How brilliant does Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s pot admission look now that the smoke has cleared?
Even conservative pundits on the Hill are musing about how fogeyish and out of step the other guy looks all of a sudden. That would be the PM, Stephen Harper, who could barely mask his disdain not only for Trudeau’s weed revelations, but that reporters continued to blow smoke in his face about it a week later.
“I don’t count legalizing the marijuana trade as a serious economic policy,” the PM snapped last week. Apparently, some disagree. Two billion a year in added government revenue, not to mention the savings to our justice system from processing minor pot offences, is nothing to sniff at.
The joke has turned out to be on the PM. Most Canadians, including some among the older voters who make up the Conservative base, favour liberalizing marijuana laws, overwhelmingly so judging by the reaction online in recent days. Those who took to online comments of conservative mainstream papers across the land, by the hundreds it should be noted, say it’s time to rethink Mary Jane.
Harper was in Toronto before the long weekend to deliver a speech to the faithful at the annual Conservative BBQ. The scene was a cricket pitch in Sunnybrook Park. The PM talked about cricket, like politics, being a long game. A very long game. It was an odd thing to say given an election is more than two years away. He chastised “the pundits,” who said the HarperCons couldn’t win seats in T.O. Well, some guy named Ford had a little something to do with that.
The usually Harper-friendly National Post took some delight in panning the event. It was no barnburner. Not difficult to see why. Harper’s 2,600-word sermon reads a lot like the speech he gave on the campaign trail in 2011. It might as well have been 2011.
The PM touched on familiar – some might say all-too-familiar – themes. He mentioned the economy 12 times criminals or crime eight times families and taxes seven time each.
He criticized the opposition parties for “dangerous” and “vacuous” thinking. He threw in a few well-worn lines about the government working to ensure that Canadians, and not foreign workers, get first dibs on jobs. That would be jobs that Canadians don’t want anyway, but he didn’t mention that part.
There was also a tip to the lunatic fringe in the party who thinks the Canadian Human Rights Act, that piece of legislation used to nail neo-Nazis in the past, is an infringement on our “freedoms.” As old Reform standbys go, that one was right up there with the abolishing of the gun registry, another of the “accomplishments” noted by the PM.
Earlier in the day the PM announced the government would be introducing legislation to make sex offenders serve their sentences consecutively. It’s like that with the Conservatives. Every time they need to change the channel, they push the law and order button.
By Harper’s count, the Cons have delivered on 84 of the 100 promises made during the campaign. But he lost me on the Peter Ustinov line about Toronto being like New York run by the Swiss. Who even uses that anymore? Orderliness, politeness and civic pride? The PM must be living in the past. Certainly, he hasn’t been keeping tabs on what his fishing bud Rob Ford has been up to.
It was vintage Harper. But that vintage is starting to go sour on Canadians. The latest polls show the Libs 10 points ahead of the Conservatives. Blame the ongoing Senate scandal. Blame the high-profile desertions. Blame voter fatigue.
The murmurs have already begun among some party faithful that maybe it’s time Harp start considering a graceful exit. The PM has heard the rumours. He has gone into bunker mode, the small circle around him tightening further.
After the recent departure of yet another communications director, Andrew MacDougall, there have been wholesale changes in the PMO. There, most of the new faces are old ones, friends of the PM, whose habit it has been to seek out his closest allies when in rough waters.
The recent cabinet shuffle was supposed to put a new face on a government that’s showing its age. But the move of Peter MacKay from defence to justice minister was also subtle acknowledgement of Harp’s increasingly tenuous grasp. Keeping MacKay in defence would have kept the latter’s leadership aspirations at bay, given those bad headlines related to the F-35 purchase.
But that would have been too risky a play, even for the win-at-all-costs PM. Earlier this year, MacKay publicly mused about leaving the party should it opt to go to a one-member, one-vote system to choose the next leader. The system that would favour Western Canada where Conservatives are more numerous than Eastern and Central Canada where riding associations are smaller.
MacKay is definitely looking more saleable these days as an alternative to Harper, gracing the cover of Hello! Canada to announce the birth of his child.
After seven years in power, it’s natural that the electorate would start thinking that it’s time for a change. But arguably, it’s the Conservative brand that needs changing.
For the better part of the last decade, the Cons have been able to sell the idea that they’re the only party that can be trusted to steer the economy.
In his Toronto speech, the PM referenced the 1 million net new jobs created since the end of the recession. “Only the Conservative Party can be counted on to take care of this country,” intoned the PM.
But here we are five years removed from the Great Depression Part Two, and the economy is still growing at barely one per cent. Another 39,000 Canadians lost their jobs in the last quarter. Youth unemployment remains out of this world. The numbers of those who’ve been out of work for a year or more are growing.
Meanwhile, average Canadians are up to their proverbial necks in debt, while the banks enjoy record profits. The price of a barrel of oil went down by $2 before the Labour Day weekend. The price at the pumps, however, keeps going up. That’s something meat-eating, car-driving Conservatives can understand.
The ongoing Senate scandal has revealed malfeasance all the way up to the PM’s office. But it’s also served to make a mockery of Conservative claims to fiscal responsibility, not to mention, accountable and transparent government. The PM’s proroguing of Parliament yet again to avoid answering questions about that have fuelled the perception of a tired government. The Cons are more than just out of touch with Canadians on pot.
