by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
February 2, 2004
On January 20, Belinda Stronach resigned as president and CEO of Magna International, aka, Daddy’s Company, and announced that she would be a candidate for the leadership of new Conservative Party of Canada. I only have three minor criticisms of her initial speech - one, she read it; two, she read it badly and three, what she read wasn’t worth reading. But other than that she did just fine. She even let people know where she stands on certain issues.
Stronach, or Belinda as she likes to be referred to, later lambasted the media for concentrating on her good looks and fashion sense. But if the media ever does get past her physical attributes and starts discussing what she stands for, they will realize that she’s just another small "l" liberal. She even uses liberal phraseology when she speaks about the issues.
For example, she is described as being "middle of the road". as a former american politician once said, the only thing that you find in the middle of the road are straight lines, dead animals and liberals. and let’s face it, Belinda is anything but dead and the last thing that she resembles is a straight line. The main problem with being in the middle road is that you have to leave it to others to decide where the road will go. For years the Liberals allowed the CCF/NDP to shape the road’s direction before watering down their policies and adopting them. Later, in the 1990s, the Libs allowed the Reform/alliance to set the direction by making their fiscal policies more middle of the road. a Belinda-led Conservative Party would allow the NDP to mark out the road so that they can find the middle and move the country further to the left.
Stronach also said that the Conservative Party needs to create a bigger tent. In other words, beliefs and policies don’t matter--only power does. You can be for same-sex marriage or against same-sex marriage; be for increases in social spending or against it. She wants to bring the party back to the glory days of the red Progressive Conservatives where the party stands for nothing other than being an alternative to the Liberals.
Belinda also said that she wants to keep Canada’s social safety net, implying that she does not take issue with the amount of social spending that the present Liberal government engages in. Not much of an opposition. Besides, it’s not a safety net--it’s a hammock. and people aren’t falling through the cracks, they’re diving in. But she seems fine with all the spending that the Liberals are engaging in.
Stronach has a simplistic solution for financing all this spending — she’s going to grow the "economic pie". That’s what Michael Wilson, the finance minister under Brian Mulroney tried to do. The economy never quite grew enough and the deficit shot up. When Paul Martin became finance minister he wanted to do the same thing until he was persuaded that it would not work. The only way that the deficit could be reduced was to slash expenditures which Martin did. a Belinda government would go back to the era of high deficits while she stayed in the kitchen trying to bake her pie.
another Liberal-type quality that Stronach has shown is her arrogance. By highlighting the fact that she had no political experience, she shows a disdain for politicians, not an uncommon quality in the general population but not very attractive for someone who aspires to be a politician (something about Belinda that’s not very attractive; you read it here first). Stronach plays up the facts that although she and her family are filthy rich she went to public schools in Newmarket of all places and that her family didn’t have their own swimming pool when most of her neighbours did. If these things made her a better person, the credit belongs to her father Frank who made the decisions, not her. She brags about how she runs Magna International but has not shown she’s capable of running a business of that size that is not owned by her father.
Yes, she has been spoon fed some of Mike Harris’ policies from the Common Sense Revolution like lower taxes, but it’s hard to know how much she actually understands. She knows how lower taxes will benefit Magna, but does she understand the effect on a shopkeeper in Vancouver or a fisherman in Cape Breton Island? If she does, she hasn’t articulated it.
Stronach is living proof that the new Conservative Party is just a step backwards to the heyday of the PC party. The more things change, the more they stay the same.