Hudak Aims To Recreate "Harper's Follies"

Hudak's bad math has been under a
microscope since day one of this campaign.

No matter how you add, subtract, multiply or divide Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak's  bogus "Million Jobs"numbers, the outcome would not be good for thousands of Ontarians. 

Hudak is, of course, proposing the slashing of 100,000 public sector jobs - one out of every six public employee in the Province. This would include teachers, educational assistants, paramedics, welfare workers, child protection workers, occupational therapists, behaviour therapists, group home staff, probation officers, jail guards, personal support workers, speech and language pathologists, communication disorder specialists, nursing home staff, water safety inspectors (think Walkerton here) and the list goes on and on. These are highly trained, dedicated people who make a difference in our communities.

Hudak wants to eliminate these 
dedicated people who make 
a difference in our communities 
in favour of a 30% corporate
tax cut

This "public sector genocide" would, of course, supposedly offset the gigantic loss of revenue that would occur as a result of reducing corporate taxes in Ontario by 30%. Hudak's conservative ideology would have us believe, that this tax break to big business, would "trickle down", thereby creating a million jobs and reinvestment in the Province. 

It's a quaint fairy tale that, but Mr. Hudak either doesn't understand or doesn't care about the devastating impact of his destructive platform, either on the middle class of this Province (a great number of those public service jobs are middle class), or the vulnerable and needy people  whose lives depend  on the hardworking public servants he wishes to fire. 

The truly sad part is, that there are so many citizens who take the Conservative leader's numbers at face value and also don't understand the devastating course Hudak is plotting. They simply don't grasp that what he is proposing, is nothing less than a crime of colossal proportion against our Province, our communities and the citizenry as a whole.  

But Hudak's corporate tax cut theory has already been disproved by circumstances at the federal level. 

In 2005, the year before Stephen Harper came to power, unemployment in Canada stood at 6.8%  

After drastically slashing corporate taxes across the country to record low levels and imposing similar crippling cuts on the federal public service that has devastated the lives of multitudinous  Canadians (such as our veterans), unemployment currently sits at 6.9%. And this does not include the 39% of unemployed Canadians who have simply "given up" looking for work.  Since Harper's tax breaks then, Canada has seen a net increase in unemployment of +.1% nation wide over eight years. So there are actually slightly more people unemployed now (discounting the 39% who have given up) than there were before the massive tax cuts. What happened to all the jobs?

Well aside from the fact that there was a recession midway through those eight years which saw unemployment peak at 8.3% in 2009, jobs have been slow to rematerialize in the five years since then. There has been no evidence of "trickle down" and in fact, corporations are sitting on any savings they may have gained from their tax breaks. All of which prompted former Bank of Canada Governor, Mark Carney to call on corporate Canada in 2012, to reinvest the vast amounts of "dead money" they were sitting on. In essence, big business has been hoarding it's savings from lower taxes rather than using them to benefit the economy and the country. 

And recently, The Conference Board of Canada has found that cuts to corporate taxes alone will not create new jobs without Government stimulus. In fact, they discovered that government spending on it's own, will create more jobs than reducing corporate taxes. But Harper, clinging to his Calgary School dogma, has already implemented what Hudak is proposing -  austerity measures that are just the opposite of The Conference Board's findings and that have proven to be detrimental to our economy and to our society as a whole. 

But what Harper has succeeded in achieving, is the creation of a large number of part-time "McJobs" with no benefits, no retirement savings and low wages. Hardly the kind of employment that is suitable for Canadian families. And Mr. Hudak is proposing the exact same thing for Ontario. The PC's plan would guide Ontario down a dark and foreboding path that would lead to  large scale, long term suffering. Our economy would experience immeasurable if not irreparable damage. 

And in the meantime, those 100,000 out of work public servants would end up selling their homes and slinging burgers at McDonald's in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. And only God knows what would happen to the people who used to depend on them. But it's a safe bet that their diminished and discontinued services would likely result in thousands of them ending up on the streets, in hospitals and in our jails, thereby negating any savings Hudak ever hoped to gain from terminating their supports. 

Ontario's most vulnerable would be hurt the worst.

Harper Has Never Denied Sharing Flanagan's Belief in Assimilation of First Nations.

