Changing What Canadians Care About and Bragging About It

With the Cadman affair taking up so much space, this story seemed to sneak by.

Tom Flanagan, yes the same guy who apparently met with Cadman, wrote an article crowing about what a genius his ex-boss has been.

He begins with this.

Perhaps the most significant act of the Harper government is being conducted so slowly, steadily, and silently that it has raised barely a whisper of public debate.

Translation: Harper is changing the country while no one is looking.

After three Conservative budgets, the Government of Canada has been made financially incapable of offering costly new social programs or significant tax cuts for the foreseeable future.
Remember the national day-care plan the Liberals talked about when the country was awash in $13-billion annual surpluses? Or the Kelowna treaty to deal with aboriginal poverty?

Those surpluses are now almost gone.

You can almost hear him giggling can't you? He's literally thrilled that he's destroyed the fiscal capacity of this country with the specific intent of making future social spending programs an impossibility.

To launch any big-ticket initiatives over the next few years a prime minister _ whether Harper or a successor _ would either need to risk political suicide or hope for an economic miracle.

That's because raising taxes, returning to a deficit or slashing existing programs could be the only ways to pay for new spending, barring an unexpected economic boom.

His pride is palpable, isn't it? Harper and Flaherty frittered away a $13 billion surplus and are now projecting that surplus will be $1.3 billion by 2010 and Flanagan is on his feet shouting Bravo! He then makes the following bizarre comment.

With only a minority government, says Flanagan, Harper could never have taken the instant slice-and-dice approach of the Mike Harris Tories during Ontario's Common Sense Revolution.

He obviously thinks the way Harris destroyed the province and left it with a $5.2 billion deficit was a good thing. So good in fact that he's thrilled that Harper is slowly but surely accomplishing the same thing across the country.

What is it with these people? I understand of course that their fiscal ideology support what Flanagan is saying, but why is it that they don't recognise the damage they do?

``Harper really didn't have the option of the cataclysmic approach because you can't do that without a majority,'' he said in an interview.

``So he's made the incremental approach work _ all the time having the insecurity of a minority government.

``It's really quite a performance, I think . . . Over a period of a few years they've got all this in place and they never appeared _ at any one point _ they never appeared to be making a radical shift.

``But the cumulative impact of all these together is creating a new profile.''

Not only are the Conservatives boxing in the federal spending power in general, said Flanagan, ``they're also boxing in the Liberals from being able to campaign on expensive promises.''

Cataclysmic approach!? I do believe this is the first time I've ever seen this word used in quite this way. The author seems to attach a positive definition to it.

So there you have it folks. The Con's are on a mission to destroy what this country has become and Flanagan freely admits that it's being done by stealth. His arrogance is staggering really. Writing an article like this takes an incredible amount of gall and is tantamount to thumbing his nose at 66% of the population who do not support the Con view of the world.

That said, it's hard to blame him. After all, the media don't cover this stuff. They are more concerned with unnamed senior Liberal sources who are gunning for Dion and repeating the same story over and over again. Pathetic really.

For more about our small minded, visionless leader, here is the whole article.