The federal election campaign took a turn for the worse last week. The focus shifted from the Duffy trail \u2013 a daily reminder of the moral and ethical bankruptcy of the Harper government \u2013 to a debate about balancing the federal budget in the short term. That trivial tiff mainly pitted Trudeau against Mulcair with the media\u2019s appetite whetted by the man-bites-dog discovery that Mulcair, of the stereotypical big-spending party, is dead keen for balancing the books.<\/p>\n
The media\u2019s focus on NDP-Liberal sparring was great news for Harper, a development astutely captured by Michael deAdder in his Thursday Cabinet Shuffle<\/em> cartoon in the Chronicle-Herald.<\/em> The Harper\/Darth Vader character, informed that the two parties are \u201cfighting it out on the left,\u201d announces that with the \u201cJabba the Duff\u201d trial out of the way and his opponents duking it out again, \u201cuntil things change, I\u2019ll be having a nap.\u201d<\/p>\n News editors are rarely as insightful as media cartoonists. The media herd was stampeded towards \u201cthe economy\u201d as the post-Duffy issue of the week by a sharp drop in the stock market on Monday and Tuesday. The fact that the market rebounded later in the week, leaving this Friday\u2019s closing index 3% highe<\/em>r than a week earlier, was neither here nor there. The economy was the <\/em>issue, and just like that the campaign shifted to terrain that favors the Conservatives.<\/p>\n The stock market bounce-back notwithstanding, the near-constant media focus on the decline in the Canadian dollar, the price of oil and China\u2019s economic problems may create fear and economic uncertainty that the Conservatives will exploit in order to dampen voters\u2019 enthusiasm for change. Although there are many Canadians who are unemployed or underemployed and beset with stagnant incomes and rising debt, Harper\u2019s stay-the-course message may resonate best with those whose present circumstances are pretty good, and who want to keep them that way.<\/p>\n The fact that there are many Canadians in that enviable position was highlighted with the August 25 release by Environics Analytics of its eighth annual Wealthscapes<\/em> report. It proclaimed 2014 as \u201ca good year for Canadian balance sheets,\u201d with household net worth (liquid assets, employer pension plans and real estate minus debt) increasing by 6.1%. According to EA (which uses a variety of data sources including StatsCanada, and the Bank of Canada), net worth grew fastest in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario, where most voters live. And the gap between rich and poor narrowed, as wealth of the bottom fifth of the populace grew by 9.3% over the previous year, compared with 5.6% for the top fifth. According to Environics, \u201cdespite recent economic concerns related to the oil market, the new data suggest that households have improved their balance sheets and may be in a stronger position to weather economic downturns.\u201d<\/p>\n In the context of the election campaign, the question is whether Canadians who are doing okay will operate from their \u201cstronger position\u201d to turf the Conservatives or give in to the fear-mongering about the future and cling to the devil they know. The question becomes more salient as the economic “devils” they don’t know – the opposition parties – snipe at one another about balancing the budget. A balanced budget is hardly an economic necessity – we haven’t had one since 2008 while the federal debt-to-GDP ratio continues to decline. However, the political heat around the issue grew with Trudeau\u2019s announcement that a Liberal government would run three more years of deficits to pay for an enhanced national infrastructure program. That promise, following several statements by Mulcair that the NDP would balance the books, led the media to declare that Trudeau was moving the party to the left of the NDP.<\/p>\n Nova Scotians, who witnessed that run-to-the-left-of-the-NDP ploy by Liberals in the 2013 provincial campaign, should be skeptical, given the McNeil government\u2019s 180-degree turn. And Trudeau\u2019s decision to enlist Paul Martin to help him out on the fiscal file may evoke similar incredulousness among Canadians with long memories. Martin, they will recall, was the main author of the Liberals\u2019 famous Red Book, that very progressive 1993 campaign platform. As Finance Minister, Martin executed a dizzying U-turn, tossing the Red Book in the trash and imposing the kind of cuts to health, education and unemployment insurance that Harper could only dream about.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, with monthly reports on economic growth and employment due out this week, the media will continue to focus on the different approaches to balancing the budget of the two opposition parties and the Harper government’s record may keep getting a pass. On the bright side, some polls are showing the Conservatives sitting in third place and Harperman,<\/em> the celebrated anti-Harper ditty by Environment Canada researcher Tony Turner, is going viral.\u00a0https:\/\/secure.avaaz.org\/en\/harperman_33\/?bukFoib&v=64154<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Maybe, despite the squabbling opposition parties, Canadians have already decided that, in the words of Tony Turner and his backup singers, \u00a0“Harperman it’s time for you to go.”<\/p>\n -30-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The federal election campaign took a turn for the worse last week. The focus shifted from the Duffy trail \u2013 a daily reminder of the moral and ethical bankruptcy of the Harper government \u2013 to a debate about balancing the federal budget in the short term. That trivial tiff mainly pitted Trudeau against Mulcair with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[118],"class_list":["post-362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-federal-politics","tag-wealth","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1168,"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions\/1168"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.formac.ca\/starrspoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}