Shorter Harper: "At least you're not Haitian!"

[bcholmes]

Harper, in turn, assured a large partisan crowd that he feels for people making the transition from one job to another. "We know that some Canadian workers are transitioning between jobs. that's never easy and I don't want to minimize it, but we should never lose sight of how solid our fundamentals are and more importantly how fortunate we are to live in this country," he said.

He then talked about how he travelled to a desperately impoverished slum in Haiti and how the people there looked hopeless, in stark contrast to Canada, which he described as "a land of above all else, boundless hope."

— Canadian Press

What are these "fundamentals"? Is that language to obfuscate "our oil companies are doing well"?