Federal Politics – Page 203

Ontario could have done better.

May 23, 2012 by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #8- Revised It was in 2007 that The Democracy Papers were written to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America. Despite changes being rejected firmly in Ontario and twice in British Columbia, people still complain. The complaints are understandable. No system is perfect. Neither is democracy but it is better than the alternatives.

Suppose a decision needs to be made about something important to you. And that decision is being made for you. Who do you want to make that decision? Do you want people whom you know and trust to make it? Do you want people who are experts in that field to help? Do you want extensive public discussion on the issues? Do you want to consider all the options? Or would you, in some wild state of insanity, decide to get a bunch of lottery winners to make the decision for you? That is what happened in Ontario running up to the 2007 election.

And what is worse, most Ontario citizens were not aware of it. Surveys, in August that year, showed that less than 30 per cent of the population knew of Ontario’s citizens’ assembly on electoral reform and the referendum to be put before the voters during the October election. Ontario citizens were mugged.

In one of the most capricious acts of government in Ontario since the Harris Conservatives decided we did not need to be so rigid about checking the safety of our drinking water, the McGuinty Liberals set a group of lottery winners to play with our electoral system.

Not that there is anything wrong with examining our electoral system. First-past-the-post (FPTP) voting is no sacred cow. Examine it all you like. It took centuries to develop. Nobody thinks it is perfect.

But would it not be better to have such things studied by people who know what they are doing? What is wrong with learned discussion? Why could we not consider the pros and cons with people who understood voting systems and the political scene? Why were we instead being force-fed a single option? It was wrong.

The McGuinty government picked one voter from each of 103 ridings in the province and said ‘you decide.’ They turned this befuddled group of citizens loose without even a leader who knew about the question. Judge George Thomson had presided over family court before going to work for Ontario’s civil service at Queen’s Park. He was on the same learning curve as his flock. The results show how little they knew.

The lottery winners voted for a system called mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting. This is a somewhat confusing system of voting where political party appointees can be appointed to the legislature to ‘top up’ party representation. Their job done, the lottery winners went home to their ridings. It was the voters who were left to sort it out in the referendum that came with the October provincial election.

And they did not get much help. Elections Ontario had been told by the government to spend what was necessary to educate Ontario voters. Luckily, Elections Ontario decided to spend less than $7 million on the task. They left the educational job to the various groups organizing pro-MMP/pro-FPTP campaigns and the news media.

The battleground turned out to be the Internet. The news media were slow getting into the fray, relying mainly on their own political columnists and talking heads. The one thing for sure is that nobody showed off their expertise. One newspaper column solicited from an assistant professor inVictoria, B.C. gave a glowing report on MMP, mentioning how it has been used in Germany with excellent results. The academic needed to extend his research a bit and he would have also found that MMP was a reluctant compromise in 1949 because of how Hitler’s Brown Shirts took advantage of proportional voting in the Wiemar Republic.

But then everyone needs to improve their research on this question. Platitudes such as ‘MMP will help more women and minorities get in the legislature’ are all very nice but nobody has offered any proof of that statement.

Proportional representation is the most common voting system in the world. The reason is because it is easier for illiterate voters to vote for a party symbol than a name. Mixed-member proportional is not as common. Mixed member means that some people are elected directly and some are appointed by their political parties. The pro-MMP people are usually selective in their examples. Using New Zealand is a guarantee that not many Ontario voters would know much about that country’s politics. Far more Ontario residents would be familiar with the results of MMP voting in Mexico. Now why does nobody mention the Mexico experience?

The most vigorous pro-MMP campaigns was by the Green Party and NDP. These parties are under the impression that they will benefit the most from MMP. The pro-FPTP campaigns were slower to emerge because of the ease with which the pro-MMP groups label you as reactionary. Hopefully, more and more informed people will join in on the discussion. We need to protect our democracy.

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Thinking on a new Canadian Constitution.

May 22, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Victoria Day is a day set aside to recognize the foolishness of having a foreign queen as our head of state. It is a day set aside to thinking of how we can do things better.

And we can. One of the most serious weaknesses in our representative form of government is that some people vote for a local representative just to show their choice of the person they prefer as Prime Minister. That means we often elect some very useless people just to get a particular party leader. In Babel, this tendency is downright embarrassing.

