Lying With Steve ... Now Updated With New and Improved Motherfuckery

Prime Minister Stephen Harper wasn't always politician. He actually began his political career as a strategist, and becoming a candidate himself was something that he just sort of fell into. He's a superior strategist, but only a mediocre candidate on the stump.

He's also a murderous cyborg, without human feelings or emotions, which you can see from his hair. You can program him to sing every Beatles song ever written, but you always walk away knowing that he doesn't actually feel anything. This is a marked contrast to Michael Ignatieff, who is at least embarrassed by his own stellar incompetence.

That's what makes watching Harper campaign so much fun. Never having connected with another human being, he seems constantly confused by our trivial mortal rituals. If you were to hand him a baby, he would need to take a second to decide whether to kiss it or twist its puny head off and mock its physical weakness.

Watching him lie is even more fun. You see, the Liberals were born to lie. The only time they seem truly uncomfortable is when they have to tell the truth. They break out in a sweat and chew on their lower lips when they have to do it. That's why Jean Chrétien governed under the name Chico Bernardo for three years.

The current prime minister's natural instinct, being a murderous cyborg, is to bend others to his will. Dissembling seems to confuse him, but he knows that his power is still somewhat reliant on the will of the people. Regardless of how much he resents it, he lies when he has to - unlike the Liberals, who do it for fun - knowing that there is no other way.

Sometimes he tells magnificent whoppers, usually about the economy and the deficit.

Stephen Harper is preparing Canadians for a prolonged clampdown on government spending, but he's insisting that he will dig the country out of deficit without raising taxes.

In a year-end interview Monday, the Prime Minister warned that when Ottawa ends its recovery spending in 2011, Canadians can expect five years of belt-tightening as his government tries to tame public finances.

Mr. Harper says his government will go ahead with a planned second year of pouring stimulus money into the economy in a budget to be delivered in March. But as public concern mounts over ballooning deficits, Mr. Harper is acknowledging the recession's grim hangover and setting up a political choice between his Conservatives and the Opposition: He says the deficit can be wiped out with restraint in Ottawa, and without tax increases.

“The government's approach will be clear. We won't be raising taxes, but we will be constraining growth, making sure that growth is very much contained in the future, and that the tax base of the country can gradually recover,” Mr. Harper said in a year-end interview for CTV's A Conversation with the Prime Minister , taped for a Boxing Day broadcast.

“And within four to five years, if we follow that path, we should be back to a balanced budget.”

That is so adorable! To think that just a decade ago he was incapable of telling a lie, and now he's defying the laws of mathematics with the greatest of ease.

You'll notice that Harper hasn't said anything about spending cuts, or even stopping program growth. He's only suggesting that he'll "constrain growth," whatever the fuck that means. And this will actually eliminate the current $56 billion deficit (that will almost certainly be about $85 billion by this time next year) by 2016 without raising any taxes.

Since approximately two-thirds of the Canadian federal budget involves health care and education, Harper can't promise to freeze program spending. Not with a growing and aging population. Just to stay at current levels, spending has to increase by a minimum of about 5% a year. Unless the Conservatives institute the death panels so celebrated by their American cousins, there will be no spending cuts.

Of course, he's promising that he won't raise taxes, either, which raises an interesting question: How do you balance the budget with increased spending and frozen revenue? The short answer is that you can't, unless you're lying in pretty impressive ways.

What you'll likely see is Harper and his magnificent dupe of a finance minister, Jim Flaherty, pretend that things like Employment Insurance premiums aren't taxes, even though they're removed from your paycheck just like taxes are. Those will go through the fucking roof. But even that won't be enough. $85 billion is a rather large sum of money.

There's another complicating factor. Even if the Liberals continue to be terrified of the electorate, there's still going to be an election in the next three years. As any student of politics will tell you, no one has ever won an election by honestly promising to constrain government spending. American Republicans promise it a lot, but they like to pretend that giant tax cuts and massive armies are the result of Santa and not spending.

The Harper Conservatives won in 2006 by promising, among other things, federally subsidized babysitters and hockey sticks for the kids. In 2008 he offered to help you renovate your home and get a new lawn, courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer. And he did this while cutting the Goods and Services Tax to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, which is how we went from a $13 billion surplus to being broke when everything went to shit in the fall of '08.

