I won’t paste the whole snippet of the [...]]]> It appears to me that either Eric was told by the PMO to lay off on the tough questions with Harper if he wanted his interview with him, or else Eric has revealed that he ideologically agrees with Harper on what one should do about taxes.

I won’t paste the whole snippet of the Q & A; you can read it at the link, but here is the relevant part of the interview that left me shaking my head:

Reguly: Do you regret cutting the GST now?

Harper: No, not at all.

Reguly: No?

Harper: No, it’s … First of all, I believe cutting all taxes is good policy, okay? I… I’m of the school that… You know, there’s two schools in economics on this, one is that there are some good taxes and the other is that no taxes are good taxes. I’m in the latter category. I don’t believe any taxes are good taxes…And cutting the GST, cutting a highly visible tax like the GST, was a strong sign of credibility to the population at large that we were serious about cutting taxes.

Reguly: Good.

Harper: Yeah.

That wasn’t exactly a hard hitting follow-up question there by Eric, to the rather debatable notion that “no taxes are good taxes”, particularly when a lot of those taxes Canadians pay go towards supporting our social safety net and universal medicare and so on. As others have said, there were a lot of followup questions that could have been asked by Eric, such as several mentioned by Jurist over here.

Yet all Eric could come up with was the response “Good”?

I don’t know if this interview was conducted before Harper was forced to issue his apology to Ignatieff over his attack on him over a quotation that was never uttered by Ignatieff in the first place, but regardless of when it was conducted, it’s the type of mushy response a biased organization like Fox News would use with politicians they’re sympathetic with, and I’m sure the Prime Minister’s Office is very proud of Eric’s softball follow-up and apparent agreement with them on taxes. Mike Duffy couldn’t have done any better.