Syphilis is on a comeback

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 5 Comments

Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images

Ghosts, the 1881 Henrik Ibsen play in which syphilis signifies “the tragedy of heredity,” was a death knell for the 19th century. The 19th century did not take it well. Ibsen was met with pan-European abuse for his “dirty act,” his “almost putrid indecorum.” The funny thing, to the modern reader, is that Ghosts never explicitly mentions syphilis. In 1881, theatregoers understood doomed Oswald Alving when he described the inherited contagion that surfaced “down there” and spread to his brain. Today’s undergraduates need annotation; they live in a world of high-quality public health care where syphilis, a disease knocked out readily by penicillin, is almost never encountered.

In contemporary Canada it still flares up occasionally among high-risk groups, particularly gay men. But now Alberta, suddenly plagued with the pre-antibiotic horrors of adult neurosyphilis and congenital syphilis among newborns, has had to launch a shock campaign of public awareness. As in Ibsen’s time, so in ours: debate within Alberta has concentrated on the message, with scant attention paid to the crisis itself—a crisis as anachronistic in the 21st century as a cholera epidemic caused by a contaminated water pump.

Alberta made syphilis a reportable disease before the Second World War and introduced mandatory screening for expectant mothers shortly thereafter. But beginning in 2005, with an economic boom creating high mobility, crack cocaine enjoying a renaissance, and strains increasing on Alberta’s health care system, syphilis broke into the heterosexual population, with “street-involved” Aboriginal women hit particularly hard.

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Finally, time for a real agenda

By Erica Alini - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 132 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

By now the wisdom is well and truly conventional: the Conservatives may have won a majority for the first time in 23 years; they may have control of both houses of Parliament; their enemies may be scattered before them, but God forbid they should actually do anything with the power they now possess.

For that would be “polarizing,” and thus in violation of the First Principle of Political Punditry: Thou Shalt Hug the Middle. And since the middle is, by long-established consensus, wherever we happen to be at the time, this leads very quickly to the Second Principle of Political Punditry: Thou Shalt Not Change Things Much, If At All.

Indeed, it has been so long since any government in Canada attempted anything so ambitious as an agenda that we have almost forgotten what that looks like. The years since the last Chrétien government was elected in 2000 have been something of a lost decade. Whatever sense of direction there might have been was dispelled first in the infighting between the Chrétien and Martin gangs, then in the sponsorship scandal, and at last dissipated utterly in the three minority Parliaments that followed. The notion of planning ahead, taking risks, spending political capital, all the ordinary business of majority governments, must now be relearned.

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The Weigel affair: shooting the watchdog

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, June 26, 2010 at 12:48 PM - 14 Comments

Friday’s big American media story was the resignation of Washington Post weblogger and conservative-movement specialist Dave Weigel, who came under pressure when gossips obtained some of his tart-tongued and borderline nutty private e-mails to Journolist (a controversial private online club for young liberal media personnel which itself collapsed amidst all the chaos and poo-flinging). By a weird happenstance, Canada’s most remote, reclusive correspondent actually knows Weigel slightly. In February 2008, at the peak of the presidential primary campaigns, I spent a week slouching around the Washington offices of Reason, the libertarian magazine where he then worked.

Weigel was one of the more interesting figures in that scene: trained more conventionally in “traditional” journalism than other Reasonites, he was the detail-oriented data guy in the newsroom, par excellence. If somebody needed to know whether Tom Dewey won Illinois or how big the Pennsylvania congressional delegation was, it was pretty much fifty-fifty whether they’d Google it or Weigel it. My impression of him was that he was sarcastic, a little tightly wound and, not improperly, conscious of his own cleverness. He’s a type of person I find it pretty easy to get along with.

Weigel’s personal politics—liberal? Left-libertarian?—were not on display while I was there. I’m sure his bosses, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie, knew of his views at least in a general way, and I’m equally confident that they didn’t really care, because he was doing good reporting for them, as he did for the Post. Ideological media enterprises in Reason‘s category need to have someone with the “right” philosophy holding a golden share and making editorial-line decisions. But with that condition met, they can find tasks for anybody who is prepared to be fair and inquisitive.* For all I know, Reason‘s Radley Balko, who covers paramilitary excesses in policing and incompetence in the U.S. justice system, might be earnestly in favour of eugenics for Uzbeks. Would this somehow alter the (immense) value of his reporting?

