Will Canada Drop Harper for Trudeau? The prime minister has cut taxes. His challenger wants to cut emissions. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
http://www.wsj.com/articles/will-canada-drop-harper-for-trudeau-1445211119
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s management style seems to have alienated a lot of people on his own side of the aisle during his nine-and-a-half years at the helm of the Conservative government. Now, as he faces an election on Monday, his reputation as a not-very-likable fellow could cost him and his party—and also cost Canadians their future prosperity.
None of Canada’s top three national parties is expected to come away from the election with a majority government. For most of the campaign the Conservatives were given a reasonable chance of winning a plurality of seats in Parliament. If that happens, Mr. Harper would have to govern by looking for allies on a vote-by-vote basis until he is forced to call another election.
But in recent days internal polling began to suggest that the center-left Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau—the eldest son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—could finish first past the post with enough seats for a minority government. This is partly the result of a late-stage slump by the further-left New Democratic Party (NDP). A Liberal majority is unlikely but not impossible. The contest is now said to be down to suburban Vancouver and Toronto electoral districts.
Mr. Harper is well aware of his charisma deficit. While still an opposition leader, in 2002, he quipped at an Ottawa press-gallery dinner that he had studied economics because he didn’t have the personality to be an accountant. Today even his ideological allies complain that the introverted policy wonk has become guarded and increasingly prone to centralizing power.
Yet Mr. Harper is by no means politically inept. He was front and center in uniting Canada’s western Reform Party and the traditional Conservative Party, which is how the right regained power in February 2006. As prime minister he has earned a reputation for doing things incrementally and for keeping his promises.
His government has not been radical. It has reduced the growth of federal transfers to the provinces for health-care spending and made some cuts in personal income-taxes, using tax credits. But cutting the growth of spending is not cutting spending, and tax credits are a feeble substitute for across-the-board marginal rate cuts to spur economic growth.
Mr. Harper’s fiscal policy has been a continuation of reforms begun by Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (1993-2003) and his successor, Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin (2003-06). After Liberals reduced the federal corporate tax rate to 21% from 28%, Mr. Harper’s Conservatives took it to 15%.
The Harper government’s most important legacy may be on trade. As Jason Clemens, the executive vice president of the Canadian economic research center Fraser Institute, notes, under Mr. Harper “Canada negotiated a huge free trade agreement with the Europe Union, and over 30 bilateral agreements.”
Mr. Trudeau has declined to make any promises backtracking on trade and he has said that the corporate tax rate is “fine.” His campaign rests on a call for change in leadership, and he has benefited from a media obsession with the prime minister’s less-than-engaging personality. Mr. Trudeau has name recognition and, at age 43, offers a more energetic profile than the stodgy, 56-year-old Mr. Harper.
The irony is that much of what Mr. Trudeau offers as policy change would mean a shift backward toward the uncompetitive, big government Canada of his father in the 1970s. He promises to run deficits of up to $10 billion a year for three years so the state can “invest,” and then, in the fourth year, return the budget to surplus.
If that’s not distressing enough, Mr. Trudeau also told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. journalist Peter Mansbridge last month that as prime minister his first economic initiative would be to “call together the [provincial] premiers, talk about climate change, get to Paris at the end of November with a plan to reduce emissions in responsible ways.”
For a resource-based economy with hundreds of billions of investments in oil and natural gas, this spells trouble. But it’s precisely what the greens and the left expect from a change in power. That, and a vague, noncommittal national-security agenda that would degrade ISIS, without explaining how.
The Canadian economy is suffering from a downturn in commodity prices, and Harper fatigue is natural after nearly a decade. Conservatives have to hope that their limited-government message still resonates, and that their base turns out. They also have to hope that swing voters buy their arguments that Mr. Trudeau is too inexperienced to govern and that change for the sake of change is risky.
Anyone who watched a first-term U.S. senator with plenty of sizzle but not much substance bamboozle American voters in 2008 knows that’s not always an easy sale.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
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