Harper is an unprincipled coward

Every now and then, a country experiences a leader with enough luck, balls, brains and vision to truly make a profound contribution to their country through government. You may have heard their names before: Reagan, Thatcher, Trudeau and St-Laurent are some of a list of many.

Of course it’s easy to be nostalgic of the past, especially when most of these leaders were in power before we were all born. But looking at these examples of principled leadership, it’s pretty clear that for the last five years Canada has been led by a chickenshit.

Racking up a massive deficit and endlessly complaining about a coalition from his opponents to the point where he’s making it sound like the Bolsheviks are planning to storm parliament, you have to wonder how he thinks his leadership has gone. After five years of failed crime bills killed by his own proroguing of parliament, there was the a G8/G20 summit that spent about $850 million jailing cripples and trampling on 800 years of precedent towards individual rights.
I can’t help but hope that he realizes that his legacy is marred in a failure of principles. For someone who obviously treats politics as nothing more than a game, he must.

About the only sign of principled leadership we’ve seen out of Harper in the last five years has been on foreign issues, namely his unwavering support for Israel. While his conservative base may care, most Canadians have more important concerns in their lives than to care about a country halfway around the world that could fit two and a half times into Nova Scotia. And yes, size does matter.
It’s not as if the rest of the world hasn’t seen its fair share of principled conservatives. Even David Cameron, the present leader of the United Kingdom, has managed to largely maintain principle despite having a government supported by the social democrats.

He now has a serious five-year plan intended on cutting colossal government deficits and despite enormous public pressure to the contrary he has stayed the course.

Despite rioting in the streets by students who are rightly pissed about the massive increases in cost of education, Cameron at least demonstrates that he has a plan to deal with the colossal deficits in the UK left by the bailout of multiple banks by his predecessor. You may not agree with him, but he is a leader who has the balls, brains and vision to succeed. Time will tell if he has the luck.

In Canada we find ourselves with a leader only as conservative as the blue tie he may or may not be wearing; nothing more than a partisan hack.

He has used his status to force his party to support budget after budget of record deficits. We aren’t projected to come out of deficit for five years according to the Finance Department and that projection (like most of Flaherty’s) was deemed to be nothing more than a pipe dream by Kevin Page of the Parliamentary Budget Office.

This five-year plan saves over that time a whopping $6.8 billion by freezing department spending. Again, Page is critical of the government with a recent report stating that only one government department out of a sample of ten had something resembling a plan to curb expenditures.

Harper’s budget plan demonstrates about as much wisdom as a Justin Bieber soundtrack.

It’s also about as conservative as other five-year plans used throughout history.
Yet we as citizens are left to believe that superman himself is on the case, tranquilly working away long hours in his office to save us all from the pit he created on our behalf.

This spend first, save later mentality is drowning the country in more debt, well beyond the point that even Stephen Harper’s illustrious future singing career will be able to save us.

So is Canada better off after five years? I’d say so. We’re spending more money on the census and getting statistically useless results.

Our government has managed to make Trudeau’s deficits seem Thatcher-esque, our civil rights are being eroded and while criminals are getting away with eleven year sentences for stealing tens of millions of dollars from investors, your grandmother has been locked away for longer for growing a natural plant in her basement. Bienvenue au nouveaux Canada!

PM Harper’s five year legacy

• $210 Million added to the national debt by 2015
• $6, 400 More federal debt per Canadian by 2015
• 40% Increase in the size of the federal government since 2006
• $108, 255 To fix a bocce ball court in Woodbridge