The Christmas present that Canada needs this year, and needs desperately, is a Parliament that works. It would be a Parliament that deals with the real needs of real people in a frightening time.
That depends on prime minister Stephen Harper. He’s the guy from Toronto who is part egghead economist and part ideological pit bull.
I admire and respect a person who stands by his convictions. My admiration disappears when those convictions begin to hurt people.
Unfortunately, the prime minister is so full of what’s ideologically right that sometimes he doesn’t understand what’s good, necessary, practical and helpful.
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After applying his ideology to disrupt our 39th Parliament, he went to the Governor General asking for a federal election because Parliament had become “dysfunctional.”
In October’s election, the non-progressive Conservatives got about 170,000 fewer votes than in January 2006. They enjoy the support of only one voter out of five.
During that election, the prime minister kept arguing the fundamentals for Canada’s economy are strong. But by election time, the Toronto stock market had fallen from 15,156 in June to 9,955, a drop of 34 percent. Now he’s very worried about Canada’s economy.
After the election, Harper told a Tory policy convention that the party would have to be less ideological and more practical. Yet the financial update the new Parliament received was really not practical. It didn’t do much to solve Canadian’s problems and it was extremely ideological.
Probably the most ideological item was the plan to cut off federal funding to political parties. It was an attempt to undercut the opposition. But more importantly, it was an attempt to limit public discussion of important national issues.
The move created a huge political backlash that could have ended Harper’s government, had the Governor General not bailed him out.
Now Harper and his helpers are consulting people. The finance helper, Jim Flaherty, is asking for time to put something together, though most other world governments have already taken action. The time for consulting, Mr. Flaherty, was in September and October, the time your boss was wasting on an election.
Flaherty needs to develop a wide-ranging proposal to help stabilize our economy, and the proposal must help to stabilize peoples’ lives too. There must be support for some major sectors – manufacturing, forestry, fisheries, agriculture, mining. That aid must be dependent on keeping people employed.
There must be help for small business owners, who also employ many people, and who are getting caught in a credit crunch. There must be lower taxes in the lowest tax bracket. And there must be help for individuals who lose their jobs in terms of longer and stronger unemployment benefits.
These are necessary even if there has to be a budget deficit. This is the nature of a moral economy.
If Harper can get past his ideology and do the practical thing, we may have a workable solution that everyone in Parliament can support.
Rob Brown is a former agricultural writer and broadcaster now doing studies in ethics. He can be reached at moral.economy@sasktel.net.
