But has the leopard really changed his spots? Well no. He doesn't eliminate the GST he reforms it, chips away at it a percentage here and there. Does he eliminate the Liberal immigration Head Tax? Nope he chips away at it, leaving it reduced to $100. He does things half way. He doesn't support more day care spaces, he gives working Canadians a tax credit instead.
But is this a new Harper, as flawed as his positions are, really appealing to the needs of working class Canadians? Not really says an excellent column in todays Winnipeg Free Press. Which because it is a subscriber only page I am reprinting here in case it no longer sits in the Google cache after today. And besides he says exactly what I have been saying all along.
Canadians terrified of Harper's real plans
Wed Jan 4 2006
FRANCES RUSSELL
WITH the wind at their backs from NDP leader Jack Layton's calls for a change in government and a cheerleading national media, Stephen Harper's Conservatives are cruising at 54 per cent in the polls, just as Brian Mulroney was in April 1984.
Well, no.
After almost two years of all-scandal, all-the-time, the Free Press headline Monday summed it up best: "It's Tories by a nose in new poll." All other surveys still show the Liberals tied or with a slim lead.
How can this be? How can the Liberals even be close after the gaffes, the insensitivity, the dithering, the lack of focus, the culture of entitlement, the arrogance and yes, the scandals? Not to mention the 22 months of the most relentlessly negative campaign in Canadian history, staged by Harper's Conservatives.
Part of it may be public turnoff from the daily battering of words like "corrupt," "corruption," "organized crime," "criminal conspiracy" and worse, spilling daily from the Conservatives, amplified by most of the media. Like battery acid, it's corroded the civility of our political culture and is driving voters away from the ballot box in droves.
But mostly it's because, furious as all Canadians are at Liberal sins, they remain terrified of Stephen Harper and the direction he would take the country.
Like the Bush Republicans, the Harper Conservatives set groups in society against each other. Like Bush Republicans, they govern for the secure and affluent, for the "have mores," as President George W. Bush once memorably described them. And like Margaret Thatcher, they don't believe in society, only in individuals.
Their idea of public policy, as a prominent New Democrat once put it, is to give everybody a bucket of gravel and tell them to go out and build a highway.
It sounds so democratic to give individuals money to "choose." But Conservative promises of taxable allowances and credits, for day care, for public transit passes, for private but not public pensions and for children's amateur sports, don't create public services available to all. They just help individuals with above average incomes. Taxable allowances and credits do nothing for people who don't pay taxes and little for people who earn a modest living.
The single mother working at Wal-Mart on minimum wage can't benefit from a taxable allowance for child care. She needs a subsidized child- care space, a space that won't be available. A tax credit for a bus or subway pass isn't any use to her either if she can't afford all that money at once or if there is no public transit to use. As for the tax credit for sports equipment, she needs it for food and rent.
Harper's $400 million for individual transit tax credits would be better used assisting municipalities to improve their public transit systems. His $1,200 per child taxable allowance is of no use if there is no quality child care to be bought at any price. And his $250 million for new child care spaces is conditional on those spaces being provided by business through tax credits, hardly comparable to the Liberals' universal national childcare program, modelled after universal public education.
The senior relying on the Canada Pension, Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement is by definition worse off than the senior with a private pension. But the worse-off senior gets nothing from the Harper Conservative plan for tax credits for private pensions only.
Harper says his plan to station the military in big cities is to deal with natural disasters. But it has sinister connotations of a U.S.-style security state and is far more likely to be about social control.
As the gun violence currently plaguing Toronto illustrates, there is blowback from government policies designed to punish certain groups in society simply because they are disadvantaged. Toronto today is reaping the whirlwind that the former Conservative government of Mike Harris sowed when it slashed welfare rates by 22 per cent and terminated social housing. And Torontonians should take note that several former Harris cabinet ministers are running on the Harper ticket.
In addition to squandering billions on tax allowances and credits to well-off Canadians, Harper intends to cut the GST by two percentage points, transfer a substantial number of tax points to the provinces as he takes Ottawa out of national programs and further slashes personal and corporate incomes taxes.
Vancouver entrepreneur Jayson Kaplan recently returned to Canada from the U.S. In a letter posted on the Politics Canada website, Kaplan is urging his fellow Canadians to see the close similarities between Harper and Bush. He says Harper is using Bush's 2000 election strategy, allaying voter fears by promising to be a "compassionate" conservative, not to intrude the state into matters like abortion and only to spend "projected surpluses." Once in office, Bush did the exact opposite.
"Voting for Stephen Harper is like voting for George Bush," Kaplan writes. "The two are just too similar in their campaigns and their beliefs for it to be a coincidence."
FrancesRussell@mts.net
My Columns on Harper
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