An election is certainly just around the corner as MPs traipse across country with open pocketbooks! Government MPs, that is. Those in the Opposition couldn’t get you a single penny unless they gave it to you themselves! (If the penny was still legal tender, of course.) Hundreds of millions of public monies were shelled out to the public this past summer while Parliament was out. So nice for the public who got to see a small portion of our hard earned tax dollars after they disappeared into government coffers.
Don’t mention the plane to Redford!
David Simonds
However paltry $1.4 billion might seem, we must consider that this comes after years of budget cuts across the board that put new meaning into the words “fiscal conservative.” In fact, one might point out to Mr. Harper that the last few years were rather Dickensian. Finally, there is starting to be light at the end of the tunnel. The spring budget is supposed to be a surplus! Already, the vultures (Cabinet Ministers) are lining up at the PMO to try to snatch a few million dollars for their departmental budgets. Additionally, the government has already started to dangle little tidbits before Canadians with rumours of tax breaks and other items, which look lovely, but might not be the best in the long run.
Yeah, it’ll be the first time we have a major surplus since those nasty, corrupt Liberals were in power back in 2005. Granted, we had the global recession, a series of minority governments, and then four years of a Conservative majority, which made any chance of a surplus next to nil. Thanks to drastic cuts to the defence budget, Health Canada, the public service, CBC, and transfer payments to the provinces (did I miss anything?), we will be on the right track! The right track being the right side of the political spectrum. Mr. Harper would be the first Conservative Prime Minister to pull off a budgetary surplus since Sir Robert Borden over a century ago, according to former Finance Minister Ralph Goodale.
We solved the problem we made, next we’ll solve Martin’s.
Gary Clement
The sharing of the wealth that went on this summer should be the first of a series of Tory handouts leading up to the next election. If they’re already handing stuff out, could that mean that the budget has already been balanced, or could they be writing cheques that might bounce? We’ve all been there. We can forgive humans for spending more than they have, so why shouldn’t we forgive politicians? After all, politicians are humanoid!
While the bulk of these monies have gone to Conservative held ridings (approximately $375 million), fear not for those ridings that are Orange or Red! Liberal held ridings got about $88 million, and NDP held ridings got $82 million! Sun Media believes this to be “a lot of money.” With what was spent on Liberal and NDP ridings combined, it seems that roughly 30% of the handouts went to Opposition ridings, where 70% went to government ridings. Yes, I got the numbers right Thirty percent might not seem very big to you and me, compared to 70%, but, if you see it in the Sun, it must be so! The actual allocations (what went where) are hidden away in a Sun Media vault somewhere deep beneath Tory headquarters. Pity that us mortals outside of the Sun Media family can’t see what they have. I’d be interested to see if the NDP and Liberal ridings that received Tory handouts happen to be ridings that will be split up into new seats for the next election.
With Liberal ridings getting more than the NDP (despite the NDP having thrice the number of seats), it’s clear who the Tories see as their real competition.