[Mac]

[SFrank85]

[Mac]

[SFrank85]

[Mac]

[JBG]

[GGM1954]

Stephen Harper is a great PM. Conservative leadership has never been stonger. I thought this was a Tory sight - why are we even entertaining such nonsense for discussion?

[Rusty Bedsprings]

[teabag]

Yes I think the MSM does enough entertaining the thought of Stephen Harper being ousted. There is almost a daily bashing of the PM in the Toronto Star and Greg Weston of the Sun today does his share. I think if they say the PM is bad often enough it is the same as Chicken Little saying the sky is falling. Sooner or later people start to believe this crap.

[SFrank85]

Harper needs to come back to his base, and start to govern like a conservative again

[JBG]

[SFrank85]

[FF_Canuck]

[Jerry Kucheran]

Very correct about giving cabinet members exposure, Joe Clark probably had one of the best assembled and known cabinet members that covered the countries demographics.
Harper is the economist we need at this time, but unfortunately, his bonehead moves in Quebec and just sitting back and let the Opposition parties shoot themselves, should have been his tactic. Instead he is now forced to be a Conservative with a Liberal bent agenda, even though he is right that we can't make any moves until we see what happens to our biggest customer, the US. Like anyone running a business, who replaces that customer who is near bankrupt with an expected very slow recovery.

[machiavelli]

The small-c fiscal, social and judicial conservative that Conservative Party members misguidedly thought they were voting for as our leader in 2002 would, under no circumstance, tolerate the country to return to a colossal, superfluous 30 plus billion dollar deficit which will undeniably not be short term and could do more harm than good

Rather than accepting Obama’s moronically socialistic claim that “only the government ca n break the vicious cycles crippling the economy”, the small-c fiscal conservative that we understood we had elected would know that a country ca n not spend its way out of a recession; and therefore would permit the free market to heal itself. Fiscal conservatives know that if additional spending was the solution we wouldn’t be in this recession disarray since comrade Harper’s government is spending more than any preceding government.

A fiscal conservative PM would know that there is a finite number of dollars to be spent by either the private sector or by government. He also is aware that all non-socialistic studies categorically substantiate that private sector spending is immeasurably more beneficial than government spending. Another aspect of deficit spending philosophy that a genuine fiscal conservative PM would notify his people is that deficit spending means that the government of the day is stealing money from our grandchildren and future generations who will be inflicted with massive taxes to pay for today’s superfluous, colossal spending.

The genuine conservative we sought would slash wasteful, profligate and peripheral billions from the $230 billion Federal budget. A small-c fiscal conservative would repossess dollars from the current, obese budget for tax cuts. To acquire tax cutting dollars the conservative we thought we had elected would expedite across the board cuts to all program spending, cut million of dollars of improvident foreign aid that ends up in dictators’ banks accounts, eradicate ineffectual programs, place an absolute freeze on all government hiring, sell government assets, close worthless crown corporations (specifically the far-left bias CBC), Cut immigration/refugee numbers by 33% for at least three years, and eliminate direct corporate welfare. He would recognize that tax dollars are not government dollars, but taxpayers own money; therefore he would apply those resuscitate tax dollars to retroactively lower all levels of personal income taxes for 2008 and beyond, cut payroll taxes, corporate taxes and capital gain taxes which would put dollars into the hands of people who would immediately spend it and expedite the market place healing process.

The structure of his deficit package is a sign of just how far to the left our Prime Minister is willing to intervene in the economy with his new, far-left economics. At the very least, Harper should have incorporate sunset legislation in his budget bill that stipulated that the government, after two quarters of positive GDP growth, will immediately begin to pay down this new debt in a very brief, overtly stated, explicit duration. Harper’s abandonment of conservative ideology, and his plunge to the far- left by bailing out the auto unions, and creating a unnecessary, credulously massive deficit are illustrations that legitimate small-c fiscal, social and judicial conservatives are not represented in his Conservative Party.

In 2002 when we thought we were electing a small-c fis ca l, social and judicial conservatives we should have paid more intention to what Tom Flanagan would later write in his book, Harper’s Team: "Some socially conservatives constituency presidents and councils remained skeptical of Harper”. As it turned out it was not only the social conservatives who should have been skeptical of Harper.