It’s hard to believe there can be anyone left in Canada who still might actually believe anything Stephen Harper has to say about a blueprint for balancing the country’s inexcusably massive deficit. Conservatives will desperately want us to believe in their fiscal credentials and alchemy, but history tells a different story.

The Harper/Flaherty “stewardship” of the economy has been nothing short of disastrous, built upon a recorded history of fiscal blunders with the GST, willfully ignoring the signs of the coming recession, bizarre “no-deficit-at-any-cost” forecasts of surpluses, followed by a succession of repeated and wildly inaccurate monthly guesses over the past years about an ever-expanding deficit.

To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith on economics, these boys make astrology look respectable.

The Conservative government’s dismal record is a four-year history of economic and recession myopia that has shown up in everything from massive government overspending, resulting deficits, badly timed and ill-advised GST and corporate tax cuts. In particular, the latter two items together now account for close to half of this year’s projected $57 billion deficit. Given the Conservatives’ history as the last ones in the country to have even recognized the economy was in deep trouble, it should come as no surprise they are ironically positioning themselves once again as this country’s fiscally responsible party. Since taking office, “Deficit Jim” Flaherty and his boss have become the poster boys of miss-the-mark economic forecasting. More to the point, though, is the uncertainty this creates in the mind of the public, especially when the response of the Conservatives is to badger, cut funding, withhold information, obfuscate, and generally undermine the credibility of Kevin Page, the parliamentary budget officer they hired to police the job in the first place.

As our governing parties in Ottawa chase each other willy-nilly towards a coming election, Stephen Harper, Jim Flaherty and their Conservatives spin-meisters will be working hard to try and make us believers in an economic and budgetary miracle. However, the only blueprint around a surplus that can apply to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty happened a few years ago when the defeated Liberal government handed a surplus to him.

With the Conservative’s last budget, Mr. Flaherty’s on-the-job training continued to show no encouraging signs of fiscal insight or accuracy, nor do the Harper Conservatives seem to fully appreciate the need now for much more innovative, aggressive action against both the deficit and in support of job creation. Their invocation of innovation is a laudable technical objective, but the Conservatives, through their unfocussed corporate tax incentives, clearly have no idea how this might be brought about. It all seems like more window dressing and bafflegab.

By refusing to act now, this “wait-and-see” government is once again condemning Canada to an economic action plan that has no meaningful actions at all. With this kind of approach we can expect the deficit to grow in the coming years, and to be with us for at least a decade or more.

Stephen Harper has become an expert in saying one thing and doing its opposite. From yo-yo fiscal policies and binge deficit budgeting to reversals on Senate reform and inconsistency on Afghanistan, he has become the consummate shape-shifter, staying in power at all costs by almost weekly moving policy down whatever road the winds are blowing. But these contradictions are mere pragmatic detours for Harper along what is for him a much longer ideological road, one that, should he ever attain a viable majority, will bring massive structural shifts to Canada in the form of political decentralization and altered Canadian values. The recent budget is both an economic and strategic diversion for Harper, keeping him in power but also, more importantly, diverting our attention away from what he actually wants to accomplish. For those wishing to look closely, even the budget itself isn’t what it seems, with huge portions tied to improbable projections for the economy, unrealistic provincial participation or pie-in-the-sky future deficit reductions unlikely ever to see the light of day. Canadians can expect more of these illusions and contradictions to be revealed in the coming months, especially where the economy and budget are concerned.

Probably one of this country’s best historical examples of a petty, malevolently partisan and ideologically driven politician, Harper routinely whipsaws his audiences with performances from nice to nasty, from hero to hyperbole. His party is scared to death of him, but, as is the case with all such abusive players, I expect his fellow Conservative actors would be willing in the blink of an eye to jettison him at the first sign of weakness. Mr. Ignatieff certainly is no better, being completely and irrevocably blind to his own endlessly destructive deficiencies in leadership, timing, vision, and political intelligence. He lingers, stage left, like a dark, comedic character, transforming simple ideas in complex theories, advantage to disaster, opportunity to humiliating political errors. Mired in the mud of their own political sloughs, these two “leaders” are characters out of a bad play, unable to let go, refusing to recognize that the stage lights are dimming and that the audience is rapidly leaving the building. Maybe the problem for Canadians really isn’t about Liberal or Conservative. Maybe it’s just the truly dreadful lead actors we’ve hired. Most days I think a lot of us wish we could get together and simultaneously throw them both out. I say to you, and to all who would listen, a plague on both their houses.

So, the truly pressing question here today is: twenty years from now, when Stephen Harper’s Conservative/Reform/Alliance coalition has long departed the halls of power in Ottawa, what kind of country might we expect to find as a result of the myriad blunders in economic planning he is now implementing? Can we expect Canada to be a better place, more stable and secure? Or will history look back upon these early Harper years of the new century as the beginning of economic policies and actions that profoundly threatened the long-term well being of the country?

