Michael Ignatieff, the federal Liberal leader who according to comedian Rick Mercer is so determined to run the country he actually came home to do it, is leaping around Parliament Hill these days demanding that Prime Minister Harper fire his finance minister, Jim Flaherty, for “incompetence on a historic scale.”
People with long memories might quarrel with that accusation by recalling Walter Gordon and his pudding-headed economic nationalism of the mid 1960s while finance minister in the Lester Pearson cabinet. Or Edgar Benson in the early 70s, and the beginning of the long descent during the Trudeau years into deficit financing. In yearly sequence, the deficits piled on accumulated debt which eventually approached a half trillion dollars. We’re still paying the interest, at around $35 billion a year.
So “historic scale” may be a reach into hyperbole, but then what else is new in Ottawa? The whole place is a raving Ship of Fools, and the fact that Jim Flaherty is arguably among the greater of them makes the others, including Ignatieff, hardly less so. The Grits pound away about Flaherty’s apparent habit of assessing the national finances by counting on his fingers, which may explain why he issued blithe predictions in late November of a modest budget surplus. He altered course in January and said well, actually, there’d be a deficit of $34 billion dollars, and now – a mere four months further on – he figures it’ll be “substantially” greater, at $50 billion.
That’s why Ignatieff and his finance critic, John McCallum, are looking to mount Flaherty’s head on a pike, but then in the same breath they argue for more spending, with its inevitable addition to the deficit, on minor sideshows such as Employment Insurance. The deficit’s the most dreadful thing, they proclaim, but let’s add a few billion dollars more, get that economic stimulus moving and out the door, which is by way of saying they’re trying to have it both ways.
The absurd two-faced rhetoric of the Liberals, though, doesn’t disguise the fact that Flaherty’s political career has been badly damaged, and perhaps thrown off the rails altogether by the deficit numbers. His credibility is shot and anything he says or forecasts from now on will be taken – as it should be – with a block of salt. We can’t rely on his comfortable cluckings that the recession, even if deeper and more debilitating than he initially expected, will soon reach its nadir, with economic recovery to follow. We can place no faith in his preachings that Canada is better positioned to emerge from the current malaise than any other G-20 nation. We can’t believe anything he says, really, because he’s been so manifestly wrong about the central issue, which is of course the headlong plunge into a single-year deficit of unprecedented dimension.
But fire him? Harper will do no such thing for two reasons. First, showing Flaherty the door would be a political train wreck for the Conservatives because it would, sotto voce, endorse the Liberal accusation of incompetence, even if on less than “historic scale.” And second, dumping Flaherty would turn Harper into Ottawa’s version of the Ghostbuster. Who’re you gonna call? Not one name on the current Tory roster, cabinet minister or backbencher, springs to mind. Rona Ambrose? Not. John Baird? Don’t think so. Diane Finley, Tony Clement, or anybody for that matter? Ah….no.
Flaherty is safe because there’s no one on the Conservative team to put him out. And besides, the days of ministerial accountability when demonstrable malfeasance, inability, or outright blundering actually did cause a minister to resign from time to time are long gone. If as the old saying would have it, there’s honour among thieves, the lesson’s been lost on Canadian politicians, because they have none at all.
That’s one reason among a good many why Ignatieff and the Liberals are rabbiting away about dismissing not only Flaherty, but the Harper government itself, thereby forcing a general election. But as always, talk is cheap among dishonourable men because the Grits are fully aware that any motion to defeat the government would be blocked by the NDP.
The NDP? Jack Layton and his band of fiscal looney tunes? The furious little fellow who was determined to send the Conservatives packing in December of last year and form a coalition in their place?
Well, my oh my. Things do change, don’t they, and have, thusly: recent polls, one following the other, have revealed the New Democrats fading rapidly from national consciousness, losing votes to…..the Liberals. Master Layton, with his bothersome and tiny band in the Commons, has little enough political clout as it is. The mere hint he might have even less were an election held is an iron-clad guarantee it won’t be, because Jackie and his gaggle won’t permit it.
That’s a further reason why Jim Flaherty will stay where he is. So, too – for the time being, anyway – will Prime Minister Harper and his government because Little Jackie Layton is in greater political danger than either of them.