permanent tax on everything

I know you’ll be astonished to learn the Conservative Party has made Michael Ignatieff the focus of its new ads.

Deadline day so blogging will be sparse. Here’s an audio clip of my question to Stephen Harper at the news conference he held today in a vegetable warehouse. Also: His answer. Also: The applause, from vegetable-company employees and Conservative candidates and campaign workers, that accompanied his answer. (My question makes reference to issues discussed here.)

We’re here in Richmond, B.C., to which destination the Stephen Harper campaign plane (official motto: “At Least We Have One”) flew from Quebec City last night, a five-and-a-half hour flight. We are ready to start the day’s only event. We are in a typical family’s back lawn. There are 40 journalists, a playhouse and the most astonishingly green lawn you ever did see. Tonight there will be pictures.

Stéphane Dion demonstrates that he was listening all summer by implementing a policy change his rural MPs were already pleading for in the spring. Could the listening, perhaps, have benefited from being a bit more front-loaded?

The Conservatives are on the brink of a majority! But wasn’t the Green Shift supposed to help? No, the Green Shift is really not helping. Here are some thoughts.

Stéphane Dion has requested the pleasure of our company at the National Press Theatre at 2:15 this afternoon. If Kady doesn’t liveblog it, I’ll blogblog it shortly after it concludes.

I refer, of course, to the Conservative carbon scheme. My source is Jack Mintz, the noted Communist leftard economist, writing in that biased MSM rag, the National Post.

From this week’s print edition: my column is built around an interview with Stéphane Dion. I have spent much of the past four months writing more about Stephen Harper than Boswell did about Johnson, so I was happy for a chance to concentrate on the other guy. An excerpt:

It’s actually a lot of fun watching everyone get excited, both admirers and detractors, about a policy idea in Ottawa. But this might be a good time for everyone to remind themselves that Dion’s PermanentTaxOnEverything™ is a suggestion for allocating $15 billion, four years out.

I went camping with my brother and his hilarious kids a couple of weekends ago in Algonquin Park. We got eaten alive by blackflies. It was fun. In the gas-guzzling SUV on the way back to Mark’s home in Oshawa (Liam: “Dad, when are we gonna get there….”), I noticed the acre on acre of new housing developments, eerily Truman Show-esque subdivisions of truly immense new homes. Yes, Mark said, people are flocking to Oshawa, even though property taxes there are roughly double what people pay in Toronto, because Oshawa’s municipal council has decided to build up local infrastructure and try to make the place more livable. Incidentally, the mayor who made that call was re-elected in 2006 with nearly three-quarters of the vote.

Those lying Lieberal leftards at the American Enterprise Institute explain the advantages of carbon taxes (sorry, green shifts) over cap-and-trade mechanisms.

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