Greatly Exaggerating Rumours of the Liberals' Demise

The Tories are happy as clams this summer, what with their majority and everything. But no one likes a braggart.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper dropped by the Calgary Stampede this past weekend to pour salt on Liberal wounds, claiming the former natural governing party had joined “disco balls and bell bottoms” in the annals of history. L. Ian MacDonald, writing for the Montreal Gazette, cautions the Tories to remember “Pierre Trudeau, who in 1976 famously said 'separatism is dead.' A few months later, René Lévesque was premier of Quebec.” Liberal Leader Bob Rae and his much-reduced band of merry men now have something to rally around, something the party desperately needed to avoid total obliteration. “It’s never a good thing to kick a dog when it’s down,” writes MacDonald. “It might jump up and bite you.” Which is entirely possible, so long as the Grits have a pole vault hanging around somewhere.

A bigger concern for the Tories, at least for now, ought to be what to do now that they're at the peak of their popularity, suggests Lawrence Martin in The Globe and Mail. The Grits are vanquished for now, Harper's law-and-order policies are about to be rolled out, and his principle-driven, hawkish foreign policy has been solidified with John Baird as his foreign minister. “All things considered, Mr. Harper must feel he has the golden touch,” writes Martin. Harper will probably put this confidence to use by reining in public spending, but he'd be wise to not pick unnecessary fights, whether it's with the public sector unions, the provinces (over Senate reform), or the media. “Hubris takes over when what is most necessary – given that from the pinnacle, the only remaining route is down – is humility.”

The National Post's Keith Beardsley wonders why there's been so much fuss over Harper's interesting-only-by-Stephen-Harper-standards speech. “It’s a fact of political life that leaders give speeches to the party faithful that mention their own party in glowing terms and are less than complimentary to their political opponents,” he writes. As for claims that Harper's bluster amounts to hubris or arrogance, Beardsley says it's tough to level such a judgment just two months into a four-year mandate. But there's little to be won by picking on your powerless opponents, or ascribing values to the 60 per cent of people who didn't vote for you. “Canadians have never been very accepting or forgiving of arrogant politicians,” warns Beardsley. Remember what happened to the last party leader whose term was marred by smears that he was an arrogant aristocrat? He's teaching at the University of Toronto now.