We should think of ways to get the Prime Minister (President or Lord High Potentate or whatever) we want and still elect qualified, competent people to the House of Commons. Looking at presidential systems is one way to do it. Judging by our American neighbours, the main problem with separating the executive branch of government from the legislative branch it that they sometimes work at cross purposes and do not play nice. You can end up with constipated government rather than effective government.

Another way is to have the legislative branch of government nominate the chief executive. Maybe they could propose more than one and the populace could then vote on their choice. That idea needs more thought.

Many Canadians would probably like to stay with a more ceremonial form of head of state. That is a possibility but we would certainly want the person do more to earn their keep than the Queen and the current Governor General. There has to be more to the job than cutting ribbons, welcoming foreign dignitaries and signing bills. If you are going to sign things into law, you should have to take some responsibility for them.

As you can see, we have many questions about our head of state. And that is only a start.

And what are we going to do about the Senate? Is it worthwhile to have a House of Sober Second Thought? Should we make it a House of the Provinces to give a bit more influence to the country’s regions? There is no question but that Stephen Harper has destroyed the Senate as a serious opportunity to improve on House of Commons laws. He has created a Senate that just does as it is told.

House of Commons committees need to be less partisan, better staffed and given more time to do a proper job. We need to examine their relationship to the responsible cabinet ministers. And should we look beyond the House of Commons for our cabinet ministers? There is a serious imbalance in workload and authority of ministers today that needs to be considered. We need to go through the entire process, listen carefully to former members, ministers and staff on ways to make our government more responsible and effective.

We also have to stop thinking idly on the possible changes and start planning seriously.

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An end to the democracy we know in Canada.

May 21, 2012 by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #7- Revised It was in 2007 that The Democracy Papers were written to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America. Despite changes being rejected firmly in Ontario and twice in British Columbia, people will still complain. The complaints are understandable. No system is perfect. Neither is democracy but it is better than the alternatives.

Do you want to trade our democracy for a parliament of minorities? That is one of the possible results of promoting proportional representation. The people promoting proportional voting see it as the perfect opportunity for more minorities to have a say in our government. They say it is fairer. It is certainly more than fair to minority parties. It is just not the same type of democracy.

People promoting proportional representation argue that it is not fair for a party that might have won 45 per cent of the popular vote to win maybe 55 per cent of the seats. At the same time, they argue that a party that won 10 per cent of the vote but only 3 per cent of the seats should be given another 7 per cent of the seats to make up the difference. That is how they see proportional representation working.

But all they prove by this argument is that they do not understand or want our democracy. Evolving from the Parliament of Westminster, our democracy is not based on political parties. It is a representative-based system of responsible government built on the principle that the people rule. Added to the rule by the people is the protection of minority rights that makes democracy work. This protection of minority rights has evolved to a strong judiciary.

But now people want to throw out the very basis of our electoral system. They want it based on parties and not the representatives we choose. They argue against the first-past-the-post election system that can see someone win with less that a plurality of votes. These same people argue against run-off elections that could ensure that our representatives were all elected with majorities. They argue that because what they really want is a parliament of minorities.

This can occur when many smaller political parties are created to take advantage of a political system such as proportional representation. A recent example of proliferation of smaller parties occurred in the early 1990s when a number of new parties were formed to take advantage of changes in election funding. With the taxpayers picking up more than 80 per cent of the cost of campaigning, Canadians found they had new parties such as the Natural Law Party that had people as candidates who claimed they could levitate.

Other federal parties that formed or revived in this time of opportunity, and are still with us, are the Canadian Action Party made up of people who claim they do not approve of large banks or supra-national corporations, the Christian Heritage Party that claims principles based on biblical ethics, the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and the Green Party. These are all parties that would hope to have some of their people appointed if we had proportional government.

In the proposed mixed-member proportional system in 2007, a party needed at least three per cent of the party vote to be eligible for a portion of the appointments. With as few as 200,000 votes across Ontario, a party could have no elected seats but be appointed to as many as five seats in the legislature. From being a loser, this fringe party is being given a great deal of power. They could demand concessions from a minority government for their support. They could even demand seats in the cabinet.

What if the Green Party won enough party support acrossOntarioto be entitled to be appointed seats in a proportional legislature? What are they going to when they are there? There are few people who would complain about the Green Party’s objectives of preserving our environment. In fact, the Green Party platform is actually well represented in the platforms of most of the major parties. Maybe not as prominent or as forceful but it is there.

