Harper's leading hillbilly

Andrew Potter pulled no punches on this one.

Tony Clement is the dumber than a sack of hammers and has a bag full of the stupidest ideas to hit government since the invention of the failed curved machine gun barrel.

In his six years in power, Stephen Harper has successfully positioned the Conservatives as the party of neither the left, nor of the right, but of the deeply stupid. And as Canadians have come to realize, when Tony Clement is sent out to sell a policy, things are about to get seriously neuronally challenged.

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There is nothing wrong with trying to reduce red tape. Only the most naïve statist could believe that every single one of the alleged 2,600 regulations on business for which the federal government is responsible are necessary. Those rules that aren’t should be eliminated.

But equally naïve is the dopey libertarianism that motivates the commission’s report, and Clement’s gleeful endorsement of the one-for-one recommendation. Conservatives love these sorts of things. They pull off the neat double-shot of catering to the desired special interest while allowing the government to wrap itself in a thin gauze of ideological principle.

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To see how confused this is, try applying the one-for-one rule to everything else the government does. How about, for every new law the government wants to enact, it has to eliminate one. For every criminal it wants to imprison, it has to release one. For every tax it wants to cut, it has to increase another. For every cabinet member it wants to add, it has to fire another.

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... in his drunkard’s walk through Stephen Harper’s cabinet, from Health to Industry to the Treasury Board, Tony Clement has earned a more precise title: Minister of Everything Stupid.

Potter left out the part where Clement went to Denver to attend, (of all things), the US Democratic convention in the middle of a listeriosis crisis in Canadian meat packing plants.

H/T Holly Stick