One of the favourite political tactics of the Conservative Party is creating solutions for problems that don’t exist.
So, it was not surprising the first week of the ridiculously long federal election featured at least two of such announcements. The first was simply bizarre even for Stephen Harper, the Conservative candidate for Calgary Southwest. In an Internet ad Wednesday, Harper promised not to impose a tax on Netflix suggesting that the other parties would even though nobody has ever even suggested such a thing, except for, hmmm, the Conservatives who, in their 2014 budget, looked at taxing online purchases by Canadians from foreign vendors.
The ad would be laughable, if it wasn’t so shameless.
Far more disturbing was the second announcement that came on Sunday. Now, Harper says he will make it illegal for Canadians to travel to “places that are ground zero for terrorist activity.”
This is about as redundant as law-making gets. It is already illegal to participate in terrorist activities. Under the new anti-terrorism laws introduced with Bill C-51, it is even illegal to “promote” terrorism. That very ugly bill also created a no fly list of people who are suspected of wanting to be terrorists.
There can be only limited reasons why Harper would introduce this at this time. He is almost undoubtedly attempting to distract from his horrendous economic record, but he is also trying to advance the narrative that only the Conservatives care about the safety of Canadians.
Maybe I am looking at history through rose-coloured glasses, but there was a time in country, pre-Harper’s vicious American-style partisanship, when people of good conscience could disagree on issues without questioning each others’ patriotism.
Week one does not bode well for the rest of the campaign. It appears for the next 10 long weeks we are going to be served a steady and insulting diet of fear-mongering and boutique tax credit promises.
The bottom line is that the Conservative Party is bankrupt of ideas and their desperation is showing. On CBC’s Power and Politics Monday, Michelle Rempel accused NDP leader Tom Mulcair of promising to kill the proposed Energy East project, a pipeline that would take Alberta oilsands oil to refineries in eastern Canada.
After NDP star candidate Linda McQuaig stirred the pot last week by saying meeting Canada’s climate change goals means, “a lot of the oilsands oil may have to stay in the ground,” the Conservatives have been all over Mulcair.
I have no problem with that. It is an election, after all, but it is appalling that Rempel would just fabricate this idea that Mulcair has a secret agenda to stop Energy East.
That is what Conservatives do, however. Remember Conservative MP Brad Butt making up the story about witnessing political operatives stealing voter ID cards from recycling bins and being used to commit fraud?
Butt was trying to provide his government with “evidence” in support of the Unfair Elections Act and was later forced to apologize, but never faced any real consequences because his Conservative cronies voted down a motion to have the breach of parliamentary privilege investigated.
Ultimately, the lie was pathological because the government did not actually need any evidence to pass the egregious bill because they had a majority.
It is that Unfair Elections Act that currently has us embroiled in this unnecessarily long campaign. All indications are it is also going to be unnecessarily nasty.
