Q: I asked you about what you learned through the month of the coalition and all that excitement. Aside from what the opposition’s up to and what the opposition wants, what about the way you guys handled things? Are you happy with everything you did?
A: Well, you know, my own judgment is that what we really saw there was a continuation of a pattern we saw prior to the election—part of what led me to call the election—and during the election was the increasing opposition-for-the-sake-of-opposition approach of the other parties, and their increasing willingness to work together to do that. I think that reached a crescendo, and now I think they’ll obviously have to make some decisions: you know, are they serious in providing the government with their input on the economy? If they are, obviously we will take those things into account. If not, they’ll make their own judgments about how to go. I mean, our focus will be on what we think is best for the economy.
Q: But you don’t think you made a mistake or you mishandled your relations with the opposition?
A: Well, I think it’s always the right of the government to pursue what it believes is in the public interest. There were some measures—particularly the political subsidy measure—the opposition parties disagree with, but the government listened, and the government has decided to go [with] a freeze instead of an elimination. But make no mistake, the government believes that the elimination of these subsidies has to be done eventually, that that’s in the public interest.
Q: So it’s good policy but the timing is a political mistake?
A: Well, I guess that’s a conclusion you have to reach because we withdrew it. That said, it’s still the right policy, widely supported by Canadians.
Q: Are you going to come back to it then?
A: It will be part of our platform in the next election campaign. In the meantime we’ll put a freeze on these subsidies. I mean, I think it’s ridiculous that, at a time of economic recession, political parties are getting subsidies from the Canadian taxpayer that bear no relation to their own attempts to even raise money—that’s ridiculous. And we’re obviously disappointed there’s no willingness in the opposition to deal with that problem and to indicate, you know, that we’re prepared to lead by example from the top. We’re disappointed with that—the Conservative party would have taken the largest reduction of any party as a consequence of that policy—but that’s their decision. But I could go back: they’ve said that that’s not the reason they’ve done what they’ve done, and in fairness they did the coalition well after we indicated we weren’t pursuing that particular policy. So I do think, as I said before, that some of the opposition leaders are on the record saying this is in fact a plan that they had all along. We’ll see now, having seen public reaction, whether they choose, in effect, to recognize the results of the election, to accept that the government is the government, and to give the government their ideas about how to run the economy, or whether in fact they try to bring the government down. Those are the two choices before them.
