harper Attacks Wynne, Notley

They were actually good people. Unfair to compare them with Conservatives.

 From the CBC:

A political spat that erupted this week between Conservative Leader Stephen Harper and the Alberta and Ontario premiers is being seen by some as a calculated move on Harper's part to shore up his traditional party base.
...
On Tuesday, Harper took a not-so-subtle swipe at Wynne's performance as premier, saying: "I think I will observe what a senior official told me when I took office. They said, 'You will have your best relations with the premiers who are doing a good job in their own jurisdiction.'"
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But Harper has also taken aim at Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, referring to her new NDP government's decision to raise corporate and income taxes as a "disaster." (Notley responded that her government's priority is to protect the jobs of "regular working families," rather than "wealthy Conservative friends and insiders.") 

In the first place, it was the Alberta PC's who were the disaster that was resoundingly rejected by Albertans. Just compare the results of Alberta's "free market" (i.e., licking the bitumen-stained anus of Big Oil) policies to Norway's radical-pinko-tree-hugger-airy-fairy-wooly-headed socialist policies. Alberta's Heritage Fund (begun in 1976) has saved up the princely sum of $15 billion to help Alberta transition for when the oil runs out (or when the carbon economy is abandoned). Norway's Oil Fund (begun in 1990) stands at over $1 trillion.

Now, I know us leftards are supposed to be shitty at math (I know I sure am!) and basically, stupid air-heads who don't know how the real world operates (as opposed to right-wingers like Patrick Ross and his masterful command of the Canadian legal system), but it seems pretty clear that $1 trillion is bigger than $15 billion.

And I don't think there's really anything left to say about that mister harper. You stupid fuck.

As for the Ontario Liberals, well, they're a party as anti-democratic and thuggish as harper's own. (Though "credit" where credit is due; they learned their contempt from harper and not the other way 'round.) But even within Ontario, the Wynne Liberals have an equal in scuzzery, in the Ontario PC's, which barfed-up the murderously incompetent and corrupt Harris government (which itself puked-up John Baird, Tony Clement and Jim Flaherty to the federal party). It was later led by the corporate tool/total moron Tim Hudak and is now being led by some federal harpercon backbencher neanderthal whose name escapes me.

Anyhooo ....

"In the Canadian politics playbook, attacking premiers in the middle of a federal election campaign is unusual," said Cristine de Clercy, ​associate professor of political science at Western University.

"It's not clear to me what sorts of benefits Mr. Harper expects to secure in taking on two provincial premiers as well as the leaders of the other federal opposition. It's almost like a multi-front war now, and those tend to not end up very well."

But here's the thing: harper doesn't have anything positive to say to voters. "Conservatives" don't build things. They tear down things that work. Because of their blinkered, fundamentalist, black-and-white IDEOLOGY. (You can't call the Tar Sands projects as building something because of their net destructive consequences. As the link says, harper is only trying to reinforce his base. Ontario "conservatives" have been trained to believe that any policies other than their own are literally "disastrous." (They're also trained to ignore obvious disasters of their own.) So, having really nothing to say to his grassroots (his boutique tax cuts benefit only a small portion of wealthy Canadian voters and he knows this), harper appeals to the paranoid aspect of his ordinary supporters. Call "up" as "down," say that "black" is "white" and trash your ideological opponents in all the confused rhetoric.

Unfortunately for harper, it looks like no matter how much he doctors the statistics and deludes himself, he's incapable of making Canadians downsized into lower-paying jobs or unemployment, forget that they've been screwed by the system harper presides over. Given his own inflexible devotion to austerity in the face of economic downturn, continued economic misery experienced by Canadian households ("families" in the parlance of our times), combined with continued revelations of the vast extent of harpercon corruption, it looks like pulling out all the stops of bribery, election fraud and attack politics might not save his ugly ass from defeat.