“Harpernomics” – the Liberals have to be kidding

The issue of the current election campaign is not whether the Liberals will win the next election. Barring a major unexpected development, Stéphane Dion will be one of the very few people ever to lead the federal Liberals without becoming prime minister. It’s not whether they are losing the election but whether they are simply losing it.

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This week, the Natural Governing Party as it was known in the heady days of Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, released television ads attacking Stephen Harper over his handling of the economy. As the Lloyd Bridges character in the movie Airplane might say, they picked a bad week to attack the government on the economy.           The use of the term “Harpernomics” in these ads is meant to invoke memories of “Reaganomics” and tie the government in with those evil right wing fanatics (or to use the CBC’s current lingo, white trash) in the United States. But it’s impossible to think of the US this week without thinking about the severe financial crisis that is unfolding south of the border and how we in Canada have, at least so far, escaped the same fate. Spillover from the American financial crisis will be felt in Canada as it will be in the rest of the world; this is not the time to change economic leadership from the known to the unknown. In light of what is happening to try and place the blame on Harper for any economic slowdown we are now facing is ludicrous.           The ad goes on to quote Prime Minister Harper as saying that Canada’s economy is strong. Since it is impossible to think of the economy without thinking about what is happening down south, anyone who has paid any attention to both the American economic crisis and the Canadian election knows, Harper was describing Canada’s position vis á vis the United States. We are not in the same position as the Americans; we don’t have a lot of people losing their homes to foreclosures. We know this for a fact because although Steffi has his head so deep in his Green Shift that he wouldn’t notice, Jack Layton would. In between viewing his candidates smoking dope on YouTube, surely Jack would have said something about the scores of working people losing their homes. And if the Canadian economy was as bad as the American situation, Gilles Duceppe would suddenly remember his roots and campaign for a separate country.           The American situation didn’t happen overnight; it was a long time in the making. The road to the crisis began in the early 1990s when Bill Clinton and the Democratic Congress began to pressure financial institutions, especially Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae to provide loans so that more low income people (specifically African Americans and Hispanics) could own their own home. Lending institutions began to give mortgages to people without any regard to their means of paying the money back. There was no problem while housing prices were rising; defaulters merely sold their homes, paid off their mortgages and pocketed the difference. But the fall in real estate prices caused the cycle that the United States now finds the country in. In an irony of ironies, the fact that Canada did not go the same way as the US did is a result of the Liberals failing to enact similar policies back when they were all the rage. The fact that the Liberals, the party of diversity who always promise to end poverty and homelessness, didn’t pressure Canadian financial institutions to make wanting a house the only requirement to acquiring one, is a credit to the Liberals who were in power from 1993 until 2006.  But they are so busy dumping on Stephen Harper they never bother to point that out.           With Scary Steve ending Canadian culture and locking up sweet little at risk youth for life, there are so many better ways to get the Tories. But by focusing on the “bad” Canadian economy, this week of all weeks makes you wonder whether anyone in Liberalville is taking this election seriously.

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