Weigel is interested in movement conservatism and well-informed about it, so Reason handed him an oar and got him underway with his career of documenting its weirder fringes. It should not be a fatal problem that he privately loathes movementarian robot Republicans, unless some evidence of persistent inaccuracy can be shown in what the man publishes. And Weigel’s published journalism has held up to counterattacks pretty well everywhere he has worked. It seems somewhat cowardly of the Post to have asked him to step down for reasons completely unrelated to what appears under his byline, especially in the face of what constitutes at least a misdemeanour attack on his privacy.

After all, why can’t there be a critic/observer of Palin-Beck conservatism who hates much of Palin-Beck conservatism? Who, frankly, reports on anything for any length of time without developing some contempt for it? Isn’t it possible to argue that it should be a prerequisite rather than a disqualifier?

Weigel did commit enough technical infractions against fairness to feel the need to issue an apology on some minor points before he resigned. And one extract from Journolist did raise concerns about his fundamental ability to be fair: commenting on the Massachusetts special Senate election, he told fellow list members that “pointing out Coakley’s awfulness is vital, because…unreasonable panic about it is doing more damage to the Democrats.” I would consider such narrative-framing for the sake of a party interest (as opposed to an ideological preference) a problem even for an opinion columnist, let alone a beat reporter. (Weigel’s work for WaPo was poorly specified, but certainly somewhere on this spectrum.)

“Fairness” means being hypothetically prepared to attack any party or person; I figure if you want to be a partisan hack, you should go be one, and work on the supply side of the quote machine. But that’s one slip amongst many thousands of words, and I am not sure anyone at all could survive the level of scrutiny to which Weigel’s private conversations were subjected. The Post‘s failure to defend him seems dangerous to its practical ability to create and sell interesting journalism.

*(These outfits can end up more diverse intellectually than “objective” news organs; in any place where explicit opinions and “biases” are suppressed, it becomes easy to end up with a homogenous nicey-nice liberal workforce whose members never challenge each other. The letters “CBC” might have magically appeared just now in your mind’s eye upon reading that.)

Hard right? Hardly

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 7:28 PM - 115 Comments

Just so we’re clear: I don’t really care whether the Harper government conforms to one definition of conservatism or another. Neither do I carry any brief for conservatism, as such, though I might hold conservative views on specific issues. When I say that conservatism is dead in Canada, I am not mourning or despairing. I am merely stating a fact.

The reason that’s worth stating is that there is a party that continues to carry on as if it were conservative, though it conforms to no known definition of the word. And all right, yes, I’d prefer that people should be who they say they are and do what they say they will do, and that things should be called what they are and not what they are not.

So I suppose in that sense I should be delighted to find, via my friend Paul Wells, that I’ve got it all wrong: that the Conservatives are in fact robustly, unabashedly conservative, that indeed conservatism is “on the march across Canada.” Why, it’s the biggest swing to the right in “half a century.” It’s Harper’s hard right turn.

This is contrarian analysis at its finest. Under the Conservatives, spending, which conservatives once promised to cut, has been growing at a rate of 8 per cent a year. The budget, which conservatives once aimed to balance, is now in deficit to the tune of $54-billion, with literally no end in sight. Corporate subsidies, which conservatives once vowed to eliminate, continue to be doled out by the billions every year; much of the auto industry has been nationalized; the number of regional development agencies has increased by one. Conservative MPs now run around the country boasting of the pork they are bringing home to their ridings, complete with novelty-cheque signing ceremonies.

The top marginal rate of income tax remains where it was a generation ago, while the tax system has been further complicated with the addition of a slew of special credits for children’s sports, transit passes and other good causes. Employment Insurance has been larded up with supplementary payments that make a return to insurance principles more remote than ever. The Canada Pension Plan has been allowed to swell to Caisse de Depot-like dimensions. The great statist vehicles of the 20th century — Canada Post, Via Rail, the CBC — likewise continue to stalk the land, subsidies and privileges intact, while private oligopolies in air travel, finance and telecommunications remain largely protected from foreign competition. All were once the objects of conservative reform efforts. No longer.

The political reforms that were the bedrock of democratic conservatism in the age of the Reform party, aimed at giving more power to ordinary MPs and, via referendums, to the citizens at large, are now but a memory, replaced by a PMO whose all-controlling zeal exceeds even previous records. The philosophy that distinguished the conservative approach to constitutional matters — decentralizing power to the provinces, commitment to the equality of provinces and citizens — has been replaced by massive increases in transfers to the provinces generally and a raft of special concessions — powers, money, an ill-defined “national” status — to Quebec.

