Harper reminds voters of the Trudeau legacy

OTTAWA— Can the alleged sins of the father be visited upon the son?

Stephen Harper and Joe Oliver certainly think so, unless their recent reminiscences about the bad old days of Pierre Trudeau fiscal policy were two men trying to come to grips with some long-suppressed fiscal trauma of their youth.

The real target is, of course, Justin Trudeau.

The question is whether this is a 2015 political strategy or genuine enmity toward the Trudeau name which has built over the decades.

Last week in New Brunswick, Harper reached back to his childhood to warn of the link between deficits and the name Trudeau.

“I can remember as a boy, once the small deficits started to be run in the early ’70s by the Trudeau government, and it went on for a generation,’’ said Harper, who was a 9-yearold public school student in Leaside when Pierre Trudeau was elected prime minister.

This week in Toronto, in announcing he would introduce balanced budget legislation, Oliver also reached back to the Pierre Trudeau decade.

He invoked 1969. Oliver had just turned 29 and was at Harvard when the Pierre Trudeau decade began but more than half the Canadian population wasn’t even born then. According to Statistics Canada, the median age in the country is 40.2 years.

Governments in Canada and elsewhere still ape the Trudeau years, Oliver maintained, taxing and spending their way from one crisis to another.

“Between 1969 and 1979, federal spending tripled, buoyed by temporary highs in commodity prices,’’ Oliver said.

“This was not a response to economic crisis. It was driven by the ideology of the man at the wheel . . . and on the reckless assumption that commodity prices would remain high.’’

The result was some of our worst federal budget deficits in peacetime history, said Oliver.

There is nothing new, revolutionary, visionary (or even binding) about balanced budget legislation.

A 201l study of such legislation by Jared J. Wesley and Wayne Simpson tracks such initiatives back to the 1991 Social Credit government of Bill Vander Zalm in British Columbia.

But New Democrats such as Saskatchewan’s Roy Romanow and Manitoba’s Gary Doer, Progressive Conservatives such as Mike Harris in Ontario and Gary Filmon in Manitoba, Liberals such as Frank McKenna in New Brunswick and the Parti Québécois under Bernard Landry have all hung their hats on such legislation at various times.

One must, however, give the Harper Conservatives credit for consistency.

They believe there are no statutes of limitations in warning of fiscal apocalypse.

They used those warnings to good effect in Ontario in the waning days of the 2011 election when, with a Jack Layton-led NDP surging, voters were daily reminded of the Bob Rae NDP government, elected 21 years earlier.

This government has also been consistent in heaping scorn on successive Liberal premiers at Queen’s Park for their profligate spending, big deficit ways.

But this 11th-hour balanced budget conversion is all about smoking out Justin Trudeau — with one important caveat.

Harper has deeply held hostility to the Trudeau name and the dynasty, although as an adolescent, before he moved west, he was a Pierre Trudeau admirer.

In a now famous op-ed penned for the National Post a couple of days after Pierre Trudeau’s funeral, Harper, then president of the National Citizens Coalition, wrote: “Flailing from one pet policy objective to another, (Trudeau) expanded the welfare state, created scores of bureaucratic agencies, offices and ministries and encouraged the regulation and government control of major industrial sectors. Under his stewardship, the country created huge deficits, a mammoth national debt, high taxes, bloated bureaucracy, rising unemployment, record inflation, curtailed trade and declining competitiveness.’’

In the 2000 article he said Pierre Trudeau policies still had an impact on his western Canadian paycheque and opportunities for his family.

He characterized the Trudeau legacy as great battles won, but a war lost shortly after he left office. Harper has worked hard to ensure he will not endure any such legacy.

Pierre Trudeau, he said, was a member of the “greatest generation,’’ which defeated the Nazis and stood down the Soviets.

“In those battles however, the ones that truly defined his century, Mr. Trudeau took a pass,’’ Harper wrote.

Fifteen years later, he readies for electoral battle with Trudeau the younger, who Harper has mocked as the recipient of a “personal trust fund” from his father.

When Harper spits out the Trudeau name on the campaign trail, the depth of his animosity will go much beyond the question of balanced budgets. Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter:@nutgraf1