Harper Was Super-Right

 

Apparently:

Last week, the Liberals tabled legislation for an eventual “digital services tax” on big tech companies, including Facebook and Netflix.

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It’s not entirely surprising that the Trudeau government would look to tax Netflix; it has already used other legislation to subject them to strict content controls. But keen political observers may remember that one of the most-mocked episodes from the 2015 election was a video in which then prime minister Stephen Harper warned that “only our party can be trusted not to bring forward a new Netflix tax.” ...

(Sidebar: ahem ... And it only gets worse.) 

During the 2015 campaign, both the Conservatives and the NDP promised balanced budgets if they won government. But the Liberals pledged to run three years of “modest short-term deficits” of about $10 billion, on the grounds that interest rates were low and the spending could be used to bolster infrastructure and “kick-start” the economy.

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In a campaign strategy that was widely ridiculed at the time, Harper focused heavily on the notion that the “three modest deficits” was a just a fake-out, and a prime minister Justin Trudeau would end up blowing out the deficit well beyond $10 billion per year. “Friends we’ve gone through this before; look at the mess in Ontario with the ‘modest’ deficits of a Liberal government,” Harper said at a Hamilton campaign stop.

“Trudeau’s deficits will not be small,” Harper said at another campaign stop. “He said the budget will balance itself. He has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to these things.”

The other items on this list are all somewhat open to interpretation, but Harper is correct that Trudeau absolutely did not stick to “small” deficits. The national debt has doubled under Trudeau’s watch, and even before the massive expense of COVID-19 (which saw at least $200 billion in non-pandemic deficit spending), the Trudeau government had already blown past its promised targets, posting a $14 billion deficit in 2018/2019. ...

During the 2015 election, the Liberals explicitly promised in their platform “we will not buy the F-35 stealth fighter-bomber.” The Conservatives had championed the F-35 as a cornerstone of Canadian defence policy, and to that the Liberals contended that Canada was being hoodwinked by an overpriced jet that woudn’t work for Canada’s needs and could be easily replaced with “lower-priced” options.

So the Trudeau alternative was to launch an “open, fair and transparent” procurement process that concluded in early 2022 that Canada should buy the F-35. The result is that Canada is getting the exact same jet, albeit at the expense of keeping its already-outdated fleet of CF-18s in the air for 10 years longer than if they’d simply stuck with the original F-35 contract.

 

Canadians were warned.