[redthrowaway]

Cutting spending is positive among their base, which is about a third of Canadians. The rest typically wouldn't vote Conservative. They and the NDP simply split the Liberal and Bloc vote in the last election.

You may view the CBC and Healthcare as waste; the vast majority of Canadians do not. Harper wants more than anything to convince Canadians that the Conservatives are trustworthy. The last thing he wants is for Canadians to be sick of them by the time the next election rolls around, especially if the Liberals manage to find a halfway competent leader.

That's why Harper's been as centrist as he has, and that's why cuts to popular programs are being delivered alongside this news. He'll stay true to conservative values, but only insofar as they don't hurt his re-election chances.

[gyardley]

Or Harper could just be a fairly centrist politician - after all, there's no better time in Canadian politics to push through radical change than the earliest stages of a majority government, something Harper has never previously had. If his 'true colors' were ever going to show, it'd be right now.

Not everything has to be a conspiracy theory.

[huggyface]

Cutting spending is positive among their base, which is about a third of Canadians.

Cutting spending is a positive among all Canadians. The Liberals had their most populous years when they were responsible for -- and still deserve credit for -- brutal spending cuts (health care transfers, services, etc) that balanced the budget.

While HN isn't the place for discussions like this, it really is hard to rationalize some claims against conservatives with reality. The Conservatives are currently running the largest budgets in Canadian history. They increased transfers to the provinces more than any other government (some would say naively and rashly, making promises that health care spending, for instance, could just increase exponentially forever). They cut the military budget.

But if you read what you just wrote you would think that they were a slash and burn government. Hardly.

It's also worth noting that Harper has the most liberal reign to do what he wants right now, given that he doesn't have to face an election for another four years and memories are infamously short in Canada. He doesn't need to pander to the masses right now, at all, and the same-old "trying to hide the hidden agenda" bits grow enormously tiresome, bringing the sort of ignorance, baseless partisan noise into the discussion that we see too often South of the border.

[redthrowaway]

I'll agree that HN isn't the place for this discussion. I will say, however, that if what I wrote comes across as me thinking he's "hiding his true intentions", that's not what I intended. Rather, he doesn't want to give voters, many of whom would not normally vote Conservative (and didn't when the libs had strong leaders) reason to distrust them. It's not a conspiracy; he's just playing a long game and trying to set up the Conservatives as Canada's new Natural Ruling Party (r).