The Green’s first choice might be to form a coalition with a party that needs a few extra bodies to form a majority government. That is a common solution for legislative bodies with proportional voting systems. The major party will promise to carry out some of the Green party’s ‘green’ promises, which are in its platform anyway, in exchange for the voting support to keep the party in power.

At the same time, consider how a larger party, needing a partner to form the government, accommodates a minority party with absolutely no similar policies? For the Conservative Party, for example, to find any common ground with the Marxist-Leninists or the Canadian Action Party would be difficult.

The problem is the narrow focus of most of these splinter parties. They can rarely win a riding because of that narrow focus. They bring nothing to the legislature but their narrow view. And they only represent the people who share their view. Given enough of these parties, the legislative body can descend into a parliament of minorities. Who then represents you?

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Asking the ‘Why’s’ of proportional voting.

May 19, 2012 by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #6- Revised It was in 2007 that The Democracy Papers were written to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America. Despite changes being rejected firmly in Ontario and twice in British Columbia, people still complain. The complaints are understandable. No system is perfect. Neither is democracy but it is better than the alternatives.

In the 2007 provincial election, Ontario voters were presented with a referendum that was not just a choice between one electoral system and another. It was a challenge to the democratic principle of one person; one vote.

The referendum question was whether you favoured the present first-past-the-post electoral system or would you like to have something called mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting that was proposed by Ontario’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform?

Superficially, the citizens’ assembly proposal could be seen as fairer. It is not.

The first and most basic difference about the proposed system is that voters will get two votes, one for an individual candidate and one for a political party. If you vote for the individual, are you not, in fact, voting for that candidate’s party? Under what circumstances would you, as a voter, want to vote for a candidate and then vote for another party?

‘Maybe,’ you think, ‘I can vote for the individual and then for a party that I would like to see represented in the legislature.’

This ‘why’ is confusing. ‘Why can’t this party get anybody elected to the legislature? Will their members not be as good legislators as the candidate I already voted for? Are they going to be a second class member of the legislature, members with seats but who do not report to any constituents other then the party bosses? Do these appointed people represent their party or the voters?’

And the questions continue. They become even more complex. And there is really nowhere to turn with questions where you might expect an unbiased answer.

To be fair, and our voters are fair, they might ask questions of some of the cheerleaders for the proportional voting idea. ‘Why,’ you might ask, ‘should the seats in the house be topped up to match the popular vote for party?’

‘That is generous but why does the proposal, in turn, take the win away from a party with 53 per cent of the elected seats but only 40 per cent of the party vote?’

The mathematical implications of MMP voting are complex. There are many permeations and scenarios that can be as intriguing as they are frightening. The conclusion is that the most likely split of candidate and party vote is where there is a strong candidate who has earned a personal following but whose voters usually support other parties. This scenario can only work against the smaller parties.

The MMP cheerleaders will also tell you that more women and minorities can be appointed to the legislature from the party lists. That evokes a very big ‘why?’ If you look around the Ontario legislature or Parliament as they are at the present, you will see women and various minorities already there. Many of these people will be insulted if you suggest to them that they could be appointed instead of elected.

The MMP cheerleaders also tell you that the at-large, supernumerary appointees to the legislature under MMP will be eager to represent voters in ridings that are not represented by their party. That is a very nice fairytale but reality is that there is no incentive for persons who are representing a party to waste time looking after voters’ needs. (In Germanywhere a mix of proportional representation is used, they had to create a petitions committee of the Bundestag to make sure voters’ concerns were heard.)

The appointed members under MMP are chosen by their political parties. They would probably be chosen in very much the same way as Canadians choose the Senate of Canada. They are just not as likely to be as useful. These are the losers in the ridings and party hacks who do not want to have to run for election. Under MMP, they would be mixed in with the general population of members. We would never know if they do anything. If we simply gave the party leader the number of votes to cast as these people would have exercised, it would be a far cheaper solution.

But the cheerleaders tell us that in a new MMP legislature, the parties will have to work together in coalitions and that the system will reward cooperation, compromise and accountability. This seems based on the supposition that there would no longer be majority governments. They think that minorities spell an end to partisan rigidity, trivial bickering and narrow thinking. They obviously were not in Ottawa between 2006 and 2011 to see how that minority government was getting along!

