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Let’s start with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s first major campaign pledge: to make the home renovation tax credit permanent if he is reelected. If it were economics, it would clearly be bad economics, aiming to “stimulate” one of the few sectors of the economy doing so well it already has the government worried about a bubble.

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Stupid people think that means I am a plant from the PMO.

What can you do about stupid people? Ask them to read the many thousands of words I have written criticizing Stephen Harper?

When I closed my law office and embarked on a second career as a writer, a wise old journalist told me that I’d have to give up my party membership. It would be a conflict of interest. He called himself a socialist and never voted anything but CCF or NDP.

Do I like Stephen Harper? I’ve never met him. And am not keen to. Except to give him a piece of my mind. Though I’m not confident it would do him any good. But in this world in which we live in, as Paul McCartney sang, we have to make choices.

I’m not in favour of compulsory voting. If John Robson simply can’t find anyone, or any party, he can stomach, let him not vote. But it will make a difference.

Consider the alternatives.

According to the polls, we are alarmingly close to electing an NDP government. The NDP is no longer officially socialist. It is officially nice.

Tom Mulcair wants us to believe he is a safe pair of hands. He was a Quebec Liberal. In 2007 he was prepared to work for the Conservatives, until he was shocked to discover that the Conservatives didn’t plan electoral suicide by offering the voters something stronger on climate change than what assured the defeat of the Liberals under Stéphane Dion in 2008. He’s not left wing. He’s a political gun for hire.