I received Jati Sidhu’s campaign flyer in the mail today. What a textbook exercise in muddled thinking!
He attempts to list six points where the “Harper Plan Has Failed.” I noticed his first knock on Harper—“A New Recession” is essentially the same reason (but in different words) as his fourth point, “Rising Unemployment.” To make matters worse, he has to bend the facts to support his position. He quotes the June unemployment report – in September. Why not the most recent August one? Because unlike June when the economy lost 6,500 jobs, August showed Canada had gained 12,000 jobs. Oh, and by the way, those gains were of 54,000 full-time jobs versus a loss of 42,000 part-time jobs. So a 12,000 gain is massively understating the case.
Jati then makes another point which, again, he conveniently counts twice. Harper “Can’t Balance the Budget” and Canada has “Skyrocketing Debt.” The only way to get into debt is to run an unbalanced budget. The problem here is that some voters like myself actually remember the political climate in Canada in the months leading up to the global financial crisis of 2008. Harper was then planning not to run deficits but had to under threat of a Liberal and NDP coalition to throw him out to do just that. So the deficits can be laid at the feet of the Liberals, not the Conservatives. Go on Google and look it up yourself.
Finally we come to my two favourite, utterly contradictory points: “Using Children for Politics” (…like Justin Trudeau would never do that!) and “Working for the Rich.” In the former we’re told that because the Conservative’s childcare benefit is taxable, those in high tax brackets will be “giving a lot” of it back. But in the very next point we’re told that “Stephen Harper’s priority is a $2-billion tax break for the rich.”
So, let me get this straight: Harper’s bad because the rich will have to pay taxes … and he’s also bad because they won’t pay taxes. It’s truly hard to argue with that logic.
Sounds “just not ready” to me.
Marc Vella
