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.

On the passing of Jim Flaherty

I intended to say nothing out of
respect for his family. But.....

As my Dad used to say, "if you can't say something good about somebody, then say nothing at all". Good advice for the most part that I've admittedly ditched in my mad rantings about the evils of Stephen Harper's Reform-a-Cons in this blog. But when one of the enemies of the state pass, it's only good etiquette to suspend the vitriolic volleys out of respect for the family of the deceased. 

So with that in mind, I had resolved to say nothing at all regarding the late Jim Flaherty. I didn't like the man in life, but the passing of any human being is a tragedy of mammoth proportions to the family of the deceased. I know this from personal experience. So do most people my age. So I suspended my twitter attacks on the Harpercondriacs for a good 24 hours out of respect, not for the passing of the man himself, but out of respect for his grieving family. 

The Opposition parties were suitably solemn as one would expect them to be when any of their colleagues buy's the farm. Hell, even Harper himself was positively magnanimous about the departure of the late Jack Layton, offering to allow him a state funeral. But knowing what a cold hearted heel Harper is, this was probably not as much out of respect,  but thanks for the surge in Laytons NDP in 2011 that may well have helped Harper win his fraudulent majority government. 

But now the undeserved accolades for Flaherty are pouring in. Mostly from the

Jim Flaherty, Friend of the 1%.

mainstream media who hypocritically seem intent on canonizing the very man they routinely lambasted (and rightly so) in their columns. It is one thing for Citizen Stephen to heap adoration on his co-conspirator, calling him a "great Canadian". One would expect that. But for the supposedly unbiased news media, this is absolutely intolerable. 

 The Ottawa Citizen said that Flaherty was: "a steady hand on the tiller", a phrase taken directly from the "Harper spin-doctor" play-book. The Halifax Chronicle Herald claimed that Flaherty had:  "...a reputation at home and abroad as a capable minister" (I'm sure the Euro Zone won't much miss ol Jim's finger pointing and vacuous lecturing).  The Globe And Mail even went so far as to say that: "Jim Flaherty helped save the world from economic meltdown". Puleeeeze!

All old Jimbo did, was to take credit for the work Paul Martin did in stabilizing our economy and regulating our banks against just the sort of meltdown that did occur in 2008. If you'll remember, Jimmy denied the very existence of the recession at first. And even prior to the 2008 crisis, he had already squandered the $16 billion dollar surplus he had inherited from Martin on tax cuts that every expert in the field had advised against.  And when Mark Carney left the Bank Of Canada for England, Flaherty seemed absolutely lost.  

Put the fucking homeless in JAIL!

I can go on ad nauseum as to why Mr. F was nothing like the "Great Canadian" he is being made out to have been today. But think Austerity (ever notice that Flaherty and austerity rhyme?). Think vindictive cuts to the CBC. Think about the attack on the jobless via EI. Think about the attacks on the CPP and universal health care. Think about those mammoth, undemocratic, Omnibus-budget bills of his. And Think about the man who wanted to jail the homeless as Jimmy wanted to do when he was a Harrisite in Ontario. And while we're on the subject of Ontario, I'm sure there are thousands of families in Walkerton who will never forget nor forgive what Flaherty, Harris and Clement did to them. 

For more detail on Flaherty's record, see what the good folks at Progressive Press had to say when Uncle Jimmy stepped down as Finance Minister last month: What's With All The Praise For Jim Flaherty's Record

Well I've done a fine job of not heeding my father's advice once again. I didn't wish to speak ill of Jimmy at this time. It goes against the grain for me. So can't we just get by with saying Jim was "a good family man with a sense of humour" and leave it at that? Do we need to get all hypocritical and, well, LIE about the man? He was a career public servant, yes. But there are many, many, many Canadians today who wish he hadn't been. So lets just be respectful of the family and drop the Bull Shit. Ok?

The man who said "there's no such thing
as a bad job" never worked at a "McJob",
harvested tobacco, or slaved in a factory.