Fairness makes it imperative that we declare a bias in discussing these politicians. The political stance of either Stephen Harper or Tim Hudak is enough to make us toss our cookies. They are not your father’s brand of Conservatives. They are neo-cons.
It is not enough to say that Stephen Harper is an unreformed Reformer or that Tim Hudak is a parasite Harrisite. Harper used his mentor Preston Manning and cohort Stockwell Day as stepping stones to the leadership of the Alliance (Reform) Party and finally to the combined Reform-Conservative Party. It was this combination of Eastern Progressive Conservatives and populist Prairie Reformers that gave Prime Minister Harper his minority government in 2006.
Tim Hudak in Ontario is a younger version of neo-con. He is a pretender to the Mike Harris provincial mantle. He was personally selected for the job by Deb Hutton, the person considered the brains (sic) behind Mike Harris when he was Premier of Ontario. In marrying Hudak, Hutton must have made the long-term commitment to making her husband premier in the Mike Harris mould. And there is nothing progressive in that model of Conservative.
As neo-cons, Harper and Hudak are the new breed of conservative. Many consider them the pit bull breed of politician. They are more to the right of the political spectrum than most of the voters they look to for support. Neither is as strongly religious as the religious right that they also expect to support them. They are only different in perspective. Harper is an economist who bought into the Prairie populism of Calgary and the tax cutting of the Fraser Institute. Hudak is an economist who bought into the Mike Harris Common Sense Revolution (tax cutting) that ravaged Ontario in the late 1990s.
The only real difference in them is that Harper is a control freak: Hudak is controlled.
Prime Minister, Harper runs a tight ship. There is no question that he cows his cabinet and caucus to his bidding. He rarely allows insight into his motivations and directions. He sees himself as omnipotent and above the fray in his dealings with the media and the civil servants. He has twice forced a Governor General to prorogue the Commons to demonstrate his contempt for the institution of Parliament and to evade the rules. His imperial approach to the billion-dollar G-20/G-8 summits in 2010 was excessive, expensive, brutal and he has yet to be held accountable.
Tim Hudak is less sure of himself. He requires programming. He needs constant recharging. His incessant references to ‘Ontario families’ is becoming a parody. He is a small town boy and in off-the-cuff exchanges thinks small. He is no leader.
Harper can lock himself into an election mode and stay with the program he has set through thick and thin. Whether Hudak can exhibit such self discipline has yet to be seen. In this, Harper is lucky because he can go for as short an election period as 36 days. Hudak is already warping gradually into a campaigning mode, seven months before a fixed voting date of October 6, 2011.
These two men want to run our lives. God help us!
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