Stephen Harper Flashback (circa 1997)

Stephen Harper's speech 'to a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing U.S. think tank':

First, facts about Canada. Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.
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In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance.
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Of our two legislative houses, the Senate, our upper house, is appointed, also by the Prime Minister, where he puts buddies, fundraisers and the like. So the Senate also is not very important in our political system.
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What the House of Commons is really like is the United States electoral college.
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The NDP could be described as basically a party of liberal Democrats, but it's actually worse than that, I have to say. And forgive me jesting again, but the NDP is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.
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Some people point out that there is a small element of clergy in the NDP. Yes, this is true. But these are clergy who, while very committed to the church, believe that it made a historic error in adopting Christian theology.
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If you look at the surviving PC support, it's very much concentrated in Atlantic Canada, in the provinces to the east of Quebec. These are very much equivalent to the United States border states. They're weak economically. They have very grim prospects if Quebec separates. These people want a solution at almost any cost. And some of the solutions they propose would be exactly that.
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Its [the NDP's] main concern, of course, is simply the left-wing agenda to basically disintegrate our society in all kinds of spectrums.