The NDP leadership race is soon coming to a close and they will crown one of  8 people as their new leader. The media has claimed a two-way race between Thomas Mulcair and Brian Topp for leader but this speculation is useless as it will be the card-carrying NDP members that will make the final verdict. Based on Liberal failures in the past 6 years, here are some pieces of advice and caution:

Canada is entering the 21st century based on technology of the 1800s. Our education system is an assembly line. Our healthcare system assumes that patients are not well enough informed to manage their own medical records. Our bureaucratic structure is unnecessarily complex and large for the services we need to produce. Add on the abuses and perks and misplaced priorities and you get a very expensive system that doesn’t work very well.

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.

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.

While skeptics fought a reasoned fight against some of the Liberal Party’s new constitutional amendments, the party voted with sufficient numbers to pass some of former President Alfred App’s controversial departure gifts. In doing so, they also took a stab at new policy conventions and voted for a “Bold New Red.”

In a previous post, I analyzed the main talking points of the Conservatives and found that a basic logic behind their proposed cuts in spending increases for provincial healthcare transfers made sense. However, while the logic behind the plan was sound, the plan itself wasn’t. The lack of leadership and the misguided neglect of the system will lead to bigger problems in the future – at least, this is what the Parliamentary Budget Watchdog says.

Sometimes you have to wonder where the Conservatives find the money to afford their new initiatives while they preach austerity. The Conservatives are now making a Religious Freedom Office within Foreign Affairs at the expense of tax payers.