You know, I think I might finally be starting to understand where the Conservatives are coming from. I've been looking to understand the "nuanced" version of their policies for a while, and thus far have gotten nowhere, but hopefully this is a first step in the right direction. (Also, I don't spend much time in Alberta, or around many Conservatives, so the sample size that I've seen is quite small; it's not that I believe there to be no Smart Conservatives, but I do believe that there are only few in proximity to me.) They believe that the government is a bunch of bunglers, isolated in their policy tower as the academics are isolated in towers of ivory. Consequently, politicians don't know a thing about actually running anything, resulting in wasted money, ineffective policies, etc.
The Conservative response is to hand over control to the corporations, assuming that they'll do a decent job at running it themselves if the bunglers just stop gumming up the works.
Is that a good strategy to take? It can be: look at the way immigration in the US is run in large part by its economy, where immigration status is tied quite strongly to employment and businesses themselves are responsible for a great deal of the process. In this instance, the US immigration system has shown that there can be some success allowing companies to be heavily involved in running something that we Canadians typically take to be a gov't matter. (US immigration has some definite problems, but it also has a track record of some success, and at a modicum of stability; the program is far from an utter failure, though it's also far from perfect.)
The problem that the Conservative government is failing to recognize is that not everything can work this way. It's in the shared, short & long term interests of governments and businesses that the incoming immigrants be employed: governments don't have an economically sagging immigrant population to prop up through social services, and companies have lots of control over who's allowed in, meaning that they get the pick of the litter. Long term, immigrants don't become a perpetual weight on the social services, and capable people are probably more likely to have capable children (teaching them good habits, sending them to good schools, providing safe environments in which to grow up, etc).
But while it's in the interests of the government, both short & long term, to protect the environment, it's only in the long term interests of companies to protect the environment from which they draw natural resources. Their short term interests are radically opposed to this, because it requires postponing profits. Sadly, long-term viability is not in vogue in the business world nowadays (was it ever?) and so leaving the governance of the environment in business hands is just asking for a catastrophe. Furthermore, there an non-economic interests in the environment, which corporations could only have an instrumental interest in protecting (in order to protect their own image, say).
This is where the Conservative idea goes wrong: they believe that the solution to political ineptitude should be solved by deregulation and governance by economic corporations, but overlook the fact that political mandates are far broader than economic interests (including that which can fall under the heading of "instrumental to economy"), and that short term interests will win out over long term interests in the economic sphere. (Also, anyone who was a sentient being in 2008 knows that the ineptitude and greed of big business can lead to catastrophes all on their own, without the help of bungling politicians standing in their way.)
Maybe what we need instead is to have our bungling politicians, if indeed that's what they are, to collaborate more closely with people involved in economy, environment, health care, etc. But any such collaboration is totally impossible in the political climate that Harper's Conservatives have brought about.
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