The government knew for a year that applications for the Temporary Foreign Workers program were happening in the same fields and same regions as people were filing for unemployment. This speaks to their idea of economic management. Why did it take the government one year to remove loopholes in the program? How could changing EI be considered a fix for a separate, broken, program?

It is no secret that Canada’s economy is in rough shape. Anyone that looks at the job numbers sees permanent, well-paying jobs, have disappeared and whatever boom of jobs the Action Plan ads claim to have created are in fact temporary and forcefully drop wages in a time when the cost of living is rising rapidly.

Auditor General Michael Ferguson released his annual spring report which found lack of information to be the theme of the Conservatives’ program spending. Included in this analysis is $3.1 billion in funding for anti-terrorism which can’t be accounted for and off the radar. In times of economic uncertainty and austerity, can the Conservatives really afford to lose $3.1 billion without having it accounted for?

You may have seen the ads, they air everyday. They tout the government’s steady hand on the economy and the creation of new jobs. However, putting successful PR aside, recent job numbers state a dip of 50K jobs and an explosive report finds that common Canadian jobs are being given to temporary foreign workers for lower wages.

Who says Canadian politics is boring? Despite being in the first majority government since 2004, politics was easy as government shenanigan continued and controversy ruled The Canadian Political Scene. This post will round up 2012 into one bite-sized image with the big scandals and the party progress reports.

Newly appointed Conservative Senators are finding their perks rather appealing – so appealing that they are cheating taxpayers to cash in. First Patrick Brazeau abused the system, and now Mike Duffy. We can all agree they should repay their takings and we all agree their expenses will never outweigh their salaries. We can, then, agree the housing allowance perk should be scrapped and the savings be refunded.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty confirmed that Canada is in deeper economic trouble than anyone was willing to tell us. They didn’t want us to know how much they actually spent and they tried their best to hide the numbers, as the Auditor General pointed out last month, but as we crunch the numbers, we see that this government has spent more than any government in Canadian history.

In  politics, there is no such thing as a reality. If people think a certain way of a party, this way of thinking becomes a reality that is set in stone. While polls aren’t always accurate, they give people a chance to see what others are thinking and it also gives a chance to see where people stand on policies and what perceptions they have of political parties.

The opposition has been doing everything they can to stop Bill C38 or the Omnibus Budget Implementation Bill – the same bill that would attack and transform EI, the same budget that would attack pensions and retirement, and the same budget that would take an axe to environmental regulations to prop up the Alberta tar sands exploitation project.

As part of the federal budget, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty decided to take a strong stance on EI, making it harder to get and forcing families to split and lose everything in order to get whatever job is available outside their region. Let’s remind Flaherty of how the system really works and why he really has no right to touch it – at all.