With friends like this
Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada should both be friends of liberty. But are they really? Like liberals, conservatives have proven they're less committed to liberty and more committed to expanding government power. They only favor different special interests than their ideological counterparts.
Pierre Lemieux - July 28, 2008
Every week if not every day brings its crop of liberticidal news from Ottawa, just like when the Liberals were in power. In the past few days, for instance, we were reminded that the government is fighting to keep documents away from the access to information process and the prying eyes of the citizens, and that it will grant $250 million of “reimbursable investments” to Bombardier.
What have the Conservatives achieved after two years and a half in power? It is hard to find much good. And when some good steps were taken, like a small deregulation of telecommunications, they came with bad company, like reinforcing the anti-trust bureaucracy and a false spectrum auction.
The Conservatives have brought their own building blocks to the construction of the Police State while dismantling nothing of what the Liberals had built before them. The Conservative government has restricted political competition by reducing allowed donations to political parties, promoted ID papers for voting, openly imposed official ID papers for boarding interior flights, subsidized the provinces to transform driver’s licences into more of an ID card, increased the penalties for drug “crimes”, undermined the defence against “impaired” driving, created an American-like no-fly list, made anti-money laundering legislation more liberticidal, and extended the DNA database.
This government has deepened bureaucratic controls on consumer goods, prepared the ban of incandescent light bulbs, pushed the crazy ethanol agenda and the centralization of securities regulation.
In several of the new laws, increased surveillance and search powers were granted to state agents.
Despite their (fuzzy) promises, the Conservatives have done nothing to rescind the gag law that restricts free speech during electoral campaigns and nothing to repeal — I mean repeal — the infamous 1995 gun control “law”. In general, they have done nothing to reclaim our liberties.
During the first two years of Conservative government, federal expenditures have increased at an annual rate of 4.9% (4.8% without national defence), more than twice the annual rate of growth (2.0%) during the preceding 12 years of Liberal rule. And despite all the talk of tax cuts, federal revenues under the Conservatives have risen by 5.6% per year, nearly one full percentage point over the 4.7% annual growth under the Liberals from Chrétien to Martin.
It has been argued that, as a minority government, they could not do better. There is a bit of truth there. Yet, during the first half of 2008, there was a grace period when the Liberals wanted to avoid an election at almost any cost and the Conservatives had virtually free rein in the House of Commons. What did they do during that period? They did things like introduce legislation to entrench existing firearm controls (the amnesty trick), regulate food, therapeutic products and cosmetics more tightly, expand the search powers of customs cops, and maintain security certificates.
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