Stephen Harper is REALLY not a leader

A good political leader is able to inspire people to get behind their platform for change. But before this can happen, you actually have to have a platform for people to support.

Contrary to the Ipsos-Reid survey showing that 31% of respondents believe Harper won the debate (proving only that, proportionately, more Conservative supporters like to vote in online surveys), I didn’t see any clear winner. Political partisans tend to interpret political debate accoridng to their biases, meaning pretty much everyone will claim their side won.

What I did clearly see was that the Conservatives have no platform, that Harper’s plan consists basically in a patchwork of tax cuts, that Harper believes the economy is doing fine (it isn’t), and that Harper continues to embarrassingly pretend his government cares about the environment in any meaningful way. The only sensible thing Harper said was in regard to the need for a withdrawal deadline for Afghanistan.

Harper sets his sights too low

At one point, Harper tried to score a point against Dion by pointing out that Dion doesn’t support Harper’s  income splitting plan for seniors. Dion retorted that indeed he doesn’t Harper’s plan, because his plan will go much further for seniors.

The Liberals’ plan will:

increase the Guaranteed Income Supplement by $600 a year for Canada’s lowest income seniors, and by $800 a year for low-income senior couples

The Guaranteed Income Supplement, according to respected economist Andrew Jackson, is one the main reasons for currently low poverty rates among seniors in Canada.

What emerged the leadership debates was that each leader had specific ideas about:

• rejuvenating Canada’s ailing manufacturing sector
• providing real action on environmental problems
• improving healthcare

Each leader, that is, except Harper, for whom leading a country apparently consists almost entirely in finding out how to cut more taxes. This would not be so inexcusable were it the case that the tax cuts were having any positive effect on Canadian society. But as emerged from Harper’s weak response to moderator Steve Paikin’s pointed “but are the tax cuts working?” question, even Stephen Harper acknowledges that his tax cuts are having little to no positive effect on the economy.

Beyond the fact that our economy is heading into recession and that productivity is falling under Harper’s watch(unprecedented since 1961), the tax cuts are not merely “not having the intended positive effects,” they are actively gutting the amount of money the federal government has to spend on healthcare and other social programs.

The $50 Billion Harper is proposing in tax cuts could be used to improve healthcare, to fund universal early childhood learning and care programs (which research shows have tremendous social return on investment), or to jumpstart a Canadian sustainable development manufacturing sector. Instead Harper would rather give it to large corporations like Exxon (as Jack Layton made plain).

Again, where’s the beef?

With Harper at their helm, the Conservatives will never achieve anything better than their mid-30s to low-40s polling. To achieve true broad and national appeal, you need to articulate an actual platform, something positive–and I don’t mean feel-good, but rather an actual plan with some content, rather than an anemic retreat into the safety of boring and demonstrably ineffectual tax cuts.

But Harper just doesn’t have it in him. He’s too focused on ideologically-based tax cuts to see that our healthcare system desperately needs a significant injection of new funds, particularly in light of our aging population. He’s too close to large energy corporations to see beyond the myopic pursuit of short-term profits. And he’s too stuck in an outdated laissez-faire economic mindset that fails to see the transformative potential of investment in education and high-quality childcare.

Harper is a tinkerer surrounded by inexcusably incompetent technocrats at a time when Canada neads real leadership that is willing to acknowledge the economic, healthcare and environmental issues we’re facing and provide real solutions.