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Do the NDP and Liberals need a trial marriage?

May 18, 2012 by Peter Lowry

This romance is not getting off the ground. Are we too shy to be the one to make the first move? And you do not have to do it for love. Nor is anybody pregnant. The simple facts are that the Conservatives consolidated with the right and finally won a majority government. We let that happen because there was no corresponding consolidation on the left. If the Liberals and NDP do not join forces, we will both be wandering over the scorched earth of a Canada in the punitive hands of the malcontents of the far right.

Canadians do not want nor do they deserve what Stephen Harper and his sycophants are doing to this country. And neither proportional representation nor preferential voting are going to save the day as long as Stephen Harper’s people can win the country with just 40 per cent of the popular vote. He can count, you know!

What we do know about this marriage is that some of our old swains are going to dessert us. The NDP is going lose some of the direct union support. The Liberals are going to be cut in with the mass desertion of the party’s right wing. That is fine. Unions were useful but they had been steadily drifting over to the Liberals anyway. The right wing of the Liberal Party is no loss as those people did us more harm than good.

If Dalton McGuinty was not one of those hidebound conservatives in liberal clothing, we could have a trial marriage here in Ontario. The Ontario Liberal Party desperately needs the humanizing influence that Andrea Horwath’s party could bring to the Liberal caucus. And we would certainly wish Dalton McGuinty well, over there in Tiny Tim Hudak’s caucus. Those two deserve each other.

The critical test for the marriage of the federal wings of the parties is Thomas Mulcair. He needs to be willing to undergo another leadership contest. The best guess is that his ego would tell him to go for it. And he could win.

It also solves the problem for the Liberal leadership. Bob Rae is not the darling of the Liberal left wing. He never has been. Too many of the Liberal left were turned off by his failed leadership in Ontario in the 1990s. Besides, the leadership of a combined new Liberal Democratic Party opens all kinds of interesting possibilities.

The Liberal caucus in Ottawa has some excellent younger contenders who can wait the one or two terms in Parliament if Mulcair is leading their party. There is another possibility in Nathan Cullen. As it stands today, Mike Crawley, president of the Liberal Party of Canada, should be talking to his counterpart in the federal NDP. The wedding bells are ringing.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Looking at proportional voting.

May 17, 2012 by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #5- Revised It was in 2007 that The Democracy Papers were written to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America. Despite changes being rejected firmly in Ontario and twice in British Columbia, people still complain. The complaints are understandable. No system is perfect. Neither is democracy but it is better than the alternatives.

Have you wondered why those who support proportional voting only mention two examples of legislative bodies that are elected by that method? There are other examples and some of them have important lessons to share with Canadian voters.

The poster child of proportional voting is New Zealand. That country has had mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting for the past ten years. All most Ontario voters know about New Zealand is that the people speak English, the South Island has the mountains and the small country exports a lot of frozen lamb. The Canadian voters who can name the prime minister of New Zealand might not be more than two in a thousand.

The other example, only mentioned in passing, is Germany. Proportional voting has existed in some of the German states and in that country’s federal government since the days of the Weimar Republic. MMP was just a temporary compromise after the Second World War.

Proportional voting is one of the most common voting systems in the world as many third world countries use it to overcome low literacy rates among voters. It is much easier for an illiterate voter to choose a party symbol rather than deal with the complexity of candidates’ names. Canada does not have a major problem with voter literacy.

There are many variations of proportional voting. The best example of pure proportional voting is the system used to elect the Knesset of the State of Israel. This has been the system used since the first election in the new state in 1949. The number and make-up of political parties shift as the do sands of the desert areas of the country. The large cabinets are usually made up of representatives of various parties.

An important example of mixed-member proportional representation is the House of Representatives that forms part of Japan’s Diet. The appointed members and elected members do not always enjoy friendly relations. Riots in the Diet are an embarrassment to their countrymen.

A closer example of proportional voting is in the United States where the system is used to select the President. The Electoral College, charged with selecting the President, is elected state by state on a proportional basis. If the Americans used FPTP voting for President, Al Gore would have won the election in 2000 against George W. Bush.

