Mulroney shows unease with Harper's Conservatives

The Toronto Star:

Although the architect of decisive Progressive Conservative victories in 1984 and 1988 conceded that Harper is “clearly a competent Prime Minister,” his unease with the current Tory leader was barely concealed.

He suggested Ignatieff could win despite polls indicating otherwise: “You never can tell what happens in political life. I’ll tell you this, in 1984, when the campaign started I was 14 points behind. We ended up in a rather different fashion.”

He touted former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, who endured similar political uncertainty to Harper, but had far more to show for his tenure, including medicare and the Maple Leaf flag: “You can do big things — even if you have a minority Parliament. Witness what happened with Mr. Pearson, who achieved great things with minority status.”

And he pointedly dismissed a central tenet of the Conservative campaign, the spectre of an Ignatieff-Layton-Duceppe government: “They should not speculate in any way about coalitions or all of this nonsense.”

Certainly, Mulroney is still smarting from fallout of his ill-advised business dealings with German lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, now in prison serving an eight-year sentence for tax evasion.

Confidants say he feels like he was “thrown under a bus” over the Schreiber affair by people he trusted in the highest levels of the Harper government and such wounds are unlikely to easily heal.

Mulroney — like others from disparate wings of the Conservative Party of Canada, be they former Reformers or Progressive Conservatives — appears disappointed by Harper’s paucity of ambition.

Sources say Mulroney, who created the goods and services tax two decades ago, has privately expressed concerned about Harper’s reducing the GST rate from 7 per cent to 5 per cent. (It has since been melded with the 8 per cent provincial sales tax into a 13 per cent harmonized sales tax.)

“He should have lowered income taxes instead. Conservatives believe in taxing consumption, not output. How does a GST cut increase productivity?” fumed a veteran Tory.

It gets worse.

With the retirement from electoral politics of Reform and Canadian Alliance icons Chuck Strahl, Jay Hill, and Stockwell Day, it’s apparently not just the Conservatives’ centrist Mulroney wing that feels ornery.

There was Alberta conservative stalwart Link Byfield on the front page of the National Post last Tuesday, complaining that Harper has “systematically suppressed debate” on matters such as same-sex marriage and abortion.

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