On false moderation

Stephen Maher nicely pegs why Harper's attempts to appear relatively moderate haven't put a dent in the rightful suspicions of Canadians - and aren't likely to anytime soon:

Ted Byfield, a conservative Alberta commentator who has watched Mr. Harper for years, said in 2004 that any such moves would be merely strategic.

"I don’t think he knows how to compromise," he said. "It’s not in his genes. The issue now is: how do we fool the world into thinking we’re moving to the left when we’re not?"

Since then, on virtually every important national issue, Mr. Harper has shifted left toward the traditional Canadian consensus position. He has rarely, though, enunciated reasons for the shift, perhaps because that would mean admitting he was wrong earlier, or perhaps because he does not believe he was wrong, just that the earlier position was not acceptable politically...

Some policy flip-flops are a normal byproduct of going from opposition to government, but Mr. Harper has changed his whole platform, one item at a time, embracing everything from bilingualism, which he once called "the god that failed," to the Kyoto accord, which he called "a socialist scheme."

It looks like he would change a policy, judge whether it moved him close enough to the centre, then finding it had not, sigh and change the next policy...

These changes are different from the normal broken promises of politics — like Jean Chretien’s vow to scrap the GST or Mr. Harper’s promise on income trusts — and more like a complete transformation. And since they have not been accompanied by a public explanation, it is hard for anyone to know what Mr. Harper really thinks about things.

Average Canadians, who pay little attention to politics between elections, nonetheless seem to sense this ambiguity, perhaps in the guarded look that Mr. Harper has in his eyes from time to time.

If there's anything Maher misses, it's that there's another reason for concern beyond only Harper's lack of justification for his changes in position.

Instead, the Cons' stay in government has also been marked by a distinction between their spontaneous responses and their more calculated maneuvers. Harper's grudging moves toward the centre have, as noted by Maher, largely been based on an intention to do as little as possible as late as possible in order to appear centrist.

In contrast, his party's manner of dealing with new issues which demand an immediate response (particularly with respect to foreign policy) has generally involved taking as extreme a position as possible as quickly as possible, then refusing to retreat except to the extent absolutely necessary. And since all but the largest foreign policy issues tend to be relatively quickly forgotten, that's often resulted in little (if any) movement from the Cons' initial stances.

Based on that track record, it's easy to see that the instincts of Harper and the Cons still amount to nothing more than a cynical, centralized and corporatized version of the extreme positions which they now try to claim are in the past. And with the Cons' stay in power marked by a complete absence of principle other than a desire to reinforce that power with a majority government, Canadians have every reason to think that Harper's refusal to explain his party's change in position simply reflects the fact that he's looking to reverse course at the first politically-viable opportunity.