A number of cities in the United States have also experimented with proportional voting systems. Most notable was New York City. It implemented proportional voting in 1936 in an attempt to clean up imbedded corruption in the city government. This voting system was revoked after a decade by what many claimed were the elites who were unhappy about the number of radicals, blacks and communists who were getting elected. More importantly, the proportional system earned the enmity of the major newspapers and the experiment ended.

Most of Europe, as well as the European Parliament, use proportional systems of one sort or another. One notable exception is France. The French instituted proportional voting after the Second World War but switched back to FPTP in the late 1950s. With the exception of the federal election of 1986, the French have preferred their system of run-off elections that ensures all successful candidates have a majority of votes.

The mother of parliaments, Great Britain, has held onto first-past-the-post voting in single candidate ridings. Despite this, the country has gone along with proportional voting on representatives to the European Parliament. The devolved governing bodies of Scotland and Wales which could be looked on as provincial bodies (unless you are a Scot or Welsh) are using MMP voting.

While the majority of countries in South America use proportional representation to elect their governments, only Bolivia and Venezuela use mixed (both constituency and list candidates) representation. Closer to home, the next major country to use mixed representation is Mexico. It is possible that those promoting MMP have decided not to say to Canadians: “Let’s have a government just like Mexico’s.”

What becomes clear as you examine the various countries and their electoral systems is that the dynamic countries that offer the leadership to the rest of the world are mainly those countries that have retained first-past-the-post electoral systems. The countries that have opted for proportional systems are mainly countries that are trying (though not always succeeding) to develop a consensus approach to governance.

For all the weaknesses and frustrations of first-past-the-post, the conclusion is that North Americans like it. They know it is a system that forces candidates to take the time, make the effort and show the determination to win. Our first-past-the-post electoral system challenges the candidates, not the voters. It is the voters who benefit.

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Bloody bother these Brit royals.

May 14, 2012 by Peter Lowry

No doubt you have heard, Charlie and his lovely wife, Camilla, are en route to Toronto. It is all part of celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee. Yes, she has reigned over us for the past 60 years and she has often graced us with her presence on our soil.

Too bad we got our dose of the Bill and Kate honeymoon show last year. Somehow, Charlie and Camilla do not have the same panache. She is too dowdy by half. And he comes across as a reject from a City of London accounting firm. He does look so at home with a bowler and a brolly!

But this is not to be churlish about it. The Brit royals have a perfect right to travel and tour as they can afford it. They just have the added convenience of having tour guides wherever they go and are most unlikely to get lost or mugged during their travels. And like most Brit tourists, they do like to do it on the cheap. Getting their hosts to pay for everything is a time-honoured tradition.

The monarchists will try to tell you that it costs us nothing to use a Brit royal as our Head of State but not when they or their spawn are visiting. Their cavalcades can certainly screw up our traffic. Mind you, if we let them drive on the wrong side of the road, we would have more than a few traffic jams to worry about.

We hear that Charlie and Camilla will be visiting the Distillery District while in Toronto. Wait until Charlie finds out that all that they have on tap is a home made beer. Even back when Gooderham and Worts was in production there, the company produced Canadian Rye, not that nectar of the Scottish Highlands that Charlie prefers.

Some wit has decided that it would be great fun to have Charlie and Camilla do part of their Toronto tour on a Toronto Transit Commission bus. Hopefully, it will be cleaned before Camilla parks her behind in it. Come to think of it, that is how many of us learned in our youth to find our way around the city. Maybe, soon, the royals can strike out on their own. Just give them some transit tickets.

Every time we get into one our diatribes about the stupidity of having a foreign Head of State for Canada, we always have to make the point that, as royals go, the Brit royals seem like nice people. No doubt, it must be convenient to be born into a life of privilege. There might be a bit of jealousy involved.

But they have to get out of the way of progress.Canada needs a constitutional congress to fix what is wrong with our system of government. The Brit royals are unlikely to make the cut. Pity!

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Do the NDP and Liberals need a trial marriage?

May 13, 2012 by Peter Lowry

This romance is not getting off the ground. Are we too shy to make the first move? And you do not have to do it for love. Nor is anybody pregnant. The simple facts are that the Conservatives consolidated with the right and finally won a majority government. We let that happen because there was no corresponding consolidation on the left. If the Liberals and NDP do not join forces, we will both be wandering over the scorched earth of a Canada in the punitive hands of the malcontents of the far right.

