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

Our government, i.e. the prime minister, has basically lost interest (if they ever really had much)–even while the CF have some six more months of combat:

Conservatives shut down key Afghan cabinet committee
…
Military historian Jack Granatstein questioned whether the committee accomplished anything.

“I guess the question is: what has it been doing up till now?” he said. “There are a number of people who think it hadn’t been doing anything.”

Mr. Granatstein said Mr. Harper, and Mr. Harper alone, guided Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan and that his sense of direction lately has to be questioned.

When Mr. Harper came to power in 2006, he pledged that Canada would never “cut and run” while he was prime minister.

After Parliament approved a two-year extension to July 2011, Mr. Harper was adamant that the mission would end as scheduled, but he eventually agreed to have non-combat military trainers stay on for three more years.

Douglas Bland, chair of the Defence Management Studies Program at Queen’s University in Kingston, lamented the disbanding of the committee because it focused bureaucrats from several departments on important national security issues and forced them to work together.

“A lot of bureaucrats have come to understand the broad meaning of national security and they need leadership from the cabinet to keep that up, otherwise they’ll wander off and do other things that bureaucrats do in the stovepipe democracy,” Mr. Bland said [emphasis added, likely a key consequence of disbanding the committee--civilian bureaucratic institutional structures, and knowledge, related to conducting war will rapidly atrophy].

“The lesson has been (that) war-like operations — and that’s what this was — require the attention of ministers and especially the prime minister.”

Mr. Bland said it is simply not good enough to leave the Afghanistan mission as an agenda item for cabinet’s Foreign Affairs and Defence committee…

Actually it’s been clear for three years or so that Mr Harper had lost any real commitment to the military mission:

Prime Minister grumpy about Afghanistan

Meanwhile his tardiness while finally flip-flopping to agree to an ongoing CF training mission is leading to its own problems:

Well, well, well: The consequences of delaying our Afghan decision

Great way to run a (serious?) country’s war effort. As for combat:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to send an additional 1,400 Marine combat forces to Afghanistan, officials said, in a surprise move ahead of the spring fighting season to try to cement tentative security gains before White House-mandated troop reductions begin in July.

The Marine battalion could start arriving on the ground as early as mid-January. The forces would mostly be deployed in the south, around Kandahar [emphasis added--to where our soldiers now are?], where the U.S. has concentrated troops over the past several months…

Mark
Ottawa

A delightful piece of writing by Paul at Celestial Junk, do read to the end:

The Remaking of the Liberal Party of Canada

Earlier:

PMSH=WLMK?

Mark
Ottawa

This won’t hurt a bit. I’m just making a cabinet change.

So Stephen Harper is set to shuffle his cabinet, in this case euphemistically referred to as “injecting fresh blood” by the Canadian Press. Twice. And just what does it mean to inject fresh blood, anyway? Does the human body have blood that isn’t quite so fresh? And how does one determine the relative freshness of the sanguine fluid?

It will also give Harper a chance to inject some fresh blood into his cabinet as his team prepares for a potential spring election.
[...]
But if Harper does inject some fresh blood into his cabinet, it apparently won’t come in the form of newly-minted Senator Larry Smith.

Call me cynical, but wouldn’t “fresh blood” consist of more than just changing signs on parliamentary offices? I mean, wouldn’t it imply getting some new people? Otherwise you’re not really doing much more than shuffling the same deck, changing the batting order, juggling the lines.

Meanwhile, Canada will see an increase in taxes in 2011 in the form of “stealth taxes”. Those are the ones you don’t quite notice, but like those tenths of a cent on every litre of gasoline, do actually make quite a difference over the long term.

Employment insurance and Canada Pension Plan are going up in 2011 in the form of payroll deductions, further reinforcing the fact that Canadians can’t be trusted to prepare for their own contingencies. According to the Canadian Taxpayer Federation tax watchdog, Ontarians can expect to see an average increase of 4.3% on taxable income.

British Columbia would have seen the most tax relief in Canada had Gordon Campbell not ironically lost most of his popularity by introducing the HST. He announced a 15 per cent tax cut just a week before announcing he would step aside as leader of the Liberal Party, and the tax cut promise was subsequently rescinded by cabinet. B.C. is now poised to be second-hardest hit by stealth taxes in 2011.

But that’s alright, because we’ll get more in services right? Well, that’s certainly debatable.

If showing up at the office only half the time sounds like a dream job, you might want to consider running for Parliament.
Canada’s MPs are spending less time at work in the House of Commons — only 119 days this year — and passing ever fewer bills.

But let’s not harp on Harper, notes the article, for the lacklustre clock-punching predates the problem of “successive, unstable, minority governments” seen since 2004. The number of days our overpaid overlords worked peaked at 163 days in 1974, on par with the kind of work ethic seen in Great Britain. Since then, however, it’s gone as far south as 105 days, and averaged 119 in 2010.

