Keeping Track, First of A Series
Promise #1: Harper has never supported an appointed Senate, instead is a long time proponent of the Reform Party call for an elected senate, the so-called triple E senate. During the last election campaign, only days before the vote, Harper re-iterated a promise to Montrealers in a french-language televised interview:
Q: What if your party is unsuccessful in electing members from the Montreal area? What will you do? Will you appoint someone to cabinet to represent Montreal?
Stephen Harper: No – I’ve always believed that cabinet positions should only be filled from the ranks of elected parliamentarians. Details
Promise #1: Broken – on February 6th Harper appointed the unelected Michael Fortier, a long-time supporter of Mr. Harper, to cabinet. Fortier had not even run in the election, bluntly telling reporters that he “didn’t want to”.
Promise #2: Stephen Harper has always asserted that the unelected Senator he appointed to cabinet, Michael Fortier, would resign and run for a House of Commons seat in the very next election. In testimony before a Senate committee on September 7, 2006, Harper reiterated this promise:
this senator [Michael Fortier] will leave his seat at the next election to obtain a seat in the House of Commons. Stephen Harper, testifying before a Senate Committee
Promise #2 broken: Despite a Montreal-area riding now available for Michael Fortier to run in, he has not resigned his seat in the Senate and is not running for office in the election to be held on November 27 of this year.
Promise #3: During the last federal election, and in the months and years leading up to the campaign, Stephen Harper and other representatives of the Conservative Party repeatedly promised Canadians that they would not tax income trusts, instead favouring corporate tax reforms to level the playing field. The issue of income trusts became a significant election issue, where Harper continually hammered the Liberals, painting them as likely to tax trusts.
Promise #3 broken: After financial markets closed on October 31 2006, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced that the Harper government would indeed tax income trusts. In Question Period the next day, Harper, as part of an attempt to soften the political fall out, portrays the Conservative campaign promises as having been made only to seniors. This is disingenous in the extreme and offensive to small and large Canadian and foreign investors alike.
On Friday November 10th, Democracy Watch filed a complaint about these broken promises with the federal Ethics Commissioner, specifically naming Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty in the complaint.
Harper and Bush more alike than columnist will admit
John Ibbitson (Thursday Nov 9, 2006 We have our politics; they have theirs – The Globe and Mail) goes to great pains to paint Stephen Harper as the antithesis of George W. Bush, without illustrating any of the similarities so inconvenient to his thesis.
Some cry foul when Harper’s past comes back to haunt him, but any observer of the man knows full well his ideas on policy have long been cast, if not in stone, then at least in brick—firewall red in fact. He may be something of a political pragmatist in order to gain power, but his stated goal has always been to make Canada unrecognizable, an objective quite far removed from pragmatic change.
Illustrating this “bag it, change it” approach, south of the border Mr. Bush originally campaigned on a pragmatic, “compassionate conservative” platform but his rule has been anything but. The similarities between the two covers much policy ground.
On health care, Harper has been quoted numerous times as favoring the American model. As a contender for Prime Minister, Harper has come out in favour of Canada’s Health Act which enforces universal availability of care for all Canadians. Yet back when he didn’t expect to run for office again, writing a personal opinion piece for the ultra right-wing National Citizens Coalition newsletter, The Bulldog, Harper flat-out said that Canada “should scrap the Canada Health Act” (1997).
On the environment, Harper, and his former parties the Canadian Alliance and Reform Party, have for years fought against any Canadian effort to join the global fight against climate change including voting against the Kyoto Accord. Bush and his party likewise never endorsed Kyoto, nor even the concept of climate change.
On public education: Commenting on a Harris policy proposal to offer tax credits to parents whose children attended private schools, Stephen Harper said (2001, The Hill Times) “pulling their children from ‘union-run’ schools should be a viable option for all parents.” Bush, driven by a similar ideology, in 2001 made such tax credits into law, stating that the vouchers would merely innocently free “parents to make different choices for their children”. Can either be trusted to avoid the temptation to design funding schemes which create failing public institutions as a self-fulfilling prophecy?
On Iraq, in early 2003 Bush, capitalizing on an under-informed and over-politicized Congress, sent the country marching on to a foolhardy and unnecessary war in Iraq. At that same time Harper demonstrated his unconditional support for Bush’s imperial ambitions repeatedly in the House of Commons and for any Canadian and U.S. media that would record him.
Harper may not be a clone of Bush, but he is shaped in a substantially similar image, and he has openly expressed his desire to mould Canada into a form more like the United States including campaign promises of radical reforms to our system of government that would see an elected senate (making our upper chamber just as politicized as the U.S. senate), leading to the day when the Prime Minister’s office and a wholly or largely unelected cabinet (Emerson, Fortier precedents made or reinforced) rule by governor in council decrees, rather than gain the approval of Parliament.
Canadians are not naive and understand that many politicians are willing to say almost anything when campaigning, even if they plan on doing exactly the opposite in the future.
We need only look at Mr. Harper’s many campaign promises that he wouldn’t tax income trusts for the latest example of “say one thing to get their votes, in power do the opposite”.
The writer is a Westerner and a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party of Canada who, like many former Progressive Conservatives, opposes an elected senate, among other of Mr. Harper’s recycled Reform policies.