I’m sitting at my desk with three postcard pictures of authors whose work I’ve never tired of reading, authors who in poetry and prose continue to inspire me. Though I’ve read them many times, I keep finding something new at every turn.

Wallace Stevens is sitting at his desk (where else) in his suit (what else) and behind him is a large window through which one can just about make out the face of a snow-covered building directly across from his. Stevens looks to be spotting something just above the left shoulder of the photographer. His right hand is in the middle of pointing in that direction, while the left hand is neatly positioned on the desk in front of him as if he were in school awaiting the teacher’s signal to pick up his pen and begin to write. Perhaps he really is not as uncomfortable as he looks; it’s a black and white photograph, and the aging of the negative has left this image with grainy streaks. Stevens looks like he’s tried to get out of having this picture taken, and probably is already thinking of where else he could possibly be. Like a lot of his poetry, he seems caught in the middle of something that can’t be resolved. All the evidence he might need is right there for him – and he knows it – but he can’t quite seem to discover what it is he wants to find.

In the next postcard Robert Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is caught, mid-stride, walking along the pavement in what looks to be a city setting in a snowstorm. He has no hat on his head, tough his hands are buried deep into the pockets of a heavy, tweed overcoat. There’s not another soul on the street, though in the far background an old Chevy is parked, accumulating a deep covering of snow. It’s another black and white photo. The white of the snow on the ground leaves no markings or outlines, so it makes it seem like Pirsig is floating there, covered from head to toe in the blurred spotting of the snowflakes. He looks like he wants to ask a question, several in fact, which isn’t surprising at all. But he looks like a man comfortable with not knowing, sensing perhaps that the answers are there for him to come upon. He has only to turn the corner to find what he is looking for. You can sort of tell these things . . . just by looking.

Robert Lowell is barely in the next postcard, which is the only one in colour. Positioned far to the left in the photograph, he looks to be just entering or perhaps even backing away from the frame. His eyes are fixed on the other side of a room that is bare except for dozens of photographs filling the walls. In fact, this seems to be more about the images he sees than anything else. In some of the photos months of sunlight has almost completely bleached their colours, and all that can be seen is a telltale hand or arm emerging from a pale background of white and gray particles. In many can be seen the figure of a woman standing in front of what looks to be a garden fence. She is far from graceful, even standing still, and the poses she has struck accentuate this fact. Long, thin arms bow out from her body, waving or reaching toward something out of camera range. In others there is the barest hint of facial detail, with only the broad sloping curve of her nose actually appearing. She looks as if she were in a snowstorm, her cotton short sleeve dress and bare feet materializing out of the snowy grain. It’s clear from the array of pictures that she has been unwell. Newer ones are not faded as badly, but in them it’s obvious that some illness has reduced her to the point that her bones are showing through a thinning film of yellow skin. It’s the same round-faced woman again and again in the photos, and even the same smile is repeated, though her diminishing shape becomes more and more difficult to recognize. The pressure of the illness inside her shows to an exaggerated degree on her face, but the uncanny effect is one of increasing both the intensity and depth of her stare. Lowell, unmoving, nearly out of the picture, looks about to begin something from which he will never escape.

Photography is the nonfiction of the visual arts, something of a cousin in the art world to the fraternal twins of realism and abstraction. Digital photography will completely transform and reframe this relationship. What we are witnessing today is the birth of an entirely new art form, one already challenging our understanding of reality and the form it presents to our senses.

The metaphysics of how art and philosophy can best apprehend the “real world” has been with us since well before the dueling philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. But go back far enough, and any fine differences between a thing and its image become less apparent, part of a sacred or mysterious connection in which the image fully partakes in the reality of the thing portrayed.

This is how photography should be understood and appreciated. Susan Sontag best describes it in On Photography: “What defines the originality of photography is that . . . it revives . . . something like the primitive status of images . . . No one takes an easel painting to be in any sense co-substantial with its subject; it only represents or refers. But a photograph is not only like its subject . . . It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it.”

With photography, its imagery gives every appearance of things literally existing in more than one place at a single time. Both the mystery and duality of that appearance are at the heart of photography’s newest transformation as it transfers over to its new world of digital imaging and image editing software. In many ways the art of photography is at the same position (or re-positioning) that nonfiction is in current critical essays and theories – see my previous two entries on “The New Future of Nonfiction” and “Further Adventures in Nonfiction”.

Digital Photography takes us several steps beyond simple, static notions of original and copy; what starts out as a photo of vegetation (as in the image attached to this entry) can quickly change into a haphazard collage, a digital painting, which in turn becomes the simulacrum head of a fish. The growing fluid nature of this digital art, like that of nonfiction writing, draws upon myriad sources and tools, transforming one thing into another, juxtaposing others, yet retaining always something of its original core. The layers pile up, fragment, accumulate, bend form and genre in a way that its comprehension is both familiar and elusive.

It’s clear that digital photography and image editing software are rapidly expanding the borders and the potential for a whole new form of art. We become a part of what we know through the capture and manipulation of what we see. This digital world becomes an art of visual metaphor, balance and motion, controversy, and eloquence.