Modeling Journey

I am a little concerned about a seeming lack of urgency on the part of senior members of the LPC-NDP coalition with respect to putting together the economic stimulus package. The current stance seems to be to duck the issue by saying that the Coalition needs to know what the status of the government’s finances are before it can come forward with a package. This seems to me to be a fatally inept decision.

Assuming that the Governor General grants PM Harper’s request for parliament to be prorogued until late January, then we can expect the Harper Tories to come up with a detailed, wide ranging and very expensive stimulus package. Like Republicans, starting with Reagan and ending with the hapless Bush Junior, we can expect the Tories to jettison all their principles of small government and balanced budgets, and go for broke by throwing money at whatever they can think of, if this will preserve their power.

And Harper will move fast to do so. He has already announced a further meeting with the Premiers on January 16, during which he will discuss the ‘new’ stimulus package of the Tories.

He will also use every government lever he has to push the urgency and far-reaching nature of the new Tory stimulus package, inventing new reasons for their change from no-deficit to massive-deficit funding, which take them off the hook. “We are forced to do this”, they will claim, “because the situation is now far worse than it was in early December.”

The Coalition runs the risk that the Tory scramble to put together a stimulus package will make the Coalition look ineffective, foot-dragging and amateurish.

And when the Tories present their shock-and-awe new stimulus package to parliament in late January, it be much harder from a public relations point of view for the Coalition to stick to its guns and vote the government down.

Bob Rae has started framing the issue in a proper way, buy saying that what Harper has done with his moves to date not only has caused Harper to lose the confidence of the House, but to lose the trust of the MPs.

This is the right way to frame the issue. The MPs of the Bloc, NDP and LPC have every right to consider whether they can trust promises made and broken by the Prime Minister when they decide to vote for or against the January confidence motion. The new stimulus package by the Tories will depend on the willingness of the Tories to actually implement it, and if the MPs have reasons (as they definitely do right now based on Harper’s actions over the past few weeks) to doubt the bona fides of the Tories, they can vote no to the confidence motion, based on loss of trust as well as loss of confidence in the government’s ability and policies.

Trust is an essential element of having confidence in a government.

Where does this leave the Coalition?

They had better get their act together, pronto. And they had better start making concrete, comprehensive moves to let the Canadian voters know what they plan to do to stimulate the economy and protect ordinary Canadians.

Finally, they had better start hammering away at the lack of trust which Harper has caused through his actions over the past few years, and few weeks.

But if they are as slow off the mark as they appear to be right now, the Coalition will break up, and Harper will retain power.