What we do know about this marriage is that some of our old swains are going to dessert us. The NDP is going lose some of the direct union support. The Liberals are going to be damaged by the mass desertion of the party’s right wing. That is fine. Unions were useful but they had been steadily drifting over to the Liberals anyway. The right wing of the Liberal Party is no loss as those people did us more harm than good.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

So IBM’s coming; give it a rest Brown.

May 10, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The Brown bandwagon bungles on. It is not as though Babel’s Member of Parliament knows what he is talking about. The mailing we received from him the other day shows that he does not. It is incomprehensible. It appears to be a sloppy cut-and-paste of federal government news releases. The one thing that comes through is that whoever put this mailing piece together had very little idea of what it was about.

The mailing is one of what they call ‘ten-percenters” in Ottawa. That means that we taxpayers paid for it. It is demeaning that anything so cheap, illiterate, badly designed and poorly printed would be paid for by Canadian taxpayers. Despite these limitations, Mr. Brown is considered the King of these mailings, having wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on them since going to Ottawa.

But what does Mr. Brown care? It is printed free and distributed free. He pays nothing to keep his name in front of the voters in his riding. And he can even send ten per cent of them (hence the name) to a Liberal or NDP-held riding to supposedly support his party. The only thing that is really guaranteed is the puzzled look on the householder’s face before throwing it in the garbage.

That is where it belongs. We keep wondering when he will be sending us pictures of his trip to Asia. It is expected that Prime Minister Harper took him along on that trip as his reward for voting unequivocally for the government without quibble or question. It was that or, at worst, someone dumb to carry the Stephen and Laureen’s luggage.

As for this recent mailing, it is based on the new IBM data centre that will be opening in Barrie later this year. (That will be another opportunity to bring together the usual suspects for a photo session.)

While Mr. Brown seems under the impression that it was the federal government that selected Barrie, it was more likely that IBM Canada chose the location. It is because of the city being a logical communications hub for southern Ontario and the ease of sending technical specialists from company headquarters up Highway 400 to fix the supercomputer if something goes wrong. The data centre can be run remotely. Mind you, there might be a few local custodial jobs available to look after the building and grounds.

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Canada’s failing economy under Stephen Harper.

May 9, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It is commonly believed that Prime Minister Stephen Harper won his majority government in 2011 because of his handling of the economy. Frankly, that is an insult to economists everywhere. In effect, Stephen Harper is tearing apart Canada’s economic fabric. The man’s economic capabilities are a myth.

It has not always been to Canada’s credit that it has a strong banking system. In fact, the better description of our banks is stodgy, slow to change, ultra-conservative and dull. We used to say that Canada’s bankers will be delighted to lend you money if you can prove you do not need it. These are the traits that kept Canadian banks from chasing their American counterparts down the sub-prime rabbit hole in the early 2000s.

If Stephen Harper wants to take the credit for the glacial rate of change in Canadian banking, he can have it!

Luckily, we have a Bank of Canada Governor in Mark Carney who believes in open communication. He and his predecessor, David Dodge have done more to open up the banking system to the public than any of Canada’s back room bankers. Canadians not only get to hear from Carney but they listen to him and seem willing to follow his advice.

In turn, Canadians would not trust Stephen Harper if he tried to tell them the price of a litre of milk.

Harper’s vaunted Economic Action Plan is nothing but a public relations program with a title that is more of a lie than a plan. He and Finance Minister Flaherty played fast and loose with an infrastructure renewal program that enabled their Conservative MPs to run for re-election on the backs of gullible city councils who received their supposed largess to pour more concrete. All this accomplished was to burden the communities with high levels of debt at bargain prices for the federal government. If you added up all the money the Conservative MPs said they were doling out, the country would be bankrupt.

The serious failure in Harper’s supposed action plan is the slippery slope that Canada’s manufacturing capability is on. With no properly thought through approach to supporting Canadian manufacturing, our manufacturing base in Ontario and Quebec has been particularly hard hit. Instead of trying to balance Canada’s economy, Harper has concentrated on supporting his oil company friends in Alberta. What is really criminal is his effort to push unrefined oil-sands crude through pipelines to the west coast or to the United States. Not only is it posing serious pollution concerns in this unrefined state but it is denying Canadians the processing jobs.

We should never trust an ideologue in power. Stephen Harper is an economic ideologue and it is stupid to trust him as a leader, or as an economist. He is a disaster as either.

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