Be afraid, be very afraid
Look out, Canada! The Common Sense Revolution is about to hit the national campaign trail. If Brian Mulroney and all his happy backroom conservative cohort have their way, the heavy hand and leaden mind of Mike Harris will be dropping on a town near you with the subtlety of a Daisy Cutter trench bomb.
Trust me; he has a way of blowing things up.
Where should I start? Well, there's health care, welfare, day care, public schools, university funding, hydro production, hydro distribution, municipal subsidies and environmental regulation, to name a few.
Mr. Harris's name will also be forever tied to the Walkerton water crisis and all things troubling in Ipperwash. When it comes to slash and burn, the people of Ontario, regardless of their politics, will tell you that Michael Harris has no peer.
Nonetheless, he seems to be an early favourite to run for the leadership of the new Conservative Party of Canada (makes my heart stir just typing it), and why not? Who else, aside from Ralph Klein on a Friday night bender in Edmonton could be any more right of Paul Martin?
This, in a nutshell, is the problem facing the "new right:" namely, how far should they go without falling off the precipice to join the likes of McCarthy and Nixon in right-wing damnation?
Ironically, the Liberals have left them very little room.
Ever since Brian Mulroney resigned and left Kim Campbell to hold her nose and sink with the Blue Ship Lolliplop, the Liberal Party has been free and clear to dance across the national stage from right to left as only polls, lobbyists, and well-heeled friends and campaign contributors suggest they should. Mostly, as we all now know after a decade of the "Jean and Paul Show" that dismantled everything their party, mentors, and Paul Martin's own father worked to build, this involved heading right, and as far right as the "I'm about to launch an IPO, why do I need CPP?" nineties would let them.
Jean Chrétien's Liberals made the blue tide of the Conservatives seem like a ripple in the ocean compared to the tsunami of spending cuts that they've brought forth during their last three terms of federal governance.
For those who think I'm exaggerating, consider that while the Conservatives of the eighties and early nineties managed to take an already bloated national debt bequeathed to them by the Trudeau Liberals and actually double it, running annual deficits of 35 billion dollars and passing on a debt-to-GDP ratio one-and-a-half times the one they inherited (70% vs. 46%), it's taken ten more years for the Chrétien Liberals to reduce that ratio to pre-Brian "pass the cheque book, Mila's shopping" Mulroney levels (40%), and mostly by hacking 17 billion dollars in federal spending in their first five years of office.
Sadly, this did not include the Governor General's personal allowance or any of a number of initiatives from that Heritage Minister we all know and love.
What should scare the navy-blue shorts off conservatives and provincial health ministers from Victoria to St. John's is that Paul Martin intends to halve that old debt-to-GDP ratio once again and "continue lowering taxes."
Where is a good, God-fearing, conservative supposed to fit in with all this Liberal belt tightening?
If you're Mike Harris, it's somewhere between Adam Smith and Ayn Rand.
You see, Mr. Harris is a simple soul who believes in the benevolence of market forces and tax reduction, to the point that the province he left for Ernie Eves to lose control of, and Dalton McGuinty to clean up, is faced with more scandal, social problems, healthcare woes and infrastructure concerns than you can shake a public school ruler at, and that's when the lights are on.
Yet, with that tiny piece of fiscally and socially responsible high ground that the new Conservative Party of Canada still feels it holds (pending party resolutions and a few dozen recitations of "Hail Mary"), it seems that Mike Harris is the front-runner to lead them from the hills of Red Deer to the promised land of 24 Sussex Drive.
The odds of this are slightly higher than Saddam Hussein launching a counteroffensive and taking up residence in Disney Land, but what's frightening is that Canadian voters will be faced with a choice akin to choosing a root canal over a prostate exam, and knowing all the while that the doctor's bill is in the mail.
Of course, there's always Jack Layton.