But that is to look at the matter through the narrow lens of fiscal, economic, democratic and constitutional conservatism. Rather than obsessing on such arcane matters — you know, the whole size and role of government thing — friend Wells encourages us to see the glass as socially full. Because even as it was giving ground on every one of all those other fronts, the government has been delivering for social conservatism. Why, “look at the victories” social conservatives have won, Wells suggests, “in just the past few months.” Yes, let’s.

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The politics of IQ

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 5:41 PM - 19 Comments

Grubby as it can be, politics remains at bottom a contest of ideas. One side claims the superiority of its program and values. The other responds in kind, and voters decide which they like best.

Or, in Canada’s case, which they dislike least.

What happens, though, when someone suggests members of one political group are themselves smarter than the folks on the other side?

A recent study out of the London School of Economics did just that, purporting to show among other things that atheistic liberals boast higher IQs, on average, than their religious and conservative counterparts.

Author Satoshi Kanazawa, an “evolutionary psychologist,” then went on to draw some incendiary and fanciful conclusions from his findings: conservatism, he explained, is a very human predisposition based on self-interest—a bred-in-the-bone inclination to care about family and friends rather than the wider world that is genetically unrelated to us. Liberalism, meanwhile, reflects a more evolved willingness to embrace novel ideas and to care about those we don’t see or know, he said; it springs from greater intelligence and awareness, and takes brains to pull off comfortably.

As such, he said, liberals are less likely to need such psychological crutches like God to get through life. “More intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists,” Kanazawa wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly.

At first glance, the findings looked like a gift to the non-religious left, which in the U.S. at least has a history of claiming intellectual superiority. It is a peculiar form of identity politics, grounded in the notion that brainy sorts are most likely to join a club that would have themselves as members (apologies to Groucho Marx).

Consider the reaction six years ago, when the launch of Air America moved progressive commentators to predict that this liberal answer to right-wing, open-mouth radio would fall flat. Liberals, they theorized, are too smart and open-minded to be Ditto-heads, of course. If that meant sitting still for a daily pasting at the hands of Rush Limbaugh, well, that’s the price you pay for being progressive (they were right: Air America shut for good in January, though its demise probably had more to do with poor management and in-fighting than the IQs of its listeners).

Why then, are liberals running so hard from Kanazawa’s study?

Possibly because the armchair statisticians who lurk the digi-sphere have done such a great job rubbishing both its design and logic. Shockingly, some of these clever people are conservatives, like the Canadian libertarian Neil Reynolds. Others are what Margaret Thatcher might have called squishy, and proud to be so.

These critics are quick to point out that the purported spread between the IQs of progressives and reactionaries is only six points—within the margin of error of many IQ tests. How, they ask, can one draw conclusions about human development over a few millennia based on a sample of 15,000 Americans surveyed in the late 1990s—and adolescent Americans at that?

Liberals may also be troubled by the checkered history of this sort of inquiry. Quite apart from its eugenic overtones, past claims that liberals were brainier than conservatives generally have been proven unfounded or been exposed as hoaxes. Five years ago, the Economist printed a graphic indicating people from U.S. states that voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election were on average dimmer than those from states that went Democrat. Alas, the venerable British magazine was forced to print a correction, admitting it had been sucked in by an internet hoax.

Other studies based on the findings of the U.S. General Social Survey have found virtually no statistical difference between the IQs of people who vote Democrat and those who vote Republican (this blog suggests the “advantage” has been see-sawing back and forth, with the Dems inching ahead by a half-point in ’04).

But most of the suspicion boils down fear over how the theory plays into more deeply cast political identities. That old eastern-intellectual label remains an enduring problem for Democrats in the U.S.—and to a lesser degree large-L Liberals in Canada. The perception isn’t so much that they are smarter than everyone else as that they think they are—and thus feel entitled to tell others how to run their lives.

Small wonder then, that a sworn enemy of the religious right like P.Z. Myers, a University of Minnesota biologist who has waged war against proponents of intelligent design, is warning his blog readers to “stop patting yourselves on the back over this study,” and advising them to “ignore anything with Kanazawa’s name on it.”

