Liberal leader Stéphane Dion rips into Stephen Harper

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has described Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a “dangerous ideologue”. In an interview with the Georgia Straight in a Richmond hotel, Dion also claimed that Harper has not been sincere during this election campaign, because to do so would reveal that he wants to turn Canada into a “right-wing Republican country”.

“We have the most secretive government in our history, the least accountable government in our history—a prime minister who is admiring the right-wing policies of Mr. Bush and the right-wing think tanks,” Dion charged. “His problem, Mr. Harper, is that he cannot be sincere.”¦Because if he was sincere, he would show to Canadians really what he wants to do with the country.”

Dion also alleged that every once in a while, Harper reveals who he really is—“like today, when he insulted the artists”. On September 23 during a campaign stop in Saskatchewan, Harper said that criticism of his government’s arts policies was a “niche issue”. He also claimed that ordinary, working people can’t relate when they turn on the TV and “see a bunch of people at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough when they know the subsidies have actually gone up”. In Quebec City, NDP Leader Jack Layton immediately condemned Harper’s comments, noting that the Conservatives slashed $45 million from the arts, whereas his party would restore that money and increase spending on the arts by
$125 million.

The Liberal leader told the Straight that Harper’s law-and-order policies will result in an additional 5,000 Canadians going to jail. Dion claimed that the Conservative government has not set aside any money to pay for this. “That means that our jails will be more crowded than ever,” he said. “And when these people will get out of jail, they will be more brutal than ever, and we will not be safer. We know that because it is what happened in some [U.S.] states”¦and he [Harper] wants to import it because he is a dangerous ideologue.”

When asked for the number-one reason why Canadians shouldn’t reelect Harper as prime minister, Dion replied: “Because his right-wing ideology failed everywhere and will not succeed in Canada. It will not give us a better quality of life to the country.”

Dion said that he wants to win this election for Canada, saying that he has a plan to create a richer, fairer, greener country. As the Straight went to press, only the Liberals and the Greens had released election platforms. (For more on their different proposals for a carbon tax, see page 45.) Dion said that his party’s planned carbon tax would be
revenue-neutral, delivering income-tax and corporate-tax reductions. However, Dion claimed that Harper has demonstrated “complete dishonesty” by characterizing it as a tax grab when it’s actually a tax shift.

“You have tax cuts for the people,” Dion said. “It’s a plan to give tax cuts on what we need, and to tax what we don’t need. Mr. Harper may disagree, but he has distorted the plan.”

He added that there has never been a policy subjected to greater attacks in Canada than his carbon tax. Dion claimed that the Conservatives have spent millions of dollars on attack ads, noting that no other government in the world has done anything like this in response to “the crisis of climate change”.

“The world needs Canada,” Dion said. “There are not a lot of countries that have the know-how that we have, the universities, the skills, and the understanding of the different sources of energy than Canada. We are part of the problem as one of the biggest polluters, but we may be part of the solution. It depends on us.”

Because B.C. generates so much electricity from nonpolluting hydro power, the province produces only 8.9 percent of Canadian greenhouse-gas emissions, even though B.C. has approximately 13 percent of the nation’s population. If Dion’s carbon tax turns out to be revenue neutral, as he has claimed, it would mean more money would flow back into B.C. than leaves the province. That’s because B.C. residents produce fewer carbon emissions per capita than the rest of Canada.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Green party, Elizabeth May, told the Straight in a recent interview that Canadians deserve to know who funded Harper’s campaign to become leader of the Canadian Alliance in 2002. The right-wing party later merged with the Progressive Conservatives to become the Conservative party.

“Why has he never revealed the people who made the donations to his campaign for leadership?” May asked. “Now we know from Karlheinz Schreiber that foreign money came into Canada to depose Joe Clark as not sufficiently conservative and put Brian Mulroney in. These are questions that are fundamental to our democracy, and no one is asking them.”

She said that the best outcome for the planet of the October 14 election would be a Liberal minority government supported by Green MPs and NDP MPs, “preferably not with the Layton approach” of “constant aggressive hostility to the other parties that want to go in the same direction”.

“We need to have an election that removes Harper as prime minister,” May said.