Prentice plays by Harper’s rules
One thing that has become abundantly clear from Jim Prentice’s short tenure as premier of Alberta, is that he has imported the Harper brand of politics, in which good public policy takes a back seat to winning elections every time.
Over the weekend, the Wildrose Party elected Brian Jean as its new leader, to replace Danielle Smith, who stabbed her party — and, indeed, all right-thinking Albertans — in the back when she suddenly crossed the floor in December to join the Progressive Conservatives. And although Wildrose members were pleased that their party will now be contesting the next election with a leader who will actually be running in the election, some of them were even happier about the news that Smith lost her battle for the PC nomination in her Highwood riding.
Smith’s feelings about this turn of events were most evident in a text-message exchange, later shared on Twitter, in which, in response to a polite question about her future plans, she told Global TV reporter Vassy Kapelos to “Piss off.” But who can blame her? In a few short years, her public persona has shifted from a smart, charismatic premierin-waiting, to a pariah who is reviled by the party she left, and unwelcome in the one she joined. It also can’t help that she’s been made to look a fool, now that Prentice’s full design has been made clear.
It was evident from the start that convincing Smith and the Wildrose Nine to cross the floor was a political masterstroke. That she would agree to the deal without any guarantee of a cabinet position, or even the nomination (Lord knows that if Justin Trudeau can manipulate an “open nomination,” Prentice could, too), shows a distinct lack of political acumen.
Of the nine members who switched allegiances, only three will be running as PC candidates in the next election (three lost their nomination fights and three announced they would not be seeking reelection). With the floor-crossing “scandal” now swept under the rug, Prentice may have cemented his party’s hold on power for another generation.
It’s good timing for him, too. If Prentice had not decimated the opposition, there’s no way his government could have introduced a budget with the largest tax hike since the late 1980s and almost no spending cuts, and still have any expectation of winning the next election. Indeed, last Thursday’s tax-and-spend budget makes Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford look like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, in comparison.
The budget increases taxes and fees across the board, making everything from booking a campsite to paying a speeding ticket more expensive. It reintroduces a previously abolished provincial “healthcare levy,” which is really just another tax, since the money goes into general revenues and health care is one of the few areas that actually saw a cut in funding. Worst of all, rather than simply increasing income taxes, the budget does away with the flat tax completely, by introducing two new income brackets.
And what do Albertans get for this assault on their pocketbooks? That balanced budget the PCs have been promising for years? Of course not. The deficit will hit a record $5 billion this year. Including capital expenditures, the province will need to borrow around $9 billion per year for at least the next three years.
This, after Prentice spent weeks telling Albertans to brace for Ralph Klein-style spending cuts. Instead, the premier went in the opposite direction, doing away with some of Klein’s most cherished policy achievements, such as the flat tax, while throwing out any hope of ever being a debtfree province again (by 2020, Alberta will be $30 billion in debt, which will cost $1.8 billion a year just to service).
Perhaps he’s following the Harper playbook of ruining the finances and then swooping in to save the day a few years later. But given that the premier didn’t seem to know that his budget would not be cutting spending until a few days before it was released, it’s more likely that he’s simply flying by the seat of his pants.
In a speech last week, Prentice said that Albertans simply wouldn’t accept massive spending cuts. “Very few people that lived through the cut and the slashes that we made years ago are advocating we do that in
Move to the mushy middle, ramp up spending, avoid making hard cuts ... sadly, it seems to work
the same way,” he told the Red Deer Chamber of Commerce. Really? You couldn’t sell spending cuts to Albertans?
It is, of course, still possible that this whole gambit will backfire on Prentice: A new poll conducted by Mainstreet Technologies has the Wildrose and the PCs running neckand-neck, each with 30 per cent support of decided voters. But never underestimate the propensity of Alberta voters to cast a ballot for the devil they know. Prentice knows this full well and is betting that his play to crush the Wildrose will allow him to run a campaign on hiking taxes — as crazy as that may sound — and win.
And herein lies the problem: While the Canadian conservative movement successfully worked on changing peoples’ attitudes in the 1990s to make debts and deficits something that the voting public simply would not accept, modern rightwing parties have learned that if they move into the mushy middle and work hard not to offend anyone by taking away their taxpayer-funded entitlements, they can win elections.
This is great news for partisans, who simply want their team to win, no matter the cost. But it means that anyone hoping to limit the size of government and implement pro-growth policies that make all of society better off must watch as their elected representatives choose political expediency over sound economic policies, time and again.