Canadian Cincinnatus

Memo to Canadian Conservatives: don’t refight the last war

In the National Post, Kevin Gaudet, discussed the qualities that the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada should possess. To him, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is as important as intellectual intelligence (IQ). He is of course right that EQ is an indispensable asset in politics. But I get the sense that what Gaudet has in mind for next party leader is an anti-Harper.

Gaudet was responding to a Maclean's article written by Conservative strategist, Ken Boessenkool, who, according to Gaudet, pined an even more for an anti-Harper. Again according to Gaudet, Boessenkool wants the next leader to be “young, female, and not from the West.” Gaudet was right to criticize this as a laundry list that would eliminate many qualified candidates essentially for affirmative action reasons.

To me, in looking for the anti-Harper, both Gaudet and Boessenkool are trying to refight the last war. They saw Justin Trudeau exploit Harper’s personality flaws – that Harper is an unempathic, unfeeling, control freak – and they don’t want that to happen again. Justin Trudeau won by being warm and fuzzy and young and sunny. They want some of that same mojo.

But here’s the thing they both miss: Stephen Harper is gone. The problem they are trying to solve has already been solved - by Harper’s resignation as party leader. The challenge now isn’t finding Mr. Goodbar, but positioning yourself to beat Trudeau four years from now.

How do we do that? Remember the Theory of Presidential Opposites that I propounded in my last column. Justin Trudeau won by being the anti-Harper. In order to beat Harper, we need to find the anti-Trudeau, not an anti-Harper to counter their anti-Harper.

But say, didn’t the last election prove that Canadians respond positively to Justin Trudeau? Yes they did. This shows that the Canadian electorate right now wants politicians like Justin. But the next election isn’t right now. It’s four years from now.

By that point, Justin’s good qualities will have become shopworn and taken for granted - just like Harper’s did after nine years. (If you recall, Harper is sober, hard-working, unpretentious, smart, competent, and thrifty.) What we really need to be looking for is somebody that can exploit those weaknesses of Justin Trudeau that will have become obvious to everybody four years from now. What are they?

Well we already have a good idea. Trudeau is shallow, facile, unread, unserious, and all surface – just like he was portrayed in the Conservative propaganda ad quoting Trudeau as saying, “and the budget will balance itself.” Four years from now, the budget won’t have balanced itself. To exploit that fact, the Conservatives need a leader with opposite qualities, so that the contrast with Trudeau will be maximized, and entirely to our benefit.

But what if four years from now, Trudeau will have proven that he has inner reserves of intellect and seriousness that we have not yet recognized? If that’s the case, he will win reelection - especially with the mainstream media covering his back. But even if this proves to be the case, our position will still be maximized with an anti-Trudeau at the helm, because all politicians, even good ones, begin to grate after a while. Exhibit A is Stephen Harper himself. And of course, if Trudeau is what he seems to be, he will be ripe for defeat – but only if we position ourselves correctly today.

But still, even granting all that, wouldn’t it be better if the next leader lacked Harper’s personality flaws? Of course it would. It would be even better if the next leader lacked all personality flaws entirely. The thing is, real human beings don’t come that way. Everybody has weaknesses as well as strengths. I believe history will conclude that Stephen Harper’s strengths greatly outnumbered his weaknesses. And just as in the leadership process that selected Harper, Conservatives will be choosing from the imperfect bunch of candidates who put themselves forward.

One of the keys to success in strategy is the ability to look past the emotions of the day and look dispassionately into the future to assess the likely situation (and emotions) that will be the case then. Therefore, in evaluating today’s leadership candidates, we should think about how they will do four years from now, and not today.

 

Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau, and warm and fuzzy personalities

Famed American blogger, Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit), has often propounded the Theory of Presidential Opposites, a theory that he credits to his daughter (the Insta-daughter). It holds that:

“Each President is chosen to be the opposite of his predecessor.”

The Insta-daughter proposed the theory to explain Barack Obama’s rise. Obama is the cool, eloquent, ivory tower intellectual who succeeded the tongue-tied, ‘smoke ‘em out’ gunslinger with the Texas twang, George W Bush.

The main idea is that people get fed up with their leader’s personality type. Their quirks and idiosyncrasies start to grate on everybody’s nerves after a while. Because of this, the voters become susceptible to the charms of somebody possessing an opposite personality-type.