The "Idle No More" movement has good reason to be supremely suspicious of Stephen Harper and suspecting him of having an agenda of "assimilation" as far as First Nations are concerned. 

In addition to his legislative agenda - bills passed in the last year, C-38 and 45 in particular which gut environmental protections including protection of the vast majority of our sources of water with out consulting anyone, let alone our First Nations partners - Harper has shown little regard for our nations and people in his mad rush to declare Canada "open for business" 

Like environmental protections, Harper consider's First Nation's land and treaties as nothing more than "red-tape" to be eradicated in his efforts to open up vast tracts of Canada to exploitation to the highest bidder, be they Europeans, Chinese or whom ever else. He has fired, silenced or otherwise discredited and attacked anyone who could in anyway get in the way of his agenda. And he has used his majority government like a sledgehammer to smash any and all legitimate opposition in the House of Commons. He has closed his ears and otherwise ignored critics and bullied his way forward, forcing his will upon the 62% of Canadians who didn't vote for him, all the while spin-doctoring and lying through his teeth about facts, figures and events as he lays waste to the country side and shreds the very fabric of our society to pieces. It would seem on the surface then, that he has treated First Nations no differently than any other obstacle in this regard.  

Some disturbing clues regarding
Harper's First Nations Agenda

But there seems to be something decidedly more sinister about Harper's treatment of First Nations then merely regarding them as one more obstacle to achieving his goal of forever transforming Canada into a Neo-Conservative Oligarchy. One does not have to dig too far into Harper's political past to find some very disturbing clues as to his view of Canada's Aboriginal population. 

It is no secret that Harper is a "Calgary School" alumnus. This is in reference to a particularly toxic school of political and economic thought that closely resembles The Chicago School in the US. Both the Calgary and Chicago schools are heavily influenced by Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek and though they vehemently deny it, there is  ample evidence that the Calgary school is also influenced by controversial political philosopher Leo Strauss. Another Calgary School alumnus and close friend of Stephen Harper's is Tom Flanagan. 

Flanagan has been a close personal friend and mentor to Harper in his political career. Both Harper and Flanagan were major policy advisers and strategists with the old Reform Party and though he left politics in 1993 to continue his career in academia, Flanagan returned in 2001 to guide Harper's rise to power, first with the Alliance Party of Canada (which was nothing more than the re-branded Reform Party) and then with the hostile take-over of the Progressive Conservative Party. When Flanagan finally left politics again in 2004, Harper was leader of the Official Opposition and well on his way to becoming Prime Minister of Canada. Flanagan is currently a Senior Fellow at the conservative Fraser Institute and as such, is still  very influential in the creation of current government policy. But what, you might well be asking, has this all to do with Canada's First Nations and the Idle No More movement?

Tom Flanagan, mentor and man behind Harper's throne
openly advocates for assimilation of Canada's
First Nations People. 

Flanagan has based his academic career on researching and writing about Canada's First Nations, particularly about the Metis, Metis land claims and Louis Riel. In 2000, Flanagan published the book "First Nations, Second Thoughts" which was meant to be a critique of the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal People. In his book, Flanagan dismissed First Nations people as merely the "First Immigrants" who happened to cross the Bering Straight Land Bridge a few thousand years before Europeans arrived, a view of history that all but eliminates Aboriginal land claims. In addition, Flanagan claimed that the only sensible Native policy was outright assimilation.   

So given Flanagan's position as the man behind Harper's throne,Canada's First Nations had every reason to be concerned about Harper's policies regarding Aboriginal land claims. Phil Fontaine, then leader of the Assembly of First Nations, wrote an open letter to Harper asking him if  he shared his mentors views on assimilation. He never replied. 

So while Harper has never confirmed he shares Flanagan's views on assimilation, he has never denied it either. So does he merely view First Nations as another political chess piece to be manipulated in an effort to achieve his agenda, or does he have something far more sinister in mind for Canada's Indigenous peoples? His recent treatment of Native Treaty Rights and his outright ignoring of hunger-striking Chief Theresa Spence and the whole Idle No More movement would suggest the latter. 

Idle No More means First Nations People never having
to bow to men like Harper or Flanagan ever again.