What has our government done to make up for these extra days on the golf course? Why, they’ve crammed more stuff into smaller spaces, which means omnibus bills attempt to take care of several issues at once. Not unlike what your humble narrator has just done in this blog entry.

Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

Stephen Harper’s latest Senate-stacking sycophant is none other than Larry Smith, the former CFL commissioner who tried (and failed) to Gary Bettmanize Canadian football. Former president and publisher of the Montreal Gazette, Smith has also worked for Industrial Life Technical Services, John Labatt, and Ogilvie Mills.

I present Smith’s relevant curriculum vitae so that you might properly assess the comment he made on the CBC’s Power and Politics today when he said he has taken a whopper of a pay cut, nearly down to the realm of mortal men.

“In simple terms, the money I was earning in my last profession to where I would be in this profession is what I would call a dramatic, catastrophic pay cut.”

Is it gotcha journalism to harp on this new Harperite about his faux pas? Well, maybe a little bit. But then again, we’re always measured by our actions and our words, whether we meant them or not.

And although $132,000 may be a catastrophic pay cut for Smith, mere garnish on his Boeuf Bourgignon, a hood ornament on his Aston Martin, it’s still two times the median family income in Canada. It’s five times the median income of a single earner.

It’s difficult not to be cynical about the latest move toward Harper’s much-vaunted “Senate Reform”, which seems to involve a lot more Senators than Reformers. I suppose some might be inclined to be patient, but as we don’t know how the apparent lackey-stacking cronyism is supposed to accomplish the alleged desires of reform, I can only conclude that it’s a lustful lunge for more power.

Similarly, while others might be inclined to believe the Conservative’s are ardent deficit fighters just because Jim Flaherty is predicting a balanced budget within the next half-decade, I’m inclined to believe they’re wasteful wastrels of other people’s money.

Oh, how the mighty principles of former Reformers have fallen in the wake of Canada’s cowardly and craven New Government.

Principles that oppose corporate welfare in opposition, but can’t resist donating to aerospace giants once in power. Principles that decry a billion dollar gun registry in opposition, but happily squander a billion for a weekend summit during a recession. Principles that demanded open, accountable and transparent governance, but find the media irritating once in power.

Stephen Harper, a man in power of a party that calls itself Conservative without self-conscious irony, once said in 2004:

“I will not name appointed people to the Senate. Anyone who sits in the Parliament of Canada must be elected by the people they represent.”

It is as the National Post wrote in a headline one month ago:

“Harper’s Triple-U Senate: unelected, unrepresentative, under his thumb”

These Conservatives today are as malleable as the Liberals they malign, and Larry Smith appears to be no exception to this new rule. The man has already committed to abdicating his new appointment, should the opportunity arise to run for the Montreal riding of Lac-St-Louis.

Its already been noted as a premature ambition, given that he has yet to win the nomination, be given party assent as a candidate, and then — and this is no small detail — actually run in an as-yet unknown future election. Until then, however, he has reluctantly agreed to collect this $132,000 annual pittance.

And if he does step down from his position as Senatorial-stand-in, and actually wins the nomination, candidacy, and future election, why then he’ll earn $157,731 a year. Not quite catastrophic, but something I think you will certainly agree is a travesty.

I cannot imagine any Canadian political leader saying this with reference to, say, Jim Balsillie:

…How are we creating opportunity for everybody? So that we celebrate wealth. We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products. We expect that person to be rich, and that’s a good thing. We want that incentive. That’s part of the free market [productive greed is indeed a Good Thing?]…

Then there’s this earlier at his press conference today from the supposedly oh so progressive Democratic President Obama:

With respect to the issue of whether gays and lesbians should be able to get married, I’ve spoken about this recently. As I’ve said, my feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this. I have friends, I have people who work for me, who are in powerful, strong, long-lasting gay or lesbian unions. And they are extraordinary people, and this is something that means a lot to them and they care deeply about.

At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have. And I think — and I think that’s the right thing to do. But I recognize that from their perspective it is not enough, and I think is something that we’re going to continue to debate and I personally am going to continue to wrestle with going forward.

If Prime Minister Harper had sad anything similar to the two above quotes he’d be crucified by the Canadian opposition and most of the punditocracy.

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

Please take a look at the above links for a dose of reality. And at this in comparison with the official left in the UK:

Canada’s odd approach to immigration, or, currying favour

Only here would the current government be considered even remotely conservative. The terms of political discourse in this country are, to be polite, out to flipping progressive lunch. To conclude:

Stephen Harper’s agenda is so well hidden…

Mark
Ottawa