an April 29, 2010 report from Mary Dawson, the federal ethics commissioner, which states “the Code refers only to persons, and not to entities.” So the Conservative Party appears safe from this latest Liberal thrust.

That isn’t the only controversy arising from the Conservative ads that haven’t yet aired on television. According to the Chronicle Herald, the CBC is upset that the Conservatives are using file footage from the broadcaster without permission. A little strange, considering the footage can hardly be identified as being the CBC’s, and besides the broadcaster is a crown corporation. So surely the footage belongs to everybody.

”The journalistic integrity of CBC-Radio-Canada — of the national public broadcaster — and its political neutrality require that our material not be used in partisan advertising,” CBC spokesman Marco Dube said Tuesday.

Excuse some of us in the bleachers for guffawing at the mention of the CBC needing to defend its “political neutrality.”

But what’s strange about Karygiannis’s request to have the ad with the House of Commons footage banned is that it’s the only one that really inspires a positive message and doesn’t depend on half-truths and character assassination.

Although the claims about the stimulus spending, saving jobs and GST benefits are debatable, the image of the Prime Minister working late, by himself, in the dark hallways of Parliament Hill are very effective (though they do seem to invite a Rick Mercer spoof). And by all accounts, it’s fairly accurate. The prime minster isn’t exactly known as a slacker.

Compare that one to the attack ad that asserts Ignatieff will jump into bed with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois at the first opportunity to form a coalition government. Does anyone actually believe this is still a possibility?

Worse yet, the quotes from Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff being used by the Conservatives are taken out of context, and suggest not only a lack of proper patriotism but an active will to destroy Canada. Indeed, it’s exactly the kind of yellow journalism that most conservatives are accusing the media of perpetrating on a regular basis. It’s an utter waste of political donation dollars.

I’d like to see more ads like the one Karygiannis wants banned. The kind that talk about the positive aspects of the Conservative record. The rest is just mud-slinging in the playground.

There’s a saying that’s perfect for Michael Ignatieff’s Liberal Party. Stupidity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.

The Liberal leader is embarking on yet another Pan-Canadian tour to bring “a simple message to 20 Conservative, NDP and Bloc Québécois-held ridings that don’t yet have a Liberal MP: After 5 years under Stephen Harper’s rule, Canadian families, and Canada, are worse off.”

The problem with the tour from the outset is that it isn’t even true.

Canada has rebounded from the past economic recession faster than anybody else in the G7, and according to the OECD is recovering somewhat faster than most other advanced economies. If Canadians are worse off in certain ways than they were in 2005, it’s difficult to blame the Conservatives. I don’t recall Stephen Harper forcing people to take on burdens of debt, mortgages and car payments they couldn’t afford in an uncertain economy.

Certainly, the Conservative Party could have run a tighter ship from the outset. This government has outspent all previous governments, including the previous Liberal ones, in practically every category imaginable. They have refused to make unpopular, but necessary, spending cuts. And our children stand to inherit at least $100 billion of new debt just to get through the recession.

But it isn’t as though the Liberals would have had it any other way. Their sole point of attack against the Conservatives could be on economic grounds, but they don’t have a leg to stand on that front either.

Michael Ignatieff is busy announcing a new universal program that would cost the taxpayers a minimum of $1 billion in new debt every year. And he says he’ll pay for it the easy way: by cutting the next scheduled corporate tax cut. The very tax cuts that have probably contributed to Canada’s quickest recovery from the recession.

The very idea that cancelling tax cuts while increasing spending is the easiest way to pay for a new program is wrongheaded. The new Family Care Plan would include a six-month benefit for people to take time off work to care for ill family members. Which makes this essentially an expansion of the Employment Insurance program.

The belief it would only cost $1 billion is rather naive. As the baby boomers gray more every year, entering their vulnerable late sixties and early seventies, the chances of year-over-year increases to the program cost are guaranteed. What Canada saves in the $6 billion corporate tax cut would be lost in program spending and economic growth as companies hire more workers with the tax savings.

As for Ignatieff’s latest Canadian tour, it’s a real head-scratcher. Recently arrived from the beaches of yet another winter vacation (I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Canadian politician who travels more than the Liberal leader), he wants to go on the road to bring the message that Canadians are worse off in 2011 than 2005.