For instance, sunny, optimistic Ronald Reagan replaced “there’s a malaise in America” Jimmy Carter, who wore a sweater in the White House because he kept the thermostat low to fight the ‘energy crisis’; the hip baby boomer with a sax, Bill Clinton, replaced the grumpy Greatest Generation father-figure George H W Bush; etc.

I think there is something to this theory, and I think it partially explains Canada’s choice in the recent Federal Election. After being in power for nine years, every Canadian knew Stephen Harper’s personality flaws. He is a control freak, and he is ice cold – as Mark Steyn pointed out in a column entitled Cold Fish in an Indian Summer (where he quoted yours’ truly extensively). Mr. Personality he ain’t. Whatever Justin Trudeau is, nobody can accuse him of being an unfeeling technocrat. He is warm and fuzzy all over – and with great hair.

If this theory is true, then it would be a mistake for the Conservatives to select a conservative version of Justin Trudeau to lead them – somebody who would give Conservatism a great big happy face, while also injecting some sex appeal. Instead, they should pick his polar opposite, somebody who could highlight Trudeau’s faults, which are already manifest: he is a shallow, glib dilettante, who doesn’t think through his actions and who doesn’t have an executive bone in his body.

The next Conservative leader ideally should be serious alpha leader - but also be the people-person that Harper clearly isn’t. 

Thank God Stephen Harper balanced the budget before he lost the election

Historically, something that has enabled activist left-wing governments is preceding conservative governments that have lost their way. These governments enact all sorts of left-wing agenda items in a futile attempt to be ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’ or whatever. In doing so, they only provide bipartisan cover to their successors, so that whenever their successor implements something controversial, all they have to say is that their predecessor did the same thing. It’s an all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card.

In the province of Ontario, the hapless Progressive Conservative Premier Ernie Eves spent like a drunken Liberal in a vain attempt to cling to power. After the Dalton McGuinty Liberals swept into office in 2003, they blamed all their deficits on the Conservatives they succeeded. It didn’t matter that Ernie Eves was in power barely a year; nor that the man he succeeded, Mike Harris, was probably the toughest fiscal hawk in Canada’s history; nor that McGuinty (and his successor Kathleen Wynne) made the Ontario the world’s greatest sub-sovereign debt holder, beating out California with only one-third of the population; all that was swept under the carpet with one line: we inherited the debt from the Conservatives.

In the US, the best example in recent is President George W. Bush’s last year in office. Yearly deficits, the TARP bailout, several stimulus bills to ‘jump-start’ the ailing economy, pork-barrel spending unrestrained by Presidential veto, all of it provided cover to Barack Obama for his more purposeful agenda of “fundamental transformation”.

Historically, there was Herbert Hoover, whose economic activism provided perfect cover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, allowing Roosevelt to campaign against Hoover from the right, and then enact a much more expansive interventionist agenda when in power.

Fortunately, Canada’s new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, hasn’t been given this luxury by Stephen Harper. This is because Harper made sure that the books were balanced by the time this election was called. This is because ever since Harper’s majority win in 2011 freed him up to cut spending, he worked assiduously towards this goal.

Now somebody at this point will object. So what? Trudeau will just blow up the budget again. Yes, he will. But that’s the point. Justin Trudeau will do it, and Justin Trudeau will own it. All of it. Thank’s to Harper’s diligence, Trudeau can’t shift the blame to him or anyone else.

Even more, by cutting the GST by 2%, Harper has permanently lowered the ceiling on how much the government can be grown. As I explained in my last article before the election:

“Stephen Harper cut the GST from 7% to 5%. Many economist disapproved because a value added tax is a much more efficient way to raise revenue than an income tax. This is true, but the economists failed to understand Harper’s motives. Because he cut an extremely unpopular but extremely efficient tax, he permanently cut the size of the federal government. With a 7% GST, Finance Minister Paul Martin could simultaneously run a balanced budget with huge government spending. This is no longer possible – unless the GST is first raised.”

Because of the GST cut, Harper had a harder time balancing the budget than Paul Martin did; but as a result, Trudeau will have a harder time spending money – unless he raises the GST. And if he does that, he will provide the Conservatives a golden gift for the next election.

So, in the Conservative defeat, raise a toast to Stephen Harper. Unlike other conservative politicians who lose an election, he didn’t set his left-wing successor up for success with his dirigiste agenda.

