An ABC Voting Strategy for Canadians

25 September 2008, 5 April 2011

In 2008 in Canada, "ABC" stands for "Anything But Conservative."

What is wrong with the Conservative Party of Canada?

Let me start on the other side of that question....

Stephen Harper, the leader of the Conservatives, is a charismatic and articulate leader who has a knack for reading the public mind and saying just the right thing. Overall, I would judge him right in more areas than he is wrong. I admire his stands on Afghanistan, Canadian sovereignty, conventional energy development (still needed) and rebuilding our underfunded military. Mr. Harper understands that 14-year-olds are capable of heinous crimes, and recognizes that the public requires long-term protection from such individuals, who are no less dangerous than adults who behave in a similar manner. He also got the Aboriginal residential school apology right, and has done a pretty good job of not interfering with Canada's social, educational and health services infrastructure.Unlike his American conservative compatriots, he has demonstrated his ability to stay out of the bedrooms of the nation as well.

Mr. Harper is willing to act less conservatively than he believes in recognition of he fact that mainstream Canadians are also in most respects less conservative than he.

But the Conservatives have gone drastically wrong in two areas. In my judgement, despite Mr. Harper's considerable virtues, these two areas give evidence of a party that is seriously off-base, and therefore not yet ready to function as Canada's governing party.

Most importantly, the Conservative Party of Canada (unlike the predecessor Progressive Conservative Party exemplified by Mr. Joe Clark) has mounted an American-style negative advertising campaign featuring "attack ads" directed against the Liberal Party, in an effort to make the Liberal Party candidate, Stephane Dion, "the issue."

Mr. Harper, please allow me to remind you that Mr. Dion is not the issue. The issues are the issue. I will not cast my vote for any party that mounts a negative campaign. It demonstrates a lack of imagination and, more fundamentally, a lack of willingness to engage with the real issues due to a preference for demagoguery.

The Conservative Party will not get my vote so long as it persists in pushing forward with its negative campaign.

Issue number two: Mr. Harper has just reiterated that he will not back down from his party's reprehensible and socialistic tax grab of 31% on the Canadian Income Trusts. I have written extensively in previous blogs about what is wrong with this policy. In essence, the primary concern is that the Income Trusts were originally designed as an alternative funding vehicle for Canadian resource development, enabling Canadian resource companies to acquire capital through the small-scale unit purchases of (fiscally conservative) Canadian citizen investors (in return for generous tax-sheltered dividend payments) to promote resource development at home. The income trust program was a huge success, and it contributed immensely to the promotion of domestic Canadian savings and investment (which was also in dramatic and welcome contrast to the excesses of financial leverage and speculation that have dominated the investment scene south of the border).

The freeze on the income trusts creates three fundamental problems.

(1) The pool of small investor capital for resource development is drying up, and this is hurting resource companies across the board. Canada registers more energy and mining resource development companies on its exchanges than all the remaining countries of the world combined. The so-called "new" Conservative government is freezing out Canada's strongest economic resource in deference to assembling bail-out packages for sunset industries such as automobiles and forestry, which, though always an important part of Canada's infrastructure, will contribute far fewer future jobs to the economy than will energy and mining ventures.

(2) The regressive taxes on the resource income trusts have already begun to drive out small-scale Canadian Citizen investors, as cash-rich international holding companies buy out our resource assets at fire sale prices.

(3) The potential of the trusts to fund Canada's cash-strapped mining and resource development sector - certainly our primary source of new Canadian jobs for the next two decades or more - will now never be explored. As a result, far less development of our mineral resources, and with it the creation of far fewer jobs, will now be Canada's reality.

Personally, I have significant reservations about Mr. Dion's green Shift. It was certainly the wrong platform on which to base his campaign from a strategic perspective. The Green Shift over-emphasizes tax sanctions, and under-emphasizes incentives for behavioural change. However, Mr. Dion is campaigning with dignity, intelligence and patience on an issue-based platform against the misdirected personality-based Conservative campaign. Therefore, I hold Mr. Dion in far higher regard than Mr. Harper, as Mr. Dion is following the high road while Mr. Harper follows the low road. Additionally, Mr. Dion has pledged to hold taxation on income trusts at 10%, in contrast to Mr. Harper's punitive 31.5%. I had already decided to vote for the Liberals prior to their income trust announcement, but this stated policy certainly clinches my Liberal vote in 2008.

As for Jack Layton, the man is a weak leader of the NDP, Tommy Douglas' legacy party. Based on Mr. Layton's public statements, I must conclude that he is a populist rabble rouser, and not the man of ideas that Mr. Douglas was. He seems to be primarily concerned with punishing "big oil" (which in my view has been punished and exploited enough without acknowledgement that this sector has create hundreds of thousands of Canadian jobs and through taxes lavishly funded our government infrastructure, with which Mr. Layton is certainly deeply allied). Mr. Layton has no positive program that I can detect. He is focused on gouging the business sector, without insight that a healthy business sector offers an increased tax stream for the promotion of Canadian educational, cultural, social and health initiatives. Mr. Layton is lost, wandering in the darkness.

Now Elizabeth May of the Green party seems to be campaigning on principles, though I have not yet been convinced that the Green Party is in any way ready to govern at this time. But I credit Miss May, along with Mr. Dion, for steering her campaign on a principled and issue-governed course.

Given my reservations regarding all of the candidates and parties, I will not fault you, the reader, for any vote you may choose to make - even for Mr. Layton - so long as you adhere to the single most critical principle in the present campaign.

"ABC."

Vote Anything But Conservative in the October 2008 Canadian Federal Election!

April 5, 2011: Anything but Conservative again in May 2011? You betcha. The same problems apply. Honestly, I would bring back Paul Martin if I could. He has certainly so far been our most effective leader of the new millennium. But I'm willing to give Michael Ignatieff a chance. I believe Mr. Ignatieff listens to and thinks about what others say to him. A thinking leader would be to our advantage in an ever more complex world!
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