rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

Voting for….nothing

By Murray Dobbin

A vote for Stephen Harper is a vote for what? Well, nothing, actually. If you haven’t noticed Harper is making almost no programmatic promises of any kind in this election - except more tax breaks for strategically (and cynically) identified sectors of the electorate (the latest for seniors). The ideology here is clear: the Conservatives want to form an anti-government, a diminished state that facilitates business and is committed to ensuring that there are no more social programs on the horizon for Canadians. They will continue to tax Canadians - and then give them their money back through targeted tax expenditures.

But even here, of course, Harper is aiming at lowering taxes as much as possible at the high end (where the bulk of the revenue comes from) so that future governments - whether his or some other party’s - will have no revenue to carry out new social programs like home care, child care, pharmacare or infrastructure programs.

Harper has been repeating the same message daily for the past week: the other parties are making all these expensive promises that the country can’t possibly afford. Keeping those promises, says Harper, will almost certainly drive the country into deficit.

That he can say this with a straight face is a tribute to his gall. The reason we will likely end up in deficit is that Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty, consciously got rid of $60 billion in yearly revenue (implemented over five years) through huge tax cuts last fall. At the same time as they are - or will if re-elected - phasing in tax cuts, they are also implementing a multi-year plan massively increasing military spending. With these two monstrous financial commitments, Harper intends to starve the rest of government activities of funds and begin to create the country’s first deficits since 1996. What will follow is the start of actual cuts to social spending and other government programs.

How much revenue have Harper - and PC and Liberal governments before him - jettisoned in their dedication to downsizing the social role of government? Between 1984 and 2012 these two political parties will have voluntarily given up over $300 billion in revenue.