Think they're not going to go to that well again, particularly when the Grits are unlikely to be running on an austerity platform? It turns out that Kim Campbell was right. Election campaigns aren't a time to discuss serious issues, they're a time to figure out new and exciting ways to bribe stupid people with their own money. The Tories and the Grits differ only on the magnitude of their fiscal irresponsibility.

Hoping that the economy grows faster than government spending (which is traditionally about 7% a year) thereby reducing the deficit is a fool's errand, if only because it's never actually happened before. That's the failure of supply-side economics, which, like communism, is a fine theory, but has no practical applicability in the real world.

There are really only two ways to eliminate large deficits, and only two;

1) Raise taxes and cut spending across the board. Those of you with an understanding of basic math understand how this works. This is what Chico Bernardo did in the 1990s.

2) Create rampant inflation. If a nickle costs a quarter, a static deficit magically become five times easier to pay down, at least in theory. The only downside is that you destroy everybody's savings, and paying personal bills becomes a chore. As Robert Mugabe will tell you, this is a piss-poor way to get elected.

And that's it, folks. You're going to hear a lot about deficit reduction from people like Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin in the next few years. Once you understand that they're all lying, stupid, or both, the better off you'll be.

As always, you're welcome.

Special Evil Motherfucker Alert Update: Just to prove my point, less than a day after promising that he wasn't going to raise taxes of any kind, Harper spouts off with this.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said today he hopes he won’t have to impose a carbon tax on Canadians as part of the fight to reduce global warming – but admitted he couldn’t entirely rule it out.

Actually, the lying prick did rule it out. If you're keeping score at home, he did it fourteen months ago, when then-Liberal leader Stephane Dion proposed it during the last election. I think Harper's exact words were,"That's fucking crazy! What the fuck?"

In a year-end interview with CTV News, to air on Boxing Day, Harper again stressed Canada’s need to co-ordinate its climate policies with the United States because the two nations are part of an “integrated continental energy market.”

If the U.S. implements regulations on climate change, he said, it will be “essential” that Canada act, but if it does not, it will be “very difficult” for this country to do much.

Asked point-blank if he foresaw Canadians paying a “carbon tax” in future, Harper said: “I hope not.

“I mean, we’re going to have to see what the regime in the United States looks like. We’re going to have to harmonize a lot of our efforts with their efforts to really be truly effective on a continental basis."

You know what? That might be the single dumbest thing a Canadian prime minister has ever said.

This might come as a fucking shock to Steve and all, but the overwhelming majority of Canada's laws aren't written in Washington. And the only ones that are tend to be the ones passed by dickhead prime ministers like him. I still resent that America's retard Congress gets to dictate our drug laws to us even though Americans do all of the fucking drugs, and I resent our burning lots of oil being frowned upon by the gas-guzzling capital of the world even more.

By the way, we're only an "integrated continental energy market” because NAFTA says we are. And administration after administration has had no problem ignoring NAFTA because some duplicitous cocksucker like Senator Ben Nelson wants to feel pretty. Hey Steve, how are those Buy American negotiations working out for you, anyhow?

If Barack Obama wants to get all touchy about where most of his oil comes from, let him buy it someplace else. I'm sure America's special friends, the Saudis will give him a special suicide-bomber discount. I know that I don't speak for what passes for the "conservative movement" anymore, because it happens to be singularly stupid, but I'm perfectly okay with Canada making boatloads of money from our "dirty oil" from India and China.

“Obviously we’re looking at avoiding any kind of additional taxes on Canadians. That’s a pretty important priority of this government.”

Apparently not, you stupid son-of-a-bitch. I know that because you said that you wouldn't raise any taxes as recently as fucking yesterday.

Not only is Stephen Harper a fundamentally worthless prime minister, he deprived me of a leader with a really funny accent that I could have made endless fun of, while adopting the central plank of a platform that nearly destroyed his party.

It's official. I'm no longer merely calling for the defeat of the Conservative Party of Canada. I'm calling for it's total and utter destruction. In all honesty, I'd prefer an NDP government, which is at least honest in promising to ruin everything.