Finance Minister Jim Flaherty bought new shoes the other day. It is part of the traditional run-up to delivering a federal budget. Somehow, he found one of the last companies in Canada still making shoes. He bought an inexpensive pair of steel-capped safety shoes. He is going to need them for the kind of budget he is about to deliver. It is expected to be a budget that does nobody any good.
This says a lot about the arrogance of Jim Flaherty. It also says a great deal about the “screw you” attitude of the Conservative government. Flaherty has made it very clear that he is going to tighten the strictures on Canadians for another year so that he can be the good guy just before next year’s election. It is a cynical attitude and demonstrates the level of hypocrisy we have sunk to in this country.
It shows you what it costs Canadians to vote for an ideology based political party. We all used to like Conservatives more when they understood that they were elected to serve the needs of the voters, not themselves. Even the most die-hard Conservatives among us are reaching the stage where they are fed up with the government working to its political agenda instead of looking after the store.
Flaherty and his friends have done nothing to stop the loss of jobs to low-wage countries as they try to drive down the expectations of Canadians. The lasts that used to be used to make Canadian shoes are long gone. Did you see the other day where we do not have enough rail cars to ship our bumper grain crop from last year? These are not the concerns of Conservatives.
Flaherty will crow about the number of jobs we gained last month but are they just retail? Are they full time? Are they minimum wage? The truth is that we need to create three to four times that many jobs every month to get the Canadian economy back to where we need it to be.
Jim Flaherty is a fool. He always reminds you of a bloated frog sitting on a lily pad croaking defiantly to the night sky. He does not care about Canadians. He puts some magical point of a balanced budget ahead of our concerns. He denigrates civil servants while denying them the tools to do their jobs. He has Parliament approve their spending and then denies them access to the funds.
Flaherty, in his safety shoes, will call on business to trickle down some wealth to Canadians. We have been trickled on enough, thank you.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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