OTTAWA – The federal NDP and Liberals are fighting over which party is closest to the “Occupy” protesters who’ve started to camp out in city parks across Canada.

“I think what the Occupation movement is expressing is what we’ve been saying in the House of Commons every single day in question period,” said NDP finance critic Peggy Nash, listing issues like wages and the gap between rich and poor.

“So, in terms of the goals of the Occupation movement, we are completely on the same wavelength.”

However, interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae said after talking to protesters in Toronto over the weekend, he sees them closer to the political centre.

“(They) didn’t have an axe to grind, didn’t have a particular ideology to talk about,” Rae said. “They just wanted to express their concern about what was happening in the economy and their sense that a Canada where people really cared about each other was slipping through their fingers.”

Read the whole thing.  Jason Kenney’s quote is worth it!!

Michael J. Moldaver and Andromache Karakatsanis (I think I’ll just say Andy from now on) are the new judges, and both of them are from the Ontario Court of Appeal.  Its tough to say anything about the appointments because there’s really no information out there about them that I can find.

So long as they’re free speech advocates, believe in parliamentary supremacy, and will strictly follow sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution, then they’re good in my books.

Personally, I don’t derive a whole lot of hope out of the government saying no to this, but Mr. Plamondon believes that Min. Moore saying no to this himself, instead of it coming from Min. Flaherty or the Prime Minister is an indication of how serious the government is at reducing spending.   That might all be true, but I’ll wait for the budget, thanks.

What was also interesting was the column he wrote a week later, calling on PM Harper to follow Chretien, not Obama.  Good call.  What peaked my interest was this passage I’m about to quote.  Everything I’ve read has said the opposite, so I’m very interested to learn where Mr. Plamondon got his information for the following statement.

The notion that Martin was tough on spending has been grossly exaggerated. The nominal $41 billion turnaround — from a $38 billion deficit (1993) to a $3 billion surplus (1997) – resulted from $37 billion in additional revenues and only $4 billion in reduced spending.

Between 1993 and 1997, program spending declined by $7 billion or about 6 per cent. Reductions were made in national defence and transfers to provincial governments, but the costs of running the government actually increased by $4.4 billion, some 10.5 per cent.

The only federal entitlement program Chrétien seriously hit was employment insurance. This gave us the double benefit of reducing costs while encouraging employment. It was a courageous policy shift for Chrétien to implement. Having won all 11 Nova Scotia seats in 1993, he lost them all in 1997. Despite regional protests, Chrétien won a majority government in 1997, and again in 2000.

The lesson for the Harper government from Chrétien, and for governments around the world, is that it does not take draconian cuts to balance budgets. All that was needed in Canada in the 1990s to balance the books was to put a lid on government spending and leave private sector alone to grow the economy.

Wow.  Only a $7 billion reduction in spending?  I’m not sure – as a fiscal conservative – whether to be happy or sad to learn this.  On one hand, the idea that the deficit will be easier to eliminate than I had imagined is a relief.  At the same time, I’m kind of disappointed that the government might only need to eliminate the $11 billion in spending they laid out in the budget, and the election campaign.

The fiscal plan laid out by Stephen Harper’s government envisions a surplus budget by 2015-16 and gets there primarily by cutting federal program spending. As a share of GDP it falls dramatically, from 16 per cent in 2009-10 to 12.9 per cent in 2015-16.

Stating spending cuts as a percentage of GDP is a tricky business.  The projected fall in federal spending that you see there is largely dependent on the economy growing a significant clip over these next four years.  The government has said over and over again that it plans to control spending increases, not cut spending dramatically.

Later in the column she points out that spending under Paul Martin in the 1990s fell by a similar number (as a % of GDP) between 1995 and 1999.  The key difference that she omits is that Paul Martin was facing a much more serious debt problem, and was saddled with a serious recession that came with high interest rates and double digit unemployment.   For Paul Martin to eliminate the deficit they had to cut deep.

The only other time this has happened in Canada’s economic history – except for demobilizing the economy after the Second World War – was when former Finance Minister Paul Martin tabled his infamous 1995 budget, a budget that recast fiscal federalism and retrenched the welfare state.

Mr. Martin’s fiscal plan relied on highly contested cuts to shrink federal spending from 16 per cent of GDP in 1994-95 to 12.7 per cent in 1998-99 – almost identical to what the Harper budget is now proposing. It fell further, to 12.1 per cent by 2000, largely because of extraordinary growth in the economy.

Unfortunately, this government will not need to cut that deep to eliminate the deficit.  Economic growth will wash a significant chunk away, and the rest will be eliminated by lightly skimming the top off a few federal departments.

I’ll be more than happy to admit I’m wrong, if the government announces a plan that shows significant spending reductions in the next budget, but that hasn’t been their style so far, and I don’t expect it to change.

I do hold out hope that the expenditure review that’s planned for this year will yield significant cuts that can be used this year, and in future years to pay down the debt, and eventually reduce taxes.

I’m not holding my breath.

I will no longer be supporting Rogers Communications or any of their subsidiary companies.   Damian Goddard was fired for expressing his support for marriage being man-woman.

