THE CONSERVATIVE HIPSTERS

I like Jim Flaherty.

Why?

That is a good question.

But it goes back to my Queen's Park days. I worked for a backbencher MPP who was happy to just be a backbench MPP with no delusions of grander, no plans to be in cabinent, no pining for the fjords.

While others were promoted to cabinet had a tendency to "go hollywood", Jim always took the time to take calls from my boss personally, talk to him directly and get an answer back to him, without filtering it through several layers of politcal staff.

In addition, I have a wife who despises politics. As far as she is concerned, politics is just one of those things which seems to keep me out of the house (at this stage of our marriage, this is considered a bad thing, I understand that in later stages it may be a good thing...I just hope to get to the later stages).

During the last provincial leadership campaign, we recieved a voice mail from Jim. A real, honest to god voice mail, not some damn demon-dialer. In it, Jim, who obviously had my name on the list must have heard my wife's name on our out-going message and mentioned her by name. To this day, my wife refers to the new Minister of Finance as "my friend Jim."

This, however, peturbs me to no end.

I recogonize that we have a minority and that not all of our program will be met. However, why can't our guys just come out and say that. "We wanted to cut capital gains, but with a Minority, we didn't want waste any capital (pun intended) on anything but our five priorities. If we get a majority next time, we will try again." By admitting it is too complicated, we have basically handed ammo over to the Liberals and NDP for the next election.

I liked working with the Mike Harris Tories in 1995-1997. The whole time we were able to hold our head high and say, "Read the Common Sense Revolution. It is in there. We said we would do it and we are." Even when things went wrong, we always got credit for trying.

I know, Majority vs Minority.

D'oh.