You know, because we only pay on average 42% of our incomes in taxes. Surely, more tax dollars in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats is what’s needed. Muskoka could always use a new gazebo or two.

Yet while the Harper Government© has failed abysmally to live up to the allegations that it would have a hidden agenda, Mallick has screamed from the rooftops during this election that should a majority result, the Fifth Horseman of Apocalypse would be wearing blue sweater.

• “For a man whose very hair is screaming to escape from its tyrannical overseer, he sure doesn’t understand what the northern nations do with their money and why they gleam internationally.” – April 16, 2011
• “With a Harper majority, evangelicals will be openly part of government.” – March 29, 2011
• “The Conservative hate machine will swivel toward you like a Dalek and advance. You’re doomed. A Harper majority government wouldn’t just lash out generally. It would hunt down its enemies.” – March 28, 2011

To be sure, some of the anti-Ignatieff rhetoric has been equally as over the top. For starters, he is not Chairman Mao reincarnate, nor is his wife a fair target for partisans.

So come on partisans and columnists. Share an opinion. Have an angle, but stop this kind of over-the-top fear mongering. Anchor your opinions in fact and reality. You and what you have to say will be more respected for it.

“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he spend $60 billion or only 50?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement and stimulus I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is an overtaxed country with a half trillion dollars in debt already and growing, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, taxpayers?”

That’s not a direct quote from Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, but it’s close enough. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) certainly doesn’t feel lucky about our prospects as a country if current spending continues unabated. While we already owe a massive sum to our bankers: $500 billion in accumulated debt, the new debt being added via the deficit announced in the last budget, will amount to more than $10,200 per taxpayer between now and 2014. That figure will continue to balloon as interest on the debt begins to compound. Canada is adding more debt right now than was added during both World Wars combined, even after adjusting for inflation. You can see our national debt rack up in real time at www.debtclock.ca.

For those not feeling so lucky, the CTF has produced a Zero in Three Deficit Action Plan to balance the budget in three years. This can be done through a combination of spending freezes, trimming of department budgets and where necessary, reductions. Politicians may excuse themselves from any spending cuts in claiming that a recovery in revenues will balance the budget, but quite simply, they’re wrong. Program spending has skyrocketed by more than 60 per cent in only six years – beginning long before so-call stimulus spending – and add to that the retirement of the baby boomers now beginning and Canada faces a structural deficit that will remain long after revenues recover.

The CTF’s plan would only reduce spending by 10 per cent, returning us to 2008 levels over three years finding a total of $35.8 billion in savings.  In addition to moderately trimming department budgets and accounting for already scheduled decreases in “stimulus,” the CTF plan would eliminate $5.5 billion in corporate welfare. This means turning off the taps to private corporations that subside on the taxpayer’s dime while at the same time resisting money-sucking schemes like Kyoto and Copenhagen that will create entire new bureaucracies and dependent faux-businesses.

Equalization eats up $14.8 billion every single year and has only served to make recipient provinces even poorer and more dependent. The CTF plan would convert this from a ‘federal welfare program’ to a program to help pay down provincial debts, and then reduce the amount provided by 10 per cent each year. That would provide cumulative savings of more than $1.4 billion every year while helping poorer provinces to become proudly self-sufficient again.

Since the creation of two new “regional development” agencies by the Harper government, every single area of the country now has a government agency designed to take money from one part of the country and redistribute it elsewhere. This nonsensical logic makes it low-hanging fruit for anyone serious about balancing the budget. Savings to the taxpayer: $1.2 billion every year.

Canada also has several crown corporations that eat up excessive amounts of money. While not all candidates made the list to be cut, those that did make the chopping block would save taxpayers at least $1.2 billion annually, not to mention one time reductions to our debt from the proceeds of selling them.

All told, there is an abundance of areas that the government can easily look to in order to get its finances under control. Even holding the line on spending – which it should have done when it come to power – won’t bring the books into black. Program spending was already at unsustainable levels when Prime Minister Harper came to power.

During the Trudeau and Mulroney years, the government books often showed the budget coming into balance without any cuts a few years down the road as revenues increased, yet they never did. The government today – with deficits on par with those prime ministers – is making precisely the same argument. They know, just as previous governments before, you can’t balance your budget by doing nothing.

The jig is up and we know what needs to be done, so come on Mr. Harper, make my day.

Today, Philip Resnick and Reg Whitaker in The Tyee wrote an open letter calling on the Liberal, New Democratic and Green leaders to make such a deal.  While infinitely shorter than the Harper and Flanagan essay, the letter’s tone and suggestions are remarkably similar, especially in its call for electoral cooperation and a coalition government.

