Running on their record
National Post
Wed 30 Nov 2005
Page: A20
Section:
Issues & Ideas
Byline: Andrew Coyne
Column: Andrew Coyne
Source:
National Post

The campaign is but a few hours old, but has already
yielded its share of entertainments. There was Paul Martin stoutly asserting
that the unusually long interval between writ and election had nothing to do
with calculations of political advantage. There was the reporter who demanded to
know of Stephen Harper, since he was so darned critical of the government,
whether he cared for Canada -- and Mr. Harper's strangely analytical,
exam-question answer. There was the NDP leader, Jack Layton -- well, Jack is
always entertaining.

But the prize goes to the Prime Minister, for declaring, in all apparent
seriousness, that he intended to run on his record. Never mind that this is,
like most things Mr. Martin says in all seriousness, completely untrue: As in
the last campaign, the Liberals are going to run on Stephen Harper's record, or
rather the record they have concocted for him. Never mind, too, that the present
government has done so little in its short, disgraceful life that it barely
qualifies for an asterisk, let alone a record -- unless you count dangling
bribes in front of opposition MPs and hiding from the House for weeks on end as
achievements. Never mind, last, that "record" has, given the trail of laws that
appear to have been broken in Quebec, a rather unfortunate connotation, which a
letter from the party's libel lawyers prevents me from discussing.

No, the record Mr. Martin wants to discuss is not the record of the last two
years, but the last 12, most of it accumulated under the government of which he
now claims only the barest acquaintance, at least for the purpose of judicial
inquiries. (Why, he no more knew what was going on in the sponsorship program
than he knew Claude Boulay!) And, to be fair, that government had some
achievements to its name. It passed the Clarity Act, for instance -- to which
Mr. Martin was privately opposed. And it eliminated the deficit in just three
years -- though both the current and the former PM had previously insisted this
was neither possible nor necessary.

Still, balancing the budget was a real achievement. It's just that, well,
it's a bit late in the day, nearly a decade after, to be campaigning on that
one, isn't it? And while the Prime Minister finds it awfully impressive that the
books have been balanced every year since then, simple arithmetic dictates that
it would have been almost impossible not to do so.

When you are taking in four dollars in taxes for every three you spend on
programs -- as we have to do every year just to offset the cost of interest on
past deficits -- the gap between the two tends to grow automatically, no matter
what you do. Indeed, the proof of how ridiculously easy balancing the budget has
been is that the Liberals managed it even as they were jacking up spending by
nearly 50% in the last five years.

Look beyond the budget numbers, moreover, and the picture is less reassuring.
A number of recent international comparisons, taken together, paint a portrait
of a country that is falling behind its rivals. The Conference Board of Canada,
for example, now rates Canada 12th among industrialized nations in terms of its
economic prospects, thanks to lagging productivity growth and anemic investment.
A year ago we were sixth; the year before that, third.

The World Economic Forum's annual competitiveness rankings, similarly, show
Canada sliding from 4th in 1997 to 14th this year. One possible factor:
according to the C.D. Howe Institute, Canada imposes the highest marginal tax
rates on corporations of any country, save China.

But of course, life is about more than economic growth. What about that
United Nations Human Development Index we used to hear so much about -- the one
that takes into account a broad variety of social indicators, the one that
showed us in first place year after year? Um, we're now tied for fourth,
actually. On the environment, a Simon Fraser University study rates us 28th out
of the 30 countries in the OECD, partly because of our signal lack of progress
on reducing carbon dioxide emissions -- the issue on which the Prime Minister
boasts we are "the conscience of the world."

Keep going down the list. Health care, the touchstone of our identity? The
World Health Organization puts us in 30th place for the efficacy of our health
care. Peacekeeping, in which we take nearly as much pride? About the same, in
terms of our relative contribution. Oh, and one other indicator that might be
pertinent: Transparency International now ranks Canada 14th in terms of ethics
in government, down from fifth, thanks to a "marked increase" in perceived
corruption.

It's a record, I suppose. Still, what is it they say about records? That
they're made to be broken?

Edition: National
Story Type: Column
Note:
[email-masked]
Length: 809 words