Liberals may not be all that much brighter than conservatives, on average. But they’re smart enough, evidently, to know trouble when they see it.

'We have to be consistent'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 15, 2010 at 8:09 AM - 45 Comments

Maxime Bernier delivered a speech to the Manning conference this weekend on conservatism and Quebec. The prepared text is here.

Conservative policies don’t need to be watered down to appeal to a substantial portion of Quebec voters. On the contrary, as I said to a Calgary audience recently, I believe that to succeed, we have to be consistent, to defend our principles openly, with passion and with conviction.

What conservative principles need in Quebec is to be sold with a particular attention to Quebec’s specific political culture, just as they are tailored to be attractive to an English-speaking audience. They have to be crafted as a way to solve the problems of all of Canada, including Quebec, and not as a reaction from one region against another. If we succeed in doing this, conservatism has a brilliant future in this country.

Rob Silver considers the implications.

Maybe not the whole nine yards, but a few

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 10:43 AM - 19 Comments

That was one of the more economically literate Speeches from the Throne in recent memory, even at the cost of saying rather little (and taking rather too long to say it). But what was there was at least mostly in the right direction.

Throne Speeches are tricky things. Lines that seem innocuous turn out to be freighted with meaning. Momentous-sounding announcements turn out to mean not much at all, or never make it into legislation. A pledge to “reform and strengthen education,” for example — meaningless boilerplate, or the beginnings of a national education strategy? An “aggressive” plan to “close unfair loopholes” — a couple of technicalities of interest only to accountants, or wholesale tax reform?

Still, the general tendency of the Speech, at least in its economic chapters, was clear: smaller government, freer trade, less intervention in markets. If hardly a major change in direction — did anyone think that’s what “recalibration” meant? — it does signal the government is turning up the volume on some conservative economic themes that had hitherto been buried in the mix. The government can read the opposition’s body language as well as anyone, and can see they are not spoiling for an election. So it has taken the opportunity to steal a few yards for conservativism, without being unduly provocative.

Indeed, it’s an achievement of sorts that so much of the reaction to the Speech seemed to be in the ho-hum, is-that-all-there-is vein. For it contains at least a couple of potentially important policy initiatives. Opening the doors to foreign investment “in key sectors,” including — but not limited to — telecoms and satellites, is the most startling, even if it was telegraphed in advance. Not long ago this would have been considered a political third rail, and yet it seemed to occasion very little response from the opposition. Good: aside from offering greater choice and competition for consumers, foreign investment will be a vital source of the capital needed if Canada is to improve its dismal productivity performance — as it must, to pay for the coming wave of baby-boom retirees.

The other potentially significant development was the pledge to freeze departmental operating budgets. Again, this seemed to escape notice, with most commentary focused on the symbolic but fiscally insignificant salary freezes imposed on ministers and MPs. But a freeze on departmental budgets, depending how long it is in force, could mean quite sharp cuts in spending in real terms — not enough, certainly, to balance the budget on their own, but perhaps a sign of what is to come in the budget.

It had better. Despite the nod to restraint, the Throne Speech maintains the government’s official line that the budget can be balanced without either raising taxes or cutting transfers to the provinces and elderly. It’s true that you can grow your way out of a deficit, if you don’t care how long it takes: give it 10 straight years of growth, and even the worst profligate can balance its books. But the more leisurely the schedule, the greater the chances of a recession or other unexpected event wrecking all those pleasing fiscal forecasts. And of course, the longer you take to stop adding to the debt, the higher it climbs.

What we need is a serious plan to balance the budget in three or four years, that is within the usual economic or political cycle, coupled with a strategy to tackle the longer-term demographic challenge. That will certainly require either significant cuts in spending or substantial tax increases. I’ve argued it can and should be done by cutting spending. But whether it’s one or the other (or both), it can’t be neither.

A couple of other important omissions from the speech. On the plus side, there were almost none of the usual giveaways to politically powerful industries. To be sure, there was the expected list of shout outs to the forestry, fishing, and farming sectors. But rather than shower them with subsidies and special treatment, the speech proposed to help them by cutting red tape and opening new markets: what might be called “small government activism.” (The glaring exceptions: shipbuilding and supply management.)

