Stephen Harper’s Misunderstanding of Where He Stands in the Public Eye
At the Calgary Stampede Barbeque, Harper took an opportunity to do what he does best: attack his opposition. However, his pitch to convince party faithful that their party has the big Mo may be unfounded.
Harper told the crowd,
“Conservative values are Canadian values. Canadian values are conservative values. They always were.
“And Canadians are going back to the party that most closely reflects who they really are: The Conservative Party, which is Canada’s party.”
Well, that is news. While the first Prime Minister of Canada was Conservative, historically, the Liberals have been in power for many more years than the Conservatives under all their different names.
If we take into account that Stephen Harper was never a Conservative, but rather a Reform or Canadian Alliance leader – since the Reform Party changed names multiple times, Stephen Harper’s ‘Conservative Party’ will only have 9 years in comparison to a dominating Liberal 84.
Even when Harper’s mandate will finish in 2015, the Conservatives will only have had 64 years in power. To say that Conservative values are Canadian values is false as the Liberal party and its views have been in power the longest in Canadian history. Based on 84 years, nearing 60% of Canada’s life, The Liberal Party of Canada has pretty much built the country and everything we see today.
Side Note:
Let’s take a look at the record. This is a tally of the amount of Prime Ministers each party has had (including all of the Conservative party variations) up until the date of this article.
Prime Ministers Years in Power Liberal 9 84 Conservative 12 60
Given the results, either Stephen Harper needs a refresher course on Canadian History or he is trying to further brainwash the Canadian population into believing that despite getting only 39% of the vote, he really does represent what we believe and what we think.
“I believe the long Liberal era is genuinely, truly ending. As with disco balls and bell bottoms, Canadians have moved on,” Harper said, failing to realize that the Liberals re-launched their website as a blog, and raised $150,000 in 4 days and managed to find ways to cap the financial bleed out by his end to party subsidies which was much more political than austerity.
If the Liberals bring Justin Trudeau as their leader, it is also likely that Harper may be done in his tracks, not to mention that as his run in power continues, people will start feeling the financial pinch and will eventually do what they did to Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives lead by Kim Campbell in 1993. The Progressive Conservatives were slaughtered, left with two seats after building the country’s largest deficit – broken by Harper’s government – and the introduction of the 7% GST.
That would leave either Layton or a Liberal leader in power. Using history as an index, the Liberals will win this one, it will be a repeat of Mulroney – it is just Harper’s turn.
Harper now looks to Quebec, a province that hates Harper so much that they elected 59 NDP MPs as a way of saying that they don’t want anything to do with him or his party. Politically, the NDP is as opposite to the Conservatives as it gets. Ideologically speaking, it would be more suitable for these voters to go to the Liberals or back to the Bloc if they get fed up with the orange wave before ever going to the Conservatives despite polls suggesting that the Conservatives are second choice among both NDP and Liberal supporters which would make a merger between the two parties a catastrophe for both.
Harper told the crowd, “As many provinces know well, no honeymoon passes as quickly and as completely as one with the NDP.”
However, given that people awoke to ridings where they didn’t know their candidate or in the case of Ruth Ellen Brosseau, didn’t know where the riding was, that ‘honeymoon’ may have never existed.
Brosseau did what any politician could possibly dream of: Take a vacation in Las Vegas during an election campaign and get elected in a riding where she cannot speak their language (French), has never even visited, and lives far away from. She got elected without doing anything.
As Harper tells his party to have their hands open for the influx of Quebecers that will flee the NDP protest vote, he fails to realize that they did it because they didn’t want him to have a majority mandate and were sick of the Bloc Quebecois and frankly didn’t want to vote Liberal given the Liberal track record in Quebec – the scars are still alive in Quebec.
In the end of the day, when Canadians get pinched in their wallets, Harper won’t be able to pass through his mandates as he has with his tactical reasoning of command and conquer. He will be governing Canada in next to absolute power until October 2015 with under 40% of the popular vote. Surely, after winning a majority government, he must truly think that his values are Canadian values – especially being on the far right of the political spectrum and being a Reformer in Conservative clothing.
The numbers don’t lie. In 144 years, the Liberals have been in power for 58% of the time, how does that translate into Conservative values being Canadian values and having always been?
