What irks me most about the Harper-Ignatieff budget is that it's so much like a pinata party.
It's a paper mache figure into which Harper, under the watchful and approving eye of Ignatieff, stuffs tens of billions of dollars in Deficit Bucks and then steps away. He then hands out sticks to those who qualify with his matching fund criteria and they bash away until the pinata breaks and those Deficit Bucks cascade to the ground.
Then those kids drop their sticks, scoop up as many Deficit Bucks as they can carry and scurry off knowing that the rest of the kids, those who didn't get sticks, will have to make good the tax bill at the end of the day.
Stimulus? Maybe, maybe not. There'll probably be some recession-fighting stimulus effect but how much? Who's to say? Will it be 50-cents on the Deficit Buck or 25? Who will ever really know?
What about the provinces and the regions that don't get fairly represented at the Harper-Ignatieff pinata party? They're going to get to pay their fair share of the tax bill for the deficit and that seems to be about all the equality some will get out of this visionless scheme.
I guess the problem is that Harper doesn't have vision and he doesn't have guts. Ditto for Ignatieff. The stimulus budget is a national initiative. It's supposed to do its work nationwide and, presumably, with at least some semblence of equality.
This initiative never should have been transformed into a pinata party. That merely abandons the authority and responsibility for how the Deficit Bucks are spent to provinces, municipalities and cottage owners who are not accountable to us, the Canadian public. Harper shouldn't have hatched this scheme and Ignatieff ought to have put Canada first and opposed it.
Oh well, I hope Steve remembers to hire the Mariachi band so we can all dance around our new deficit while Michael mixes the margaritas.
It's a paper mache figure into which Harper, under the watchful and approving eye of Ignatieff, stuffs tens of billions of dollars in Deficit Bucks and then steps away. He then hands out sticks to those who qualify with his matching fund criteria and they bash away until the pinata breaks and those Deficit Bucks cascade to the ground.
Then those kids drop their sticks, scoop up as many Deficit Bucks as they can carry and scurry off knowing that the rest of the kids, those who didn't get sticks, will have to make good the tax bill at the end of the day.
Stimulus? Maybe, maybe not. There'll probably be some recession-fighting stimulus effect but how much? Who's to say? Will it be 50-cents on the Deficit Buck or 25? Who will ever really know?
What about the provinces and the regions that don't get fairly represented at the Harper-Ignatieff pinata party? They're going to get to pay their fair share of the tax bill for the deficit and that seems to be about all the equality some will get out of this visionless scheme.
I guess the problem is that Harper doesn't have vision and he doesn't have guts. Ditto for Ignatieff. The stimulus budget is a national initiative. It's supposed to do its work nationwide and, presumably, with at least some semblence of equality.
This initiative never should have been transformed into a pinata party. That merely abandons the authority and responsibility for how the Deficit Bucks are spent to provinces, municipalities and cottage owners who are not accountable to us, the Canadian public. Harper shouldn't have hatched this scheme and Ignatieff ought to have put Canada first and opposed it.
Oh well, I hope Steve remembers to hire the Mariachi band so we can all dance around our new deficit while Michael mixes the margaritas.
Basically Harper yoked Iggy to him - they both own the budget.
ReplyDeleteWhat's with the Conservative fixation with cottages. One of the infrastructure projects approved for Manitoba is revamping the pier at Victoria Beach, a cottage community on Lake Winnipeg.
ReplyDelete