More distressing was the absence of any mention of the economic union. To be sure, there is a pledge to press ahead with the creation of a national securities regulator, in place of the current provincial hodgepodge. But until lately the government had much more ambitious plans. A previous Throne Speech, in 2007, vowed to take aggressive action to dismantle provincial trade barriers if they did not do so themselves, if necessary by use of the federal “trade and commerce” power under the Constitution. The Conservative election platform in 2008 added a deadline to this commitment: 2010. Well, here it is 2010, and in a document devoted to competition, productivity and free trade there is no mention of the economic union.

Fine words, as they say, butter no supply-managed parsnips.

FOR THE RECORD: Here’s what the October 2007 Throne Speech had to say about the economic union:

Our government will also pursue the federal government’s rightful leadership
in strengthening Canada’s economic union. Despite the globalization of
markets, Canada still has a long way to go to establish free trade among our
provinces. It is often harder to move goods and services across provincial
boundaries than across our international borders. This hurts our competitive
position but, more importantly, it is just not the way a country should
work. Our government will consider how to use the federal trade and commerce
power to make our economic union work better for Canadians.

And here’s that 2008 platform commitment:

A re-elected Conservative Government led by Stephen Harper will work to eliminate barriers that restrict or impair trade, investment or labour mobility between provinces and territories by 2010. In 2007, the government announced that it was prepared to use the federal trade and commerce power to strengthen the Canadian economic union. Since that time, we have seen progress among the provinces and territories in strengthening the existing Agreement on Internal Trade. We hope to see further progress, but are prepared to intervene by exercising federal authority if barriers to trade, investment and mobility remain by 2010.

Wildrose blooms

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 35 Comments

So what’s Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith reading these days when she’s not busy haunting the nightmares of Alberta Progressive Conservatives? Does she curl up with one of her favourite libertarian ur-texts—Atlas Shrugged, maybe, or Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society”? It turns out she’s enjoying a timely Christmas gift that has the attention of politicians everywhere: The Audacity to Win, David Plouffe’s memoir of the strategies behind Barack Obama’s leap from Chicago state politics to the presidency.

There are probably not many people left in Alberta who will still chuckle at this choice of reading material. In the province’s March 2008 election, the right-wing Alliance got seven per cent of the vote and no seats. Today, with the 38-year-old Smith as leader, it sits atop the polls as the governing Progressive Conservatives come unglued. This week, two PC MLAs from the Calgary area, convinced that Ed Stelmach’s leadership portends political annihilation, crossed the floor to sit with the Alliance’s Paul Hinman, who stole a Calgary PC seat in a September by-election.

Her remarkable ascent has some commentators talking about Smith as “Canada’s Sarah Palin.” It’s a clumsy (and, yes, sexist) metaphor. Smith’s electoral experience is even more meagre than Palin’s was in 2008, amounting to part of a term as a Calgary Board of Education trustee. But Smith is in no danger of not being able to tell you what magazines and newspapers she reads. And she is a creature of principle, not instinct. As leader of a party starting nearly from zero, her problem won’t be fighting against her own brain trust, but building one.

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The Liberal Comeback In America

By John Parisella - Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 6:22 PM - 15 Comments

Conventional wisdom in America would have you believe that identifying oneself as liberal is politically risky. After all, when was the last time a serious political contender for the presidency embraced the liberal label? Outside of Teddy Kennedy, Democratic politicians have preferred the term ‘progressive’ to ‘liberal’ for the past three decades. The epic Obama-Clinton battle of last year rarely featured the word ‘liberal.’ President Clinton, a liberal president in a conservative era, preferred the term centrist to identify his brand of politics. He therefore drifted even further from the ‘liberal’ label. Obama seems hesitant to use the word, but when you look at his policies and listen to his rhetoric, you get the distinct impression identifying as a liberal may no longer be a liability for a mainstream politician. In fact, I believe the word ‘liberal’ is on the verge of a resurgence and a comeback. As well it should.

The U.S. political cycle is once again working its magic. After close to three decades of conservative dominance (which was not all bad), Americans seem to be responding to a new brand of liberalism—one in which the government is no longer the problem Ronald Reagan so memorably insisted it was. Government can now offer solutions. The credit for this goes to the financial crisis and the appalling greed of Wall Street for the resurgence. But we should not ignore the role the recent failings of the American conservative movement have played reviving liberalism. Conservatism is in dire need of redefinition, rethinking and purpose. Years of out-of-control deficits, inconclusive and ill-managed wars, mean-spirited and divisive politics, and compassionate conservatives that are neither conservative nor compassionate have harmed the brand.

