24 Sep Ignatieff disappoints but Harper frightens

Jeffrey Simpson delivered a devastating smackdown of Michael Ignatieff yesterday. Money quote:

The rhetoric infecting these speeches suggests wide differences and new ideas. Strip the rhetoric away, and the differences narrow and the search for interesting new ideas shrivels.

No question, Ignatieff is, to this point, a bewildering disappointment on policy and leadership, but there’s one thing missing from Simpson’s analysis.

The old saw about Liberal Party strategy says, “Campaign left, govern right.” These days, just about everyone campaigns moderate, even the Conservatives. Stephen Harper’s main contribution to his party’s revived fortunes has been the strategic good sense to slip a robe of moderation over its reformist undergarments. It’s a mirror image of the formula that brought Darrell Dexter to the premier’s office.

As Jim Nunn rightly warns, if we’re ever incautious enough to give Harper a majority, watch out. Unlike Dexter, who really is a moderate, Harper will change Canada in ways so radical, they will be hard to undo. They will be designed to be hard to undo, and Harper’s unprecedented concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s office will make it possible for him to move swiftly.

In years past, it was possible for Harper admirers to ridicule fears of a “secret Reform agenda” as a figment of fevered lefty paranoia. Harper settled that discussion a year ago, with the Neanderthal immoderate mini-budget that nearly brought down his government in favor of a coalition.

He flashed the secret agenda again yesterday by  playing hooky from the UN Climate Change conference, and Barack Obama’s speech thereto, in favor of a commercial appearance at a Tim Horton’s in New York Oakville, where the company re-announced what Susan Delacourt points our was a three month old decision.