A Canada You'll Never Recognize

Now that the race for the Conservative Party leadership, which really was not so much a race as a traveling road show of The Three Stooges does Canada, is finally over, with Stephen Harper firmly at the helm of a party he's been with through three name changes and enough makeovers to make Michael Jackson seem restrained, we can now forget the leadership chase that wasn't and move on to what the Great Right Hope from Calgary Southwest has in store for Canada.

And unless you think Ayn Rand is nothing short of the second coming, I'd suggest you hang on to your ten-gallon hat, because Stephen has one serious chuckwagon ride in store for you.

What once was nothing short of fantasy on the part of a few dreamers with one foot in the cow patch and the other in a puddle of holy water is now a disturbing, unfathomable possibility, what with the Liberal party's startling inability to cover its tracks while knocking the standards of creative accounting back twenty years, and with poll after poll making it very clear that Stephen Harper's vision could very well become public policy faster than you can say "notwithstanding."

Yes, what Stephen Harper says actually means something now.

And here is something Stephen Harper has been saying: "We can create a country built on solid conservative values, not on expensive liberal promises: a country the Liberals would not even recognize, the kind of country I want to lead."

Now if this involves forcing Adrienne Clarkson to wear hand-me-down jumpsuits and Paul Martin to do more than quibble about health care funding while his former steamships fly under Barbadian flags after having been painted with Canadian tax dollars, then hey, Stephen, give'm hell, you ornery cowpoke you.

This, however, is not quite what Stephen Harper means.

What Stephen has in mind is what every utopian, right-leaning economist from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman has proposed with capitalist glee for years: market forces are the best way to deal with the goings-on of day-to-day life. Leave government out of the loop; let the populace run its own affairs.

Alleluia, amen, and pass the food stamps.

In practice, what this means is that should the new Conservative/Canadian Alliance/Reform Party of Canada start sitting to the Speaker's right during Question Period anytime soon, Canada is going to start looking a lot less like Canada, and not just to the Liberals.

Stephen Harper wants to roll back taxes, scale down government, and increase federal funding for the military, which I am sure will make his former economics professors and every laissez-faire zealot in this country very proud. When it comes to health care, he uses the phrase "innovative delivery" which means "two-tier" no matter how "innovative" you want to make it.

What we have here is a love affair with supply-side economics that has not one single example of success in the developed world...should you care to see how well it does work, cast your eyes south and take in the glory of the world's greatest economic force eating itself alive with record deficits and job growth numbers about as lively as a hibernating grizzly bear on sedatives.

And don't try to blame Bill Clinton, the Democrats, or a lack of Britney Spears record sales for this nasty little state of affairs...hell, it's supposed to be a war economy.

Inevitably, with economic conservatism comes social conservatism, Christian style, or at least evangelical, grass roots, spit-in-a-bucket Christian style, like a bad smell after an ill-considered moment of flatulence.

Stephen Harper, to the happiness of about fifty percent of the population, would like to turn over the interpretation and enforcement of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to a free vote in the House of Commons, specifically to decide whether homosexuals should put their wedding rings away and just scoot their precious little derrières back into the closet, or whether women should be bound by the King James Bible and stay away from Dr. Henry Morgentaler.

Be very careful what you wish for, Canada...the next right ignored could be your own.

The governance in this country has been nothing short of atrocious, and our reigning Prime Minster, no matter how much he jumps up and down, expresses his complete disgust, horror, and utter disappointment with the daily reports of waste, stupidity, and downright greed of the government, has been part of this feeding frenzy since day one when he was Finance Minister, where the buck should have at least showed up at his desk, if not stopped.

It's disgusting. I have nothing funny to add.

Yet, Stephen Harper is right in all meanings of the word when he says that what he has planned would be a country that the Liberals would not recognize.

And unless America looks familiar, neither will you.