I will no longer watch Rogers Sportsnet channels, or subscribe to Rogers phone or internet service until they make this right.  This is completely unnecessary, Damian Goddard did nothing wrong.

Its a sad state of affairs that supporting the traditional definition of marriage publicly can now get you fired from your job.  A job as a sports announcer, no less.

The larger issue is the degree to which private entities are now choosing to censure themselves.  Roger Communications is now so scared of being portrayed as homophobic or anti-gay that they’re releasing an innocent person who expressed an innocent, honest opinion that has nothing to do with his job.

Our society truly is in decay.

I agree with Ezra Levant.  Lets put an adult in charge of the CBC, like Vic Toews, or maybe Jason Kenney.  I would nominate Stockwell Day, but he’s retired.

Trained by the CBC : Prime time : SunNews Video Gallery

I’ll be e-mailing Minister Harpauer shortly to encourage her to hold her ground, and not give in to this ridiculous pay increase demanded by the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation.

Most conservatives don’t believe in subsidies for any industry, even industries they support, like the Oil Sands in Alberta, or the MacKenzie pipeline that’s supposed to be built from Alaska down through British Columbia to the continental United States.

Lawrence Solomon argues that we could reduce the size and cost of government, and make the country more environmentally friendly by just eliminating the subsidies to energy companies.  How simple is that!!

My favourite recommendations are closing down the Export Development Agency, and putting an end to carbon capture technology.  Larry raises some important points about the potential harm in storing carbon dioxide underground.

What could possibly go wrong with pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide underground? If large quantities of carbon dioxide escape to the atmosphere on a windless night, the colourless, odourless, heavier-than-air gas would suffocate an entire low-lying community in its sleep. If the gas migrates underground, it would contaminate aquifers. And if nothing in the facility explodes and if the underground pipes don’t corrode and leak, seismologists predict that the vast store of CO2 injected underground under pressure could induce earthquakes, even in areas not known to be seismically active.

Energy conservation is the answer.  We drive conservation by cutting off the funding for these expensive, dangerous projects that could actually do more harm than good in the end.

The most benign way to meet our energy needs, and the way most favoured by environmentalists, is through energy conservation – doing more with less by using energy more efficiently. Because artificially cheapening the cost of consuming fuels through government subsidies undermines the incentive of people and businesses to use energy wisely, Harper should eliminate all subsidies to all energy-producing industries. No freebies to exploration, or to gas and oil pipelines, or to transmission corridors, or to nuclear plants, or to wind farms. Many environmentalists will cheer most of these pro-conservation measures and some will cheer them all.

This is something I’m now going to take to my MP.  Environmentalism can be a tool to achieve smaller government and freer markets.

So far, not one strong argument has been raised to replace B.C.’s HST with the RST. Sure, the public was angry when the HST was introduced, since Gordon Campbell’s government hid its pending introduction during the election campaign. With Campbell’s resignation, the public got its pound of flesh. Now it should contemplate whether it wishes to abandon a tax structure that is consistent with the 21st century and adopted in more than 140 countries around the world.

The HST is both fairer and economically better than the RST. Under the HST, most goods and services -whether hairstyling or furniture -are taxed at the same rate. With the B.C. government’s enriched sales tax credit and higher personal income tax exemption, the introduction of the HST actually reduces taxes on low-income residents.

Because of the HST’s credits for taxes paid by businesses on their purchases, sales taxes on intermediate and investment goods under the old sales tax are relieved, making B.C. businesses more competitive in international markets and more willing to invest in capital.

Earlier on in the article, Jack Mintz makes the obvious point that since revenue has to be raised to fund different government programs, most notably education and health care, it should be raised by taxes that distort economic progress as little as possible.

Its ironic that while British Columbia gets it right by moving to an HST, while reducing taxes on income and investment.  It chooses to participate in a ruinous cap and trade plan with eight other North American jurisdictions (including three other Canadian provinces).  As Lorrie Goldstein notes in the Toronto Sun yesterday, the BC government is now on the hook to pay for emission credits for companies like Encana, instead of paying for teachers and nurses.

Unless the plan to reduce our carbon footprint is based on reducing the amount of oxygen consumed by activities like teaching, and caring for sick citizens, this is completely backwards.

Of course all of this was predictable at the outset…*sigh*.

No government, least of all one that purports to be “conservative”, should pass this legislation. The presence of Geert Wilders on Canadian soil and the pitiful airbrushing of even mildly approving pieces about him remind us of the increasingly cowed state of our public discourse. We need more speech, more liberty, not less. If this law passes, I shall break it as a point of principle. A hyperlink is not an act of approval, but an act of sourcing: It says to the reader I trust you to go to the source and make an informed judgment. In denying that freedom to the citizen, the state couldn’t be more explicit in its contempt for you.

This is almost as bad as section 13 of the Human Rights Act – which is something conservatives unanimously voted against at its policy conference in October 2008.

I’m really disappointed!!  We need to push the government on this, and on section 13 of the HRA.  We have a legislative majority now.  There’s no excuse for this kind of crap.