The only thing worse than a petulant child-like control freak in your book club, sports team, classroom, scout troop or volunteer organization is a really smart one who grows up and becomes prime minister.
Stephen Harper is scary smart. He is also stuck somewhere between
the age of five and 15 when it comes to his emotions.
Get used to him. He is going to be with us for a while.
By the end of his mandate, we will hate him in the same way many
people hated Pierre Trudeau in his final years. It will be the
arrogance that brings him down.
In the meantime, his Machiavellian political instincts
and his welcome contrast to “Mr. Dithers” will
certainly get him a majority government when he decides to force an
election.
Prior to the election I just didn’t agree with Harper.
I still don’t. I don’t believe there is a
“fiscal imbalance” in this country.
Unless, that is, you find it odd that the natural resources of the
country belong to the provinces, which allows one lucky
jurisdiction to screw up tax policy across the country because it
has more money than it can hide or spend.
I don’t agree that the federal government should
shrink, and withdraw from logical national aspirations like health
care, child care and education.
I think it is self-evident that registering a gun should not be
viewed as more onerous than licensing a dog or yourself to drive a
car.
I think the Kyoto Accord is flawed but represents a positive
first step in recognizing the death spiral of global warming. It is
a crime to see Canada backing away from it to support the
aforementioned province that has more money than it knows what to
do with.
Reducing the GST instead of income tax is just plain stupid. He
knows it, any economist worth his salt knows it, but it helped
differentiate him from the Liberals, and so he will lose no sleep
over it.
But don’t get me started. What I like about Baby
Harper is that he is tough with the media, which have their own
emotional problems when it comes to power sharing in Ottawa. At
minimum, it will be entertaining, and at worst it is going to get
really ugly, which will probably be entertaining.
I like that he is so transparently straight-up about his
stunning hypocrisy. He was outraged about Belinda Stronach when she
crossed the house. But he did the same thing with David Emerson,
and is cocky enough to just say it is a political gamble.
The only guy who was this bad in the past was Trudeau, who
mocked Robert Stanfield during the 1974 election for suggesting the
possibility of wage and price controls. He implemented them within
a year of being elected without the least bit of shame. It takes a
towering arrogance to walk through these machinations as if it were
normal, and underneath that arrogance almost always is behaviour
fueled by insecurity, not confidence.
Harper screamed about the centralization of power in the
Chrétien administration, and of course he looks like a
piker compared to Harper. Harper screamed about the importance of
Parliament in his Opposition years, and it would be hard to find
examples of any prime minister who has debased Parliament so
quickly and so gleefully.
The most dangerous indicator so far, however, is Harper’s
response to the admittedly clumsy rejection of Gwyn Morgan as the
volunteer chair of the new Public Appointments Commission by the
Opposition. This commission was to be put in place to clean up the
appointments process in government. It was an important initiative.
Like a little boy who had his ball stolen at the park, Baby Harper
ran home and said he wouldn’t play again until he had
more members in his gang than the other guys. It was childlike,
petulant and unbecoming.
Politics is the art of the possible. It is not my way or the
highway.
Baby Harper has a lot to learn. No matter how smart he is, no matter what a welcome relief he might represent from those tired Liberals, people don’t like insecure bullies. In fact, just as has become the case in some high schools, he might eventually discover there will be zero tolerance for this kind of immaturity in a national leader.
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Michael Atkins is president of Laurentian Media. This column is reprinted from the June issue of Northern Ontario Business. He can be reached at[email protected].