Paul Martin Gives Tommy Angry Beard a Well-Deserved Kick in the Ass.

Paul Martin was the finance minister who plucked the federal government from the brink of fiscal chaos. It was a tough time for all including the provinces, even the Canadian Forces, but he balanced the budget and paid down $90 billion of our national debt. He kept the bankers in line and when he handed the reins to Harper he bequeathed a full treasury ready to absorb the brunt of the great collapse of 2008.

Put simply, Martin pulled our fat (yours and mine) out of the fire. Which is why he deserves to be heard on the mess we're in yet again and where we're headed.


The public has grown used to the Harper government’s mantra on deficits, but should be startled by what they hear from New Democrats, he said.

“That Tom Mulcair is now a student of Stephen Harper’s economy makes absolutely no sense,” said Martin.

“Where is the conscience of those who belong in the NDP? How can the NDP party — those who’ve worked it for all these years — stand for the fact that the party is now holding hands with the Conservatives and saying that our goal in the next mandate is to do absolutely nothing?”

“The current Conservative government has ground the economy down so far, trapping our most vulnerable of citizens in the process, that the next government has to act and that the NDP doesn’t understand that boggles the mind. Conservative obsession with eliminating the deficit down to the final decimal point is more than short-sighted. It’s yesterday’s war.”

Further evidence of how Mulcair and Harper are on the wrong page with their babble about balancing budgets comes from a new poll that finds Canadians believe their country is in a recession and support the federal government running a deficit to stimulate the economy.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I've been pretty tough on young Trudeau but I will give him credit for his commitment to a major, 3-year infrastructure programme. Sure he'll run a deficit but that's not the point. It's like bad cholesterol and good cholesterol. Harper's "throw a deck on the cottage" stimulus budget of 2009 was bad cholesterol. It was money squandered, gifted away, with no lasting return. Infrastructure spending, of the sort Harper didn't have the vision or courage to implement, is good cholesterol. It's money invested in public assets - highways, bridges, overpasses, power grids - that bolster the economy and reap returns for decades.

Of course, with this latest poll, the bearded chameleon may change his colours as effortlessly as he has on other situations in the past.

McQuaig Outs Harper - Fiscal Charlatan

In the industrialized world, Canada stands best positioned to weather out the looming recession. And, as Linda McQuaig recounts in today's Toronto Star, we can be thankful that Harper didn't have more time to undermine Canada's fiscal strength:

"Harper's resistance to European calls for tighter regulations is ironic, since he has the luxury of presiding over a country that's been spared the worst of the financial meltdown, largely because of the Canadian tradition of tighter domestic financial regulations.

This has allowed Harper to ride out the current financial storm politically unscathed, even gaining re-election in the middle of it.

In fact, although Harper's record on this has received little attention, his government had started to push Canada down the dangerous road toward looser financial regulation.

In its first budget in 2006, the Harper government changed the rules in ways that effectively opened up the Canadian mortgage market to U.S. insurers. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty noted that these "new players" would bring "greater choice and innovation" to the Canadian mortgage market. Unfortunately, they did just that. They introduced risky products – like mortgages amortized over 40 years with little or no down-payments.

The new mortgages quickly caught on. With their lower monthly payments, they made houses seem more affordable. In reality, however, they dramatically increased the cost of a home, roughly tripling it.

As the implosion of the U.S. housing market provided a vivid example of the pitfalls of looser mortgage regulations, Flaherty finally intervened last summer, tightening CMHC's rules."

Harper, a supposed economist, didn't see this recession coming. He ought to have seen it. He could have consulted his fellow economist Paul Krugman or simply read Krugman's columns in the New York Times. But no, the Boy Genius, was too busy stuck in his rancid ideology to bother looking up and noticing the obvious. He was more concerned with defunding the federal government than bolstering its strength to withstand this recession.

No matter what some Liberals may say, we ought to be very grateful indeed for the guiding hand of Paul Martin in the post-Mulroney years. We'll be reaping the benefits of that guidance in the turbulent near future. And it's all no thanks to the stooge who's running the show at the moment.

Mr. Dithers Strikes Back

In my opinion.

In my opinion, Jean Chretien was never as great a leader as many now perceive him. In my opinion, Paul Martin was a far better leader than many considered him then or now.

In my opinion, Paul Martin was handed a poison pill by the Chretien administration in the form of the sponsorship scandal. That skulduggery happened on Chretien's watch while Paul Martin sat purged in backbench exile.

A lot of folks claim that Martin must've known about it. He didn't. How do I know? Because if he had known about it he'd have been all over Chretien with it like a Newfie on a Harp seal, beating the living bejeebus out of him over it.

Curiously enough, Paul Martin seems to think the same as I do. In his new book Hell and High Water, Martin takes aim squarely at Chretien. From the Toronto Star:

In a chapter devoted to the sponsorship scandal, he takes angry aim at Chrétien, his political nemesis, for leaving him saddled with a damning auditor's report into questionable government funding in Quebec.
"I was mad at Jean Chrétien for having left me this time bomb," Martin writes. "It drove me crazy that I had to deal with this leftover mess when there were so many more important issues I had come into government to confront."

Martin repeats his assertion that he was in the dark about the sponsorship program [an often overlooked conclusion of the Gomery Commission as well]. But he conceded that the revelations of kickbacks to party backers in Quebec fuelled a political firestorm.

"We did not win the communications battle over sponsorship in the end. I don't know whether it was winnable," he said.

He said the resulting controversy revived the separatist parties in Quebec, boosted the sagging fortunes of the NDP and "lubricated the unity of the right."

Martin also critiques Harper for his "pinched vision" of Canada.

Maybe it's a function of Canadian politics. Trudeau begat Mulroney. Mulroney begat Chretien. Chretien begat Harper.

Anyway, that's my opinion.