Why Stephen Harper deserves re-election

Unlike some of the Republican candidates in the US Presidential election, who chose to live life large, Stephen Harper has chosen to live life incrementally – taking a lot of small steps, but all in the right direction.

The reason why he has done so was explained to me by top Conservative strategists at a party event held a few weeks after Stephen Harper’s first win in 2006 against Liberal Paul Martin. After losing to Paul Martin in 2004, Harper realized that the most important obstacle to overcome was the Liberal meme - repeated ceaselessly since 1993 - that Conservatives (and their Reform predecessors) are too extreme for Canada. Harper’s solution was to move forward incrementally without making any moves that could trigger the Liberals to say, Ahah! See I told you. Until now, this strategy has been successful.

Unfortunately, it has a defect. It leaves some conservatives frustrated because they fail to see the steady progress Stephen Harper has made to date. They think Harper isn’t doing anything, or they have been caught up in nothing scandals like the Mike Duffy circus. If this is you, don’t be fooled. Harper has accomplished a great deal.

For starters, Stephen Harper has been the best friend Canadian gun owners ever had. He not only abolished the long-gun registry but also recently, he significantly cut the red tape that gun owners face. This is important because, until Harper came on the scene, there is no doubt that the end goal of Canada’s gun control laws was to disarm Canadians – completely. By eliminating the long-gun registry, the Conservatives have set that agenda back decades, for if anybody were to try to ban handguns now, all he would do would be to drive all the long guns underground. Nobody would register them after seeing all the pistols confiscated. They would first have to bring back the long-gun registry first, before proposing a ban. It would be a decade-long project.

Second, the Harper government has greatly strengthened our criminal laws. Sentences have been lengthened and consecutive sentences are now possible. He even took tentative steps towards the legitimization of self-defence.

Third, Harper increased the Canadian retirement age from 65 to 67, and the retirement age of civil servants by an extra five years. These moves have a huge impact on the Federal Government’s unfunded liabilities - a sum much greater than the federal debt. He did it quietly by phasing in the limits over time. For this reason, these changes have had little impact on current federal spending, but they will pay big dividends in the future.

Fourth, he modified Canada’s immigration law while simultaneously making inroads in Canada’s ethnic communities. Thanks to these changes, we no longer have a Liberal voter importation program, but rather a system for selecting immigrants based on their economic usefulness. Of all his below-the-radar initiatives, this will probably have the most significant effect on Canada.

Fifth, Stephen Harper cut the GST from 7% to 5%. Many economist disapproved because a value added tax is a much more efficient way to raise revenue than an income tax. This is true, but the economists failed to understand Harper’s motives. Because he cut an extremely unpopular but extremely efficient tax, he permanently cut the size of the federal government. With a 7% GST, Finance Minister Paul Martin could simultaneously run a balanced budget with huge government spending. This is no longer possible – unless the GST is first raised.

Sixth, Harper has completely changes the emphasis of Canada’s foreign policy. While the Liberals canoodled up to third-world dictators like Fidel Castro, as well as the third-world dominated UN, Stephen Harper’s government has resolutely stood up to thuggish foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin, while standing beside threatened Western countries like Israel and Ukraine.

Finally, there is one achievement that conservatives sometimes criticize Harper for, his handling of the 2008 recession.  They point out that the federal deficit ballooned after the crisis hit. This is true. What Harper’s critics forget is that until 2011, Stephen Harper was in charge of a minority government, with no natural allies in Parliament. When the Great Recession broke, every other party clamored for stimulus spending. If Harper had balked, he would have been out of office and our deficit would have grown much larger than it did, and worse, it would have become structural. Instead, the stimulus spending Harper authorized (mostly tax rebates for home improvements) could be rolled up easily after the crisis passed. This is why I give him high marks. If the Liberals or NDP had been in charge, they would have added entitlement spending, and good luck trimming that later on.

The one area where I fault him is in his Supreme Court appointments. This is because the Court is as left-wing as ever in spite of the fact that most of the Justices are his appointees. Considering that there is no confirmation process required for Supreme Court Justices as there is in the US, he has had a lot of lattitude picking candidates. So where is our Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia?

But in balance, I can only conclude that Stephen Harper has been the best Prime Minister in my lifetime. We can do much worse than him, and we probably will – especially if Justin Trudeau wins the next federal election.