You know, when expatiate Indian Mohandas Gandhi returned from South Africa to travel across India in 1915 in order to re-experience the country he had left behind for 27 years, he did so one time. He didn’t continue touring the country over and over and over again.

Ignatieff has done the university tour. The college tour. The high school tour. The town hall tour. The Liberal Express tour. It may be time to give it a rest. This compulsive need to go somewhere all the time suggests a missed opportunity as a member of a rock band.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks at a Conservative rally at Royal Roads University in Victoria. (Geoff Howe/Canadian Press)

I’m not a regular reader of Maclean’s Aaron Wherry, but thanks to the advent of Twitter I often come across his blog entries. Today’s was quite interesting, actually, as it pertains to Stephen Harper’s Prime Ministerial tenure approaching the top 10 longest-serving PMs.

On Sunday, Jan. 9, Harper will surpass Alexander Mackenzie for 12th spot on the list at four years, 337 days in power. On Feb. 6, he’ll slip into 11th spot, surpassing the esteemed Lester B. Pearson at precisely five years in power.

Whether you like him or not, Stephen Harper is rapidly approaching a list of very distinguished members found in Canada’s political history books. Those who have made significant impacts in the direction of our country, its policies and its reputation.

Again, my math is little better than Aaron Wherry’s, but Harper can reach the top 10 by surviving to late April (surpassing R. B. Bennett), which is a strong possibility, should no election be forced. He would have to also survive a possible fall election to pass John Diefenbaker for 9th spot.

After that, his chances fall off precipitously without a real shift in Canadian politics that brings stable, majority Conservative governments:

1. William Lyon Mackenzie King: 21 years, 154 days
2. Sir John A. Macdonald: 18 years, 359 days
3. Pierre Trudeau: 15 years, 164 days
4. Sir Wilfrid Laurier: 15 years, 86 days
5. Jean Chrétien: 10 years, 38 days
6. Brian Mulroney: 8 years, 281 days
7. Sir Robert Borden: 8 years, 274 days
8. Louis St. Laurent: 8 years, 218 days
…
13. Stephen Harper (incumbent): 4 years, 335 days

A third mandate would also put him into an exclusive list of just six other men who won that many elections.

First, from an earlier post:

…
Canadians, because of labels and their own ignorance, simply fail to recognize that President Obama and his actual policies are well to the right of our so-called Conservatives. I challenge anyone to name one major issue of public policy that would disprove my assertion, e.g.:

Health care
Afstan
Missile defence
Income tax levels
Foreign ownership of the media
Military spending
Immigration control of borders
Dealing with terrorism suspects
Capital punishment
Etc., etc., etc…

Earlier on the theme at Daimnation!:

Bush-lite

When will besotted Canadians wake up to the real Obama?

Stephen Harper is no Barack Obama

…

Now Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, much brighter than most of our dim pundit herd, makes the point that our Conservatives are hardly conservative compared to US Republicans–or Democrats sometimes (in fact much more often than Mr Gardner recognizes, see above):

…our erstwhile Reformers look remarkably moderate — which is to say, sweetly Canadian — and are getting steadily more so…

Yes, Conservatives and Republicans may both be “conservative” but they are remarkably different creatures. Name the issue. Health care? If the most right-wing member of the Conservative cabinet gave a speech about his government’s policies to Republicans, he’d be tarred, feathered, and put on the no-fly list. Multiculturalism and bilingualism? The Conservatives have said nothing that would offend a San Francisco city councillor. God, gays, guns? Stephen Harper is slightly to the left of Barack Obama on all three [emphasis added].

And so on down the list…

On economics, there’s an even bigger gap.

“Appropriate, well-timed stimulus measures have yielded dividends in jobs and growth,” Stephen Harper said in a press release this week. Got that? In effect, Harper said, “our Keynesian approach worked!” If he were a Republican, he would have been excommunicated.

To today’s Republicans, economic policy begins and ends with tax cuts. No matter what the circumstances may be — boom, bust, surplus, deficit, whatever — the solution is always the same. Always. “Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,” Republican Tom DeLay once said.

But not just any old tax cut will do for Republicans. The focus has to be on cuts for the rich…

Much to their credit, Canadian Conservatives seem to recognize that cutting taxes won’t magically erase the deficit. And back when they had a surplus to spend, they took two points off the GST, which made the overall tax burden more progressive. In supply-side terms, that’s heresy. But supply-side is a religion with few followers among Conservatives…

Mark
Ottawa