Some may cry foul over any coalition government overthrowing a party with a plurality of seats, such as last winter’s ill-fated attempt.  While that coalition arrangement was illegitimate in the eyes of most voters, a coalition that is announced before voters cast their ballots – knowing that such an arrangement will follow should no party win a majority of seats – would be legitimate. The quality of such a government is an entirely separate debate.

One cannot help but see “Our Benign Dictatorship” leap off the page of this open letter in both the diagnose of the “problem” (in their respective times) as well as the prescription for what should be done.

The following article appears in the January 25, 2010 edition of the National Post, & Canada Free Press.

Few politicians are thought to have Senate reform in their blood the way Prime Minister Stephen Harper does. Having campaigned for it beginning in the late 1980s and winning two general elections with it as a significant part of his platform, it is time for the Prime Minister to invest the political capital necessary to reform Canada’s upper house of Parliament.

By some accounts of legend, around AD 40 Roman Emperor Caligula attempted to appoint his favourite horse to a senior government position in the Senate as a way of showing contempt for the office. While Caligula may have been a mad tyrant, one would be hard pressed to find many Canadians with a more positive view of their own appointed Senate.

One hardly needs to make the case for why it should be reformed anymore, but rather how it should be. As a young MP serving as the Reform Party’s constitutional affairs critic, Harper passionately championed a wholesale makeover in the form of a “triple-e” Senate. Pushing his more modest, but still hugely positive, proposals during the last Parliament, he became the first sitting Prime Minister to appear before a Senate committee. Few then doubted the Prime Minister’s sincerity about finally bringing the needed change he had promised.

With the expected appointment of an additional five Senators to the Red Chamber prior to March 3, the Conservatives will hold 51 seats to the Liberals’ 49. For all intents and purposes, they will have the numbers required to pass legislation without major impediments.

To this point, unelected Liberal Senators have blocked the Prime Minister’s reform package — modest proposals for elections and eight-year term limits — to avoid the embarrassment of retaining their own seats while the chamber slowly filled with democratically elected representatives. The pressure to resign in such circumstances would be inconvenient for those eyeing a maximum $100,000-per-year pension upon their second retirement.

With the exception of Michael Fortier, the Prime Minister justified his two rounds of Senate appointments following the coalition crisis as a necessary evil to balance the numbers in order to eventually reform the institution — presumably now. With the Senate roadblock seemingly out of the way, there are only three scenarios in which the soon to be reintroduced legislation can fail: 1. There is an election; 2. Opposition parties in the House of Commons defeat it; or 3. The Prime Minister does not push it wholeheartedly.

Stephen Harper has proven that when he is serious about passing legislation that his opponents have reservations about — such as stiffening the Criminal Code — he has little trouble bending them to his will. It is doubtful that when push comes to shove enough opposition members would stand up and be counted as voting against such legislation, especially if it were deemed a government priority and therefore a matter of “confidence.”

No doubt, many opposition members will attempt to tie up and stop such reforms from ever coming to a vote, as did Liberal Senators during the last Parliament. Therefore, the Prime Minister should ante up and declare his reform legislation, both to elect senators and limit their terms, a vote of confidence and a government priority.

While fault will lie with the Prime Minister if reform legislation fails to pass before the next election, success in passing it may prove to be one of this government’s greatest achievements yet. Canadians should hope that the Prime Minister’s word is still solid on this issue and that the post-coalition Senate appointments are not a resumption of older times. Say, AD 40.

National Post

Derek Fildebrandt is national research director, Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Program spending has increased by more than 60% in the last 6 years beginning long before there was any drop in revenue, a bailout of General Motors, or threat of Stéphane Dion becoming prime minster with Monsieurs Layton and Duceppe at the ready.  In 2013 we will begin to feel the pinch of the baby boomers retiring and the double whammy of increased CPP, GIS and health-care costs on the one hand, and a shrinking tax base on the other.

Anyone who has crunched the numbers will see that there has been a massive and permanent growth in the size of government beyond the so-called ‘Economic Action’ plan over the last six years and that the pressures of demographics will means that even holding the line on spending will be entirely insufficient to balance the budget.

The Trudeau and Muloney governments made the same claim that balancing the budget can be done by getting spending “growth” under control and allowing revenue growth to take care of the rest.  We all know the history and how well that worked.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has released a detailed plan to make reasonable cuts in spending coupled with freezes that will actually get the budget back in black within three years.

Conservatives should make it known within their party that this situation has a strong smell of the 1970s and 80s, and Liberals and New Democrats should get credible on this issue and hold the government to account, as is their job.