Quote:
Originally Posted by lucknow
Well, the decision the Conservatives made on Potash corp. is about as liberal as it gets. Harpers main mission is to get re elected and little else matters too much.
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Your applying that standard to one but not the other. To be sure, Stephen Harper has compromised his ideology in order to retain power, but it's naive to think that Barack Obama hasn't done exactly the same thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
But none of this unless I am wrong has been instituted by Stephen Harper's government. Every government inherits the "furniture" that was there before. Just because they don't chuck it to the curb doesn't mean that's what they would put in place if they started with a clean slate.
And this is where the debate gets interesting: if Canada and the US were clean slates, what would Obama's United States and Harper's Canada look like?
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To elaborate on that a little bit:
It's worth looking at both leaders in terms of what they've done with the framework they've been given, their activities outside of politics as well as their previous speeches and writings in which their ideologies are laid out.
It's also an interesting exercise to imagine what they would do in each others places. How would Stephen Harper vote as a member of the US Congress? Barack Obama as a Canadian MP?