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Charles W. Moore

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Listening to the left-wing conventional wisdom, myth-repetition, and slogan-parroting emitting from the four federal party leaders who were not Stephen Harper in last week's leadership debates brought to mind something Jeremy Akerman said.

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Akerman, who was Nova Scotia NDP provincial party leader from 1968 to 1980 after being first elected to the N.S. Legislature at age 28, led the N.S. New Democrats in 1978 to their then-highest ever seat total - four - which the party did not surpass for another 20 years.

Jeremy, an incisively intelligent man, had become increasingly disillusioned with socialist ideology. He finally resigned from the Legislature and the NDP leadership to accept a civil service job with John Buchanan's Tory government, before moving on to become a newspaper editor and pursue a successful career as an actor. As Jeremy once remarked to me when he was editor, and I a weekly columnist, with the now-defunct Halifax Metro Weekly: "I was a socialist when I didn't understand anything."

So true. The fatuous twaddle articulated by Canada's four left-wing federal party leaders as they attempted to swarm the prime minister on two consecutive evenings last week provided ample evidence that they don't understand anything, either. Of course, Mr. Harper, who weathered the gang of four's tag-team attack with admirable poise, could take considerable comfort in the fact that with his quartet of opponents all crowding to stage left, leaving the Conservatives as the only choice for moderate voters, should facilitate fragmentation of the lefty vote and allow Conservatives to cruise to victory in many ridings. Innuendo assailing the Harper Conservatives as "right-wing" has no rational basis in reality.

The NDP's Jack Layton in particular reconfirmed that he and his party are mired up to their armpits in what Liberal Party Deputy Leader Michael Ignatieff aptly describes as "stale socialist ideology from the early 20th century."

Mr. Ignatieff might look to similar problems afflicting lefty elements in his own party, including its current leader, but the observation is valid.

Back in the 1990s, someone observed that the NDP needed to "join the 20th Century before it was over." It didn't. Now nearly a decade into the 21st Century, Mr. Layton's party remains arguably the most rigidly doctrinaire social democrat party in the Western democracies, for example discussing at its last policy convention nationalization of Canada's primary industries and withdrawal from NORAD, NAFTA and the WTO, revealing unwillingness to abandon demonstrably failed ideological formulae long since discarded by Europe's social democrats.

A prima facie example is the NDP platform promise to reverse lowering of corporate taxes, currently scheduled to decline from 22.12 per cent to 19.5 per cent in 2008 and on down to 15 per cent in 2012. If elected, Mr. Layton would jack the tax back up to a uniform 22.12 per cent tax rate.

Of course, this is just another variation on the threadbare and time-worn socialist "tax the rich" trope, with Layton's monotonously clichéd references to "giveaways" for Stephen Harpers "Bay Street buddies," and relentless invocations of "kitchen table" economics calculated to play well with the NDP's neo-Marxist core supporters and the "Main Street" constituency that initially derailed the U.S. government's $700 billion "toxic debt" bailout plan. That is, until Main Street got a quick cold-water dose of reality when the stock markets tanked, taking much of the value of ordinary people's retirement nest-eggs and pension plans with them, seizing up access to mortgages, car and student loans and so forth, and raising the spectre of jobs evaporating.

If Jack Layton wants to administer a poison pill to sicken Canada's industrial enterprises already hunkering down to weather a looming global economic meltdown, he can hardly do better than a corporate tax increase. Even with the scheduled federal reductions, Canada's corporate tax burden will remain high by comparison with much of the competition.

According to a recent survey by KPMG International, not one of 106 countries reviewed had raised its main corporate tax rate during the preceding year, and Canada's combined federal and provincial 2008 corporate tax rate of 33.5 per cent was third-highest among OECD countries, with the global average currently at 25.9 per cent, down just under 1 per cent, year-over-year.

Jack Layton's NDP corporate tax policy charts the diametrical opposite of what reason and experience indicate is the path to prosperity. Two decades ago Ireland was an economic train wreck with 50 per cent unemployment and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 120 percent. In 1987, the Irish implemented bold strokes to stimulate their moribund economy, the key element of which was slashing the corporate tax rate to 10 per cent. Results were dramatic. Following the tax cut, Ireland's economy began sustained growth of six to eight per cent annually over more than a decade.

Corporate tax revenues doubled and unemployment was halved.

But Layton and his leftist fellow-travelers can't transcend their cherished, 19th-Century class warfare ideology, whatever the facts.

Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotia-based freelance writer and editor. He can be reached by e-mail at cwmoore@gmx.net. His column appears each Thursday.