It’s time to secure the future
By Lethbridge Herald on September 3, 2021.
Rachael Harder – MP for Lethbridge
In his 1984 State of the Union Address, Ronald Reagan decreed, “Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.” It was a profound declaration of hope, responsibility, and vision. It also set the tone for one of the most economically prosperous periods in American history.
While the statement is from decades past, the principle and clarion call remains just as pertinent today as when it was first spoken.
It is very easy to become overwhelmed by the pressing issues of the day. There is so much going on in the world right now that it takes a tremendous amount of energy just to manage the pressures of each day to move on to the next, but I find it helpful to step back every now and then to gain perspective.
Since the founding of this nation, Canadians have overcome a tremendous number of challenges. They have encountered wars, a depression, extreme weather, difficult lands, disease, division, and pandemics. But one thing I want to note: we have always kept on keeping on! We have pushed onward and continued to persevere.
The spirit in the Canadian people is strong and enduring.
There is an understanding that we are constantly building for a more secure and prosperous future for the generations that will come after us. Though we are living in the here and now, we are dreamers and creators; we invent, and we restore.
Although many Canadians are still struggling to make it through this pandemic, I know we are going to come out stronger on the other side.
When circumstances become unstable and our worlds get thrown upside down, there are always opportunists ready to take advantage of an unfortunate situation. We have seen governments try to step in as the saviour while simultaneously taking away certain freedoms that have always served us well.
Instead of imploring a sense of courage, stability, and peace, the current leader of our country has stoked the flames of division, fear, and worry.
When Mr. Trudeau should have been planning our recovery, he was instead planning for an election in the hopes of capitalizing on a spike in the polls, all the while declaring Canadians needed to have a say in the way forward.
No doubt, he will get his wish. Canadians are going to have their say on September 20, and I wonder if Mr. Trudeau will be surprised at the response he gets.
While he is focused on exacerbating the division that exists in this country, Canadians are looking to secure the future.
While Mr. Trudeau is hoping Canadians will put their trust in government, they are putting their trust in each other—in the longstanding strength and ingenuity of their fellow man.
It is Canadians who are the problem solvers, the solution makers, and the wealth-generators in this country, not the government.
Yes, we must get through these final stages of the pandemic, but we need to start building again. We need to get back to work, and get our economy roaring once more. We possess an inordinate amount of potential within this nation. We need to unleash it.
Canadians deserve a leader who sees where the strength and value of this country lies—with the people.
Amid every struggle is an incredible opportunity to overcome and grow in character and resolve. As much as this is true for the individual, it is also true for Canada as a nation.
This is a time for choosing. What kind of Canada do we wish to have, not only tomorrow, but in years to come?
In this election, we have the opportunity to secure a vibrant future for Canada.
My team and I have knocked on more than 15,000 doors and what I’m hearing again and again is that Canadians do not want the government to spend reckless amounts of money and weigh our country down with debt and high taxes.
Instead, they want a government that will focus on unleashing the potential of the Canadian people by getting rid of regulation and creating an environment for economic growth and prosperity. They want hope!
People elect Conservatives because they expect us to develop policy that will grow the economy and create jobs.
They expect us to budget within our means, stand up for victims, care for families, advocate for seniors, support our veterans, lower taxes, and deliver services with excellence.
They expect us to do all of this while being mindful of the cost and size of government.
People elect Conservatives because they expect us to be principled, hard-working, and compassionate—to be true public servants.
It has been a tremendous honour to serve the constituents of Lethbridge for nearly six years and it would be my great privilege to continue serving as the Member of Parliament. On September 20, I’m asking for your vote.
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The Conservatives, and Liberals, have had years, and years, to get it right, and have not. So here we go again, a minority, either Conservative or Liberal with the Bloc and the NDP doing ‘checks and balances.’ Maybe just as well. We certainly couldn’t get rid of the Harper Conservative majority, nor the Trudeau majority, fast enough. These two, old, tired, self-entitled, scandal-ridden parties have become tiresome lame ducks.
But these two political parties simply reflect the greater society we live in that is increasingly, VERY much divided, so how can you say that they’re the same? There are obviously structural dictates at that level, along with in the country itself that any party is forced to contend with, in addition to more and more extremely powerful, wealthy lobbyists and competing special interests. Competition is endemic. So governance is clearly hard, period, but particularly so in sprawling democracies like ours and in the U.S. (With the current intractable, nutbar right wing edging toward violence, speculation of our “free” societies becoming “ungovernable” resonates.)
So Trudeau is spot on about us being at a crossroads, that the pandemic and climate change have laid bare basic, philosophical differences. One side can be seen as open (Liberals of course, it’s the meaning of the word, also called progressive), while the other side is closed, or as Jon Stewart called them, the Party of NO. Profound differences that we can all see being played out since the conservatives became bona fide “cons” preceded by deliberately removed the word “progressive” from their name. Religion is the culprit, the Reform party here, the Tea party in the south, Harper up here and Reagan down there. Note that Rachael Harder quotes Reagan in her last piece.
Your claim has become common enough, and is wrong enough to be given its own name–“bothsidesism,” but it’s starting to look like the old saying of there being two kinds of people in the world has some merit because any newly formed parties still line up generally on the political right or left, so can mainly be seen as examples of the narcissism of small differences.
I keep suggesting on this forum that people google “conservative brain.” Since science is gradually, finally, being resurrected, along with the truth, consider that there have been studies of this phenomenon of recalcitrance, of stupidity. It’s a suite of stupidity actually. Many fall in the middle of course, but we all know that those aren’t the ones who “surge” into the leadership of “movements.” This new iteration of conservatives calls what they’re doing a movement, wanting to be seen as revolutionaries, all these “libertarians” with their “freedumb” but nature and science have trumped them, pun intended, and the results are not pretty.
So this is not an unnecessary election. At this point, a vote for conservatives is a vote against humanity.
excellent reply. one could run a large “x” through their ballot this election: consider no longer legitimising the con.
Your party got us into the mess that is NAFTA.
I still do not forgive that nonsense.
Oh and please: Never quote Reagan again. The decline of the United States as anything resembling a Democracy began under his tenure.
He was never a “statesman”. He was a talking head for those that wanted more money, and less social responsibility.
He and Maggie Thatcher can both burn in the off-gassing of their de-regulatory BS.
indeed, the very reagan that trampled rights at home and abroad with a hyper stepped up outrageously expensive, and failed, “war on drugs”. it was further inhumane and crimes against humanity ridden.
the very reagan that cut taxes massively for the rich, dumping instead more taxes on the poorer, and all the while stepping up the use of public monies to fund the industrial military complex – which redirected huge piles of public money from the masses and into the hands of a privileged few. the pathetic policies of reagan upended the usa from its position as the world’s leading creditor nation and turned it into the the world’s leading debtor nation, all in just 8 years! the year of the speech is interesting…1984.
That Harder would put Reagan on a pedestal and declare his presidency as one of the most prosperous in history is very revealing about who she cares about. During the Reagan years US average wages went steadily DOWN. (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/)
Want some of that? Vote PC and UCP.
Actually people seem to elect conservatives because they don’t want to pay taxes and they enjoy hurting others.
Look to Premier Kenney, the king of stoking fear, anger and division.
It’s what another Harder term and a possible PM O’Toole will bring as well.
Vaccinations if necessary but not necessarily vaccinations is their new motto as Cons need to avoid ticking off their ‘freedumb’ loving base.
Laws to prevent people protesting for a better environment, but those clogging hospital entrances and harassing health care workers …. freedumb for them.
It’s the essence of divisive politics.