Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivers the keynote address at a conference, March 22, in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Canada is experiencing a housing crisis. (It’s Stephen Harper’s fault.) Food prices are through the roof. (It’s Stephen Harper’s fault.) The climate crisis is worsening. (You know who’s to blame.)
The former Conservative prime minister is responsible for every ill that has befallen society, or so says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and others in his Liberal government, even though they’ve been in power for more than eight years.
This makes no sense. Whatever the statute of limitations might be on blaming the others for your misfortunes, it must surely have expired long before now. It could be expressed as a maxim: The more years that pass with a government blaming its problems on its predecessor, the more desperate that government appears. Call it the Harper Rule.
A survey of recent Hansard and news clippings shows just how far the Grits are willing to go in blaming the Tories for the ills of the world.
Grocery prices continue to rise – by almost six per cent in the past 12 months, according to Statistics Canada. Whose fault is that?
”Stephen Harper allowed Loblaws to acquire Shoppers [Drug Mart], thereby decreasing competition in Canada’s grocery industry,” Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux told the House of Commons on Nov. 23. “He is the one who brought [the number of supermarket chains] down ultimately to five companies.”
Canada is experiencing a severe housing shortage. Mr. Trudeau knows who’s at fault. In September, he pinned the shortage on “the previous Conservative government that got out of the business of housing in this country.” Now we know why so many people can’t afford a down payment, or rent.
The Liberals have run a string of deficits and amassed hundreds of billion of dollars in debt. Ottawa now spends more on servicing the interest on the debt than on defence or employment insurance or the Canada Child Benefit. You might think the Liberals would at least acknowledge this.
But no.
Stephen Harper’s Conservatives “had a $55-billion deficit in 2010-11, and what did Canadian citizens get? They got nothing,” Liberal MP Michael Coteau told the House.
(They got infrastructure, actually, as part of the effort to combat the 2008-09 financial emergency, and a budget surplus in fiscal 2014-15, but let’s move on.)
This Liberal government struggles to bend the curve on carbon emissions. But in a classic case of whataboutism, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault reminds anyone who asks, “The Harper government did not meet any of the environment targets it had.” (That’s true – and equally true of the Trudeau government.)
It goes on and on. Have the Liberals been too soft on China? Mr. Lamoureux again: “One cannot help but think about the time when Stephen Harper went to China and signed a secretive investment agreement. No one knew about it.” (This newspaper and others wrote extensively about the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement, or FIPA.)
Is Sustainable Development Technology Canada guilty of mismanagement? Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne would like to remind you “that corporation existed for 10 years under the Harper government.”
Have promises to improve the quality of life on First Nations reserves not been kept? Patty Hajdu, Minister of Indigenous Services, blames “a decade of no investments in First Nations communities under the Harper government.”
Is the military underfunded and facing further cuts? Mr. Lamoureux: “We do not need to be given lessons from a Conservative Party that depleted” the military.
Has underfunding contributed to an erosion of scientific capacity at the Public Health Agency? “We all knew that under the previous Conservative government there were massive cuts to science, there was marginalization of scientific voices, there was a putting-aside of experts in an attempt to cut the budget, cut the deficit at all costs, on the backs of Canadians,” Mr. Trudeau said. (Well, at least he’s willing to admit the Conservatives cut the deficit.)
It’s reasonable for any new government to ask citizens to take into account the situation it inherited. But at a certain point, a government must take ownership of the agenda. This Liberal government long ago lost the right to blame the other guy.