HARPER'S SUPPOSED EVIL PLAN ISN'T PANNING OUT

The Much-publicized Lurch To The Right Isn't Supported By What
Canadians Actually Think About The Issues, Writes Dan Gardner.

If you're a fan of Stephen Harper, please move along. I hope that's
not rude. It's just that right now I want to talk to people who wish,
as I do, that Stephen Harper would try his hand at another line of
work. Something better suited to his talents and temperament. Tax
auditor, perhaps. Or Mafioso. Something of that sort.

Here's the thing, my fellow non-fans. Your loathing of Stephen Harper
is so intense it's distorting your judgment. You assume your feelings
are proportionate to the threat Harper poses and so you see him as an
evil genius deliberately and steadily changing everything you love
about your country.

The whole political spectrum is shifting to the right, you fear.
Stephen Harper is making Canadians more conservative.

Lots of people make this case. None more prominently than Lawrence
Martin, author of Harperland and Globe and Mail columnist. "The
inculcation of the conservative mindset," Martin wrote in the Globe,
can be seen in "an anti-tax-hike mentality so strong that the Liberal
Party fears to even daintily mention the prospect of raising taxes."
It can be seen "in the rejection of Liberal national programs such as
universal daycare, the Kelowna accord and the green shift." It can be
seen in the fact that security, "a conservative staple," is now "a
paramount issue."

Put it all together, Martin concludes, and "the rightish trends are
many and undeniable."

"Undeniable"? Wrong adjective. "Illusory" is closer to it. Jean
Chretien's Liberals had one majority government after another but they
didn't implement a national daycare program, the provisions of the
Kelowna accord, or a carbon tax. If failing to embrace these programs
proves Canada is lurching rightward, then Canada lurched rightward
back when Stephen Harper was a disgruntled nobody muttering about fire-walls.

As for that other evidence, it's not really "evidence" so much as a
claim about what the evidence shows. Are Canadians so much more
anti-tax than they were in the past? Is security now a top concern?
These are questions for popular opinion surveys. But the people who
think Stephen Harper is turning Canada into Mordor seldom produce
survey data.

Which is a shame. Because the numbers look darn good to those of us
who don't want to live in Mordor.

First, there's voter intention. Over five years of Conservative
government, support for the Conservatives is pretty much where it's
always been. One-quarter of Canadians are bedrock supporters. Another
10 per cent lean in that direction. And that's it. Never say never,
but it looks an awful lot like Stephen Harper is going nowhere.

So what about values and policy positions? There isn't a definitive
data set. So I called around.

The first person I spoke to was pollster Frank Graves at Ekos, who
looked at responses to a variety of standard social conservative
positions, such as opposition to marijuana decriminalization, over the
five years of the Harper government. There was little change. And what
change there was tilted in a liberal direction.

Next, I contacted the Environics Institute, home of pollster Michael
Adams. As luck would have it, they've just put together a big package
on Canadian politics and society. It will be released later this month
but they let me have an early look.

We all know the prime minister's take on taxes. "I don't believe that
any taxes are good taxes," he famously said. Do growing numbers of
Canadians agree? Hardly. In 2005, 72 per cent of Canadians said taxes
"are mostly good," while 22 per cent said they're "mostly bad," and 5
per cent said "both" or "it depends." In 2010, the numbers were
essentially identical.

Inequality is another defining issue. In 2010, 16 per cent strongly or
somewhat disagreed that government "should reduce the gap between rich
and poor." That's up by a whisker from 2006, when it was 12 per cent.
But it's essentially the same as the 14 per cent recorded in 1999, the
glory days of the Chretien Liberals.

As for social issues, there's been a huge jump in support for gay
marriage. Support for legal abortion is also up substantially.

Of course what really counts is money and so, since 1994, Environics
has asked Canadians whether the federal government should spend more
on 21 issues.

Between 2006 and 2008, support for spending more on "liberal"
priorities like child poverty, education, health, and job creation was
high and steady. Between 2008 and 2010, it did tend to drop modestly.
Support for more education spending, for example, went from 77 to 70
per cent.

Is that evidence of a conservative shift? I doubt it. In 2008, the
economy tanked and the budget went into the red for the first time in
more than a decade. A little retrenchment was to be expected. The same
pattern can be seen in support for conservative spending priorities,
after all.

And in absolute terms, conservative spending priorities have much less
support.

In 2006, 39 per cent of Canadians said the government should spend
more on the justice system; in 2010, only 24 per cent did. In 2006, 44
per cent of Canadians wanted more money spent on the military; in
2010, that was down to 26 per cent. In 2006, 38 per cent of Canadians
wanted more money spent on domestic security; in 2010, 28 per cent
did.

On the entire list, only one budget item saw its support grow
significantly (from 24 per cent to 30 per cent) during the five years
of the Harper government: Arts and culture.

Yes. Really.

It's possible the prime minister really is Sauron spreading eternal
shadow across the land. But we can't believe that simply because it's
what our gut tells us. That's how the Dark Lord and his minions think.
We're the rational ones, remember?

For a rational person, evidence determines belief, not the other way
around. And the evidence to date suggests Harper has failed to
implement most of the conservative agenda, failed to push the
political spectrum to the right, and failed to make Canadians more
conservative.

He has done institutional damage, true, but that can be repaired. If
Stephen Harper were to quit today, he would be remembered as a nasty
but inconsequential prime minister.

And we would all wish him better luck in his next career.