However, today’s liberals should be careful to avoid getting nostalgic about the FDR years or the 30 years of liberalism that followed. By the end of the sixties, that brand of liberalism had run its course. In fact, liberals then were seen as free-spending, bureaucracy-building elitists with a strong interventionist streak. And eventually, they became associated with a breakdown of law and order, and a widespread sense of permissiveness that led to the rebirth of the conservative movement in the 1970′s. The Vietnam War did not help as it was seen as liberal war.

Liberals today seem to have learned that government must work with market forces and that sensible fiscal policies are fundamental to a sound and effective government. Here, Clinton deserves much credit for modernizing today’s liberalism, as he left the country with balanced budgets and reduced debt. The challenge for the Obama administration will be to harness the traditional liberal values of fairness, justice and opportunity, and mesh them with an approach to government that emphasizes responsibility, that creates the conditions for prosperity, and that acts to redistribute wealth in ways that reduce inequalities within society without punishing success. Obama has already articulated this  ‘progressive’ vision for government. His near-100 days in power reflect this. Now, if he could only start using the word ‘liberal,’ then the comeback will be complete.

Conservatism is not the issue

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 11:20 PM - 131 Comments

My recent piece on the federal budget as marking the end point of conservatism in Canada seems to have been the subject of some misinterpretation. Many people have taken it as a lament, as if this were something to be mourned. I rather thought I was just stating a fact.

I hold no particular brief for the Conservative Party of Canada. I was opposed to the party’s formation, preferring that Reform and the Progressive Conservatives should have remained separate parties that formed a strategic alliance — a coalition! — as European  parties do. Nor have I ever been able to see much point in conservatism, as such: why one would want to subscribe to a whole set of unrelated ideas simply because they all fell under the conservative label remains a mystery to me. It’s less an ideology than a grab-bag of habits and emotional leanings, not least the deep nervoses and resentments of a party that has lost too many elections.

The party/movement’s general predisposition towards user fees and private insurance in health care always struck me as simplistic (and not particularly market-oriented, properly understood), its willingness to rent itself out to the provinces in general, and Quebec in particular, has been terribly damaging to the country, and its refusal to deal seriously with global warming was blinkered and counter-productive. Over the years, I’ve had occasion to quarrel with conservatives over gay rights, immigration, drug policy, and the whole tangled archipelago of issues surrounding the Charter of Rights, the notwithstanding clause and judicial review.

But at least these were positions! Conservatives may have been wrong on these things, but anything’s better than a party that is incapable of being right or wrong, because it does not stand for anything. Conservatism may not be my thing, but it is for a lot of other people, and I grieve for their sake that the party they have invested so much of their hopes in has turned to such warm beer. And all Canadians, whatever their leanings, should wish for more balance and diversity in our political choices. Continue…

Stability is the new nothing

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 2:49 PM - 81 Comments

On the other hand, there’s Canada. Here’s Stephen Harper, campaigning in Ajax, Ontario yesterday.

Friends, the GTA doesn’t need higher taxes. The GTA doesn’t need a carbon tax. And the GTA doesn’t want this country to go back to deficits. Instead, it needs the kind of prudent investments our government is making to help the economy grow. 

Investments like the bridge on Sandy Beach Road south of Parkham Crescent in Pickering.

Investments like a new passport office here in Ajax.

Investments like the federal Gas Tax Fund, that by 2010 will have invested over 800 million dollars in the GTA.

And then, in case anyone didn’t get the hint,

Friends, our government is delivering for the GTA. But there’s more to be done. And we need a strong team of Conservative MPs from the GTA in Ottawa to make it happen. 

You need Conservative MPs to make what happen? To ensure that “more” is done in the way of “delivering” for the GTA. Want more passport offices and bridges? Vote Conservative.

This is the Prime Minister of Canada talking, you understand. The candidates for President of the United States debate the shape of the financial system and whether it is strategically wiser to focus on Iraq or Afghanistan. The Prime Minister of Canada — a Conservative Prime Minister — devotes himself to delivering passport offices to Ajax.

This is what is left of conservatism in Canada. This is what our politics have become, or reverted to — trawling for votes with hooks baited with other people’s money, like any 1940s ward-heeler. It’s the same old game, telling voters in every riding that they can make off at the expense of all the others, that the LIberals played for years. Only I remember a time when there was a party, and a leader, that said they’d put a stop to it.

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