So, factor that in when you go to your polling station on Monday.

Attention all Canadian gun owners

Today, I am doing something I rarely if ever do on this site, I am making a pitch for a political party, in this case the Conservative Party of Canada in the upcoming Federal Election. This is because Stephen Harper’s government has been without question the best friend that Canadian gun owners have ever had.

First, his government abolished the long gun registry in 2009. Then, recently, they enacted the Common Sense Firearms Licensing Act, which cuts down substantially on the red tape that gun owners face every day - all of which carry stiff criminal penalties. Mostly these changes concern ATT’s, but there also many other benefits. For the details see here.

The significance of these measures for the Canadian shooting sports cannot be overstated. For the past forty years, encroaching gun laws have relentlessly cut down our freedoms while deliberately creating roadblocks for the enjoyment of our activities - with the clear end goal of completely eliminating the private ownership of firearms in Canada. Stephen Harper’s government has rolled back this agenda for decades.

In contrast, the Liberals and to a lesser extent the NDP have declared war on us.

We must remember that the only reason that Canadians are allowed to own guns today is because in the 1990’s Canadian gun owners threw away their apathy and chose to fight back – by participating in politics. Until then, the prevailing wisdom was that all Canadians hated guns and that gun control was a guaranteed winning issue. Well, the political scalps of Kim Campbell and Alan Rock changed all that perception.

In large part, thanks to our participation in the Reform Party, the Canadian Alliance, and now the Conservative Party of Canada, Harper’s Conservatives have delivered. It is now up to us to repay their loyalty to us. If we don’t come through for them in this election - after all, they have done for us to date – then we will have only ourselves to blame if we find out that we have no friends left in Ottawa tomorrow.

Whether we will continue to be allowed to own guns tomorrow is up to us today.

 

Donald Trump, Christine O’Donnell, and the adults in the Republican Party

For grass-roots Republicans, their go-to example illustrating the duplicity of the Republican establishment is the Mississippi primary between Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel, where the GOP bigwigs resorted to mobilizing Democrats to protect their sitting Senator from a Tea Party insurgent. I don’t want to talk about that case, but rather the case of Christine O’Donnell, the 2010 Republican Senatorial candidate in Delaware. I want to focus not on how she became the candidate (by defeating Mike Castle), but on what happened after she won her nomination.

O’Donnell is significant these days because she has become the poster child of the kind of Tea Party candidate who is in over their head, and who is therefore preordained to fail: in short somebody who should not be allowed to become a Republican standard-bearer. OK, let’s take that characterization at face value. Now also take at face value the assertion by GOP elders that they are the consummate professionals of the Party, who understand how politics really works and who have its true interest – properly understood - at heart.

Now if this were all true and suddenly the Republican establishment woke up one morning to find Christine O’Donnell as a Republican senatorial candidate, wouldn’t their response be to say, OK, she’s not ready for prime time, but she’s got an R beside her name and she is running for the Senate. We’ve got to make the best of a bad situation and send a SWAT team of consultants and advisors down to Delaware to shore her up. Because you never know, with a little bit of luck and a tailwind, we might even keep Democrat Chris Coons out of the Senate. If they had done that, who knows, perhaps she might have had the kind of advisors who would have axed her disastrous I-am-not-a-witch ad. (I know I know, it is a very iffy to assume that the Republican Party actually has strategists competent enough to do this, but that subject merits a post of its own.) The thing I want to note here is that none of this happened.

What happened instead was that they did everything possible to undermine her - somebody they themselves acknowledged was in a weak position already. For example, the day after Christine O’Donnell won the Republican Primary, Karl Rove went on Fox News (or was in MSNBC, I forget), and trashed her publicly. If the GOP were really run by sober professions who cared about the greater good above all else, would they not have had Rove keel-hauled over these destructive and counterproductive comments?

From Christine O’Donnell’s primary win to election day, the behaviour of the Republican elite was entirely consistent with the suspicion held by many grass-roots conservatives that the GOP insiders are mediocrities who are more interested in maintaining their position in the party – their party - even if it means losing an election.

They act as if they would rather be the top dogs in a losing team than lesser members of a winning team. And that’s why their core supporters hate them. And this is why they rally to outsiders like Donald Trump.