Andrew Coyne rips into the Opposition

Well said.

The only thing they have to fear
By Andrew Coyne | Email | October 8th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Posted to: Andrew Coyne's Blog, Capital Read | 95 | Comment on post
Filed Under: Andrew Coyne's Blog • Capital ReadTags: Election Watch • financial crisis • Stéphane Dion • Stephen Harper

I didn’t care much for Stephen Harper’s accusation, earlier in the campaign, that the opposition were cheering for a recession. At the time, it seemed like a cheap shot. But the longer this goes on, the more I’m starting to think there’s something in it. The Liberals are now trying to make a “gaffe” of Harper’s perfectly sensible observation that the present panic on the stock markets presents a remarkable buying opportunity, for those with cooler heads. Stephane Dion, in particular, was quick to denounce the advice as “so insensitive.”

I’m sorry? How? What would they have him say? Sell? Take your lumps? Do nothing? You can only call it “insensitive” if you are bound and determined that nothing should break the spell of panic that now grips the country — that no possibility of an upside should be allowed to intrude. Just so long as cooler heads do not prevail.

This is demagoguery of the worst sort. And I don’t just mean that nothing about the present state of the Canadian economy justifies lumping it in with the United States or Europe, still less invoking the ghost of R. B. Bennett. We have not suffered a real estate crash, nor are we likely to; we have not seen a single financial institution go under, nor is any likely to; we did not have anything like the sub-prime mortgage mess; nor do we have the institutional equivalents of Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns — large, highly-leveraged, stand-alone investment banks without the backing of a chartered bank.

But that’s not what distinguishes the opposition demagoguery in this case. It isn’t that they’re fear-mongers: it’s that, having mongered such fears, they do not propose to do anything about them. Sensibly enough — the problems of the Canadian economy, such as they are, find their origins outside our borders, and will find their solutions there. But it’s the height of hypocrisy, whaling away at the government for doing nothing while offering precisely the same themselves. The 85 lefty economists who signed that letter demanding the government go into deficit and otherwise “stimulate” the economy might have been out to lunch, but they were at least putting their names on the line, and exposing their proposals to public criticism. The opposition are taking no such risk, or responsibility.