Fuschi’s Canadian Forum

No, really…did we actually expect that McGuinty meant lower liquor prices? He promised a benign HST - with only a slightly screwed up face - with the reassurance that all the manufacturers who were about to save billions in input costs, would gladly hand those savings to us. (Even federal minister Jim Prentice assured me that this fairy tale would indeed come true.) But, did we really expect him to use that strategy on liquor sales? Did we believe that the man who misled voters on over 200 different issues during his first election, was going to hand money back to the taxpayer he has conspired to torture, since then?

And surely, it must have been easy for the guy who has already spanked us repeatedly (by gratuitously banning everything from pit bulls to weed spray) to justify higher rather than lower liquor prices, in order to keep us from deteriorating into a society of reprobates. Theoretically, he might say, prices should be lower because of the government’s brilliant economic performance, but we fear that the average voter is a step away from alcoholic oblivion, (it is becoming more likely under McGuinty’s rule) and it is our duty to keep a tight rein on prices.

But if that strategy works with alcohol, will it not be just as useful elsewhere? Can we not anticipate the following announcements?

Thanks to the HST, (continued economic turmoil would be the real reason) gasoline prices have fallen. However, the McGuinty government has instituted a self-sufficiency tax to ensure that the lower prices do not lead to increased consumption and deterioration of our environment.

Electricity consumption has dropped dramatically, (it will when prices become outrageous, as they will) thereby jeopardizing the economic viability of Ontario’s power generation. The McGuinty government will act aggressively with an electric maintenance tax to maintain a floor on prices to ensure future delivery of electric energy.

How about; The Mcguinty government has bravely led the way in the spirit of our ancestors, to make the sacrifices necessary to return Ontario to its position of prominence in Canada. In the spirit of equal sacrifice for all, a land use tax will accrue to the HST levied on future burial sites.

Remember that the theory of lower prices resulting from decreased business costs, depends on the health of individual manufacturers, and the nature of their competition. At this time, both of these are questionable motivators. What is not questionable is the terrible example presented by the McGuinty government, which has made the bold statement that they intend to mug us for our own good.

Answer to comments: I would still have given Prentice more credit than McGuinty. I know that in spite of the damage, the HST is a logical measure. However, the damage is the reality, and Prentice’s statements were party boilerplate. I felt demoralized that the federal Conservatives for whom I have sacrificed myself electorally, three times in five years, could reassure me in no better way. I expected that much from McGuinty who is a straw man of little substance, but I expected more from our federal Conservatives who are abandoning us to McGuinty’s rapine.

 In the movie “Hunt for Red October”, one of the submarine captain’s (Sean Connery) challenges, was to neutralize the influence of an on-board political officer, whose job was to be his government’s eyes and ears, and act on behalf of the motherland. He was aptly portrayed as a cross between a strutting little potentate and a dangerous weasel. We have those in our hospitals now.

 I first became aware of them when both, my aging mother, and a friend’s, fell and broke their hips. My experience with the hospital weasel left me puzzled, but my friend, who never heard of the concept of diplomacy, ended up in a very public shouting match with his weasel. These apparatchiks were spawned as part of McGuinty’s plan to create the illusion of action on Ontario’s health landscape, and justify his health tax. His grand plan to create LHINs (Local Health Integration Networks) across the province, was advertised as a plan to facilitate the interaction and access of diverse facilities in selected communities. At the hospital level this means that a cadre of social workers moved in, supposedly to help inform and direct patients to post-hospital facilities.

The concept is not so perverse as the notion that our health-care can be improved by another layer of bureaucracy. Nevertheless there is a huge difference between the government’s euphemistic descriptions of its services, and reality. My experience showed me that the weasels are, first, human brochure dispensers, and second, gatekeepers. They are there superficially to guide you to the next service, but effectively, to grease your exit from the hospital, and minimize your cost impact on additional government-funded services. They are, in fact, an army of disablers, designed to restrict your demands on the system. Hence, the conflict between my angry friend’s expectations, and what his strutting little potentate delivered. In his shouting match, he asked her why she was putting him through hoops and changing her instructions to suit herself. This started the shouting, which concluded when he told her that she had gall to yell at him and her idea of service was a farce, and why was she taking up space in that hospital when nurses were under constant work stress. This is what the previously largest tax increase in Ontario history (health tax) bought you.

In McGuinty’s characteristic manner, these public leeches, have allowed him to make shallow claims about health improvement, while hiring a new army of Liberal supporters. (One weasel for each hospital floor.) Look around you and you will find more and expanding examples of this strategy. The teaching profession is about to get a multi-billion dollar expansion of kindergarten. Ontario’s electric energy production is heading down a rabbit hole to a wonderland of exotic green renewable wealth-destroyers, and will require its own expansion of overpaid and underproducing apparatchiks. Every new ban and intrusion into your life generated by this paranoid administration, has required its own weasels as well. Taken to their extreme, these directions will eventually replicate the disaster that is evolving from Greece and spreading throughout Europe. They too attempted to swell the ranks of their supporters on the backs of real producers.  

Two conflicting revelations emerged within the last couple days.

First, the most recent display of gall by Ontario’s premier. McGuinty was confronted with the truth about the real impact of the HST on taxpayers - as opposed to his usual tortured truth. In response this shallow poseur has now taken a Churchillian stance and insulted our cherished memories by invoking the sacrifices of our wartime forefathers in order to get us to quietly swallow the HST.

The other, was the startling statistic that while Canada just recorded an extraordinary and surprising surge in new employment statistics, it did so with absolutely no help from the still floundering Ontario economy. The importance of these two realities juxtaposed against one another is the way they illuminate the McGuinty which he sees in the mirror, and the one