Saturday 17 October 2015

Globe & Mail Endorse the Conservatives - without Harper

This is the dumbest thing I've read this election.

Where the editors of the The Globe and Mail have been hiding their heads I don't know, but surely even they should have found out by now that the Conservatives have no economic record to run on. News flash: If they had one, they'd be running on it, since it's far-and-away the most important issue to voters. If they had one, they'd be running on it, instead of the desperate campaign of xenophobia and racism they've resorted to. This isn't a campaign that "should've" been about the economy but "became" about Harper's meanness. Harper turned it into what it's become, and that decision reflects what he thinks (I hope wrongly) about 36% of this country (along with the fact that even he knows he has no economic record to run on). To describe it in those terms is the vilest sort of white-washing.

The fact that so many Conservative economic policies show up in the other platforms reflects the damage Harper has done to the national conversation about the economy, and one can only hope that the next non-Conservative government will begin moving Canada away from this nonsense, whatever they may promise during the election. To see the myth of Conservative economic management propagated as fact in what is supposedly the country's paper of record is disheartening - almost as disheartening as learning that they also buy into the myth of a sober, moderate, and responsible form of modern conservatism, which we could apparently have if only Harper stepped down. Never mind the fact that Canadian conservatism was transformed precisely by the merger between the CPC and Harper's own Alliance Party - a merger which severed the connection between conservatism in Canada and the tradition of British Toryism, turning it into a Reaganite movement.

Essentially, they just endorsed Winston Churchill for PM - way to stay relevant, guys. I was about done with the G&M anyway. This seals it.

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