The Department of National Defense is one of the departments slated for cuts as Harper searches for $4 billion in savings. However, as 2,100 employees are packing their stuff and moving out of their offices, renovations have been slotted as new spending. These renovations, at a cost of $379,000 tax payer dollars, can be found in the deputy defense minister’s office.
What do Lise St-Denis and Irwin Cotler have in common? Apart from being Liberal MPs, they have both been attacked by their opposition using the dirtiest tactics available. The NDP has claimed for years that the Liberals and Conservatives were destroying democracy with vicious politics and offered themselves as an alternative. It appears that the “Fix(ed) Ottawa” that Jack Layton spoke of was hot air and unfortunately, it’s not the first time this blog has come to this conclusion.
The Conservatives like to claim that they shrink government size and spending. Like with Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, spending soared and Canada crashed. Mulroney introduced the GST, but that was not enough to clean his mess. In the 1990s, the Liberals under Jean Chretien took the unpopular decision to make cuts and the way they did it turned out to be widely successful as it gave the Liberal Party 13 years of uninterrupted power. Now, the Conservatives are left with no choice but to try it for themselves – for the first time.
As if the House of Commons and senate wasn’t enough, the Prime Minister’s Office is the biggest in history. This comes as the Canadian economy is crawling and austerity is coming to find $4 billion in savings. Harper called for small government back in the 90s and in 2004, however, that Harper is gone. In the first 5 years of Harper’s mandate since 2006, bureaucracy has grown 13%, contradicting these small government principles.
The Harper Government is quietly looking into a $3.7 billion purchase of new search-and-rescue planes. When the idea was pitched 6 years ago by the Conservatives, the cost was $3.1 billion, $600 million less than now. The project was put into a bureaucratic limbo a long time ago when Paul Martin first approved it and it never got done.
The Conservatives scrapped census and the gun registry under one principle: freedom and privacy. The Conservatives deemed their decisions were beneficial as the government got out of the affairs of Canadians. However, some Conservative supporters and MPs are making the push to re-open the debate on abortion laws in Canada and tell Canadian women what they can and cannot do with their body in the name of justice. Does that make sense?
Regular users of the Canadian Healthcare system know that something isn’t right. The system is broken, inefficient and mismanaged. It has become expensive and for the causes that it has received greater funding, it has not improved. Our healthcare system still easily deserves a failing grade for wait times, understaffing and overall performance but while some believe that it is due to a lack of funds, the reality remains that the funds are mismanaged and that regardless how much money you throw in the system, it will be wasted and your healthcare won’t improve.
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