According to the National Toast, flagship of the doomed CanWest empire, fiscally at least, Canada is being heralded by Western nations, particularly the US, as a paragon of virtue.
Canada has also become a useful proxy for officials in the Obama administration that hold the country up as a model of how "regulation can work."
Paul Volcker, a White House adviser and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, this week sketched out a vision for the future of the banking system that would look "more like the Canadian system than it does the American system."
President Barack Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, also expressed a broad affinity for Canadian ethos -- ranging from the financial to the health-care system--during a recent stopover that he described as a "warming up for the visit of the President."
It's great to watch Harper's clown car cabinet try to bask in Paul Martin's sunshine knowing, had Canada suffered the setback of a Harper majority three years ago, we too would have been beset with all the fallout of American-style financial deregulation. The credit Harper is claiming today exists only because the Libs and NDP succeeded in holding his Conservatives at bay.
It's been interesting to watch Harper have to state that Canada is in better shape to weather this storm than the U.S. without ever acknowledging that the reason for that is because Canada is the "second-tier socialist country" that he so despises.
ReplyDeleteBest we watch out for the other shoe. It may just be more flattery for a proven fool -
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