Peace, Order and Good Government
This recently (1860s) replaced the more accurate "peace, welfare and good government" ("paix, bien-être et bon gouvernement"), where welfare means "the public good".
Truth. Our GDP is actually growing pretty steadily in Canada, and our financial sector is solid, and we’re not visibly heading for a crash. At this point, any deficit we have is structural - that is, it’s because taxes are too low and/or spending is too high, not because the economy is doing temporarily poorly.
The fact that the Prime Minister’s Office how the power to flat-out suppress statistics on structural budget deficit (like, even the Parliamentary Budget Officer can’t access them) is actually a pretty serious problem with our system. I know that we all like to ascribe all kinds of villainous motives or general incompetency on the Prime Minister, but in this case I’m genuinely optimistic that the information is going to get released. Because if even the bureaucrats can’t accurately forecast the budget two or three years down the road, we are going to run into some serious difficulties.
Anyway, if you’re interested you can read the full deficit report here.
(Source: The Globe and Mail)
From The Sixth Estate:
Harper’s position on climate change is much more moderate than certain Conservative politicians, but it’s worth noting that he does believe we are causing permanent global warming. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be massively boosting military assets for the eventually ice-free North (which, left ice-free, wouldn’t need these assets in the first place). His real feelings on the subject came out in a 2002 letter to Canadian Alliance supporters, around the time that Canada was ratifying the Kyoto Accord, in which he described the Kyoto Accord as merely a “socialist scheme to suck money out of” capitalist countries to China using the climate change myth as a pretext.
[.pdf link above, full text also available here]
Oh. Okay. Well, sorry Vancouver and everyone north of 60 and everyone else whose way of life is going to become totally unfeasible thanks to climate change! Socialism and all. You know how it is.
43 notes (via defeatist & abcsoupdot)
Tax Facts
Via Mark Thoma, CBPP has a great set of charts on taxes. Here’s one:
Aside from the low-tax status of the United States, it’s interesting to note that all the European crisis countries have relatively low taxes by European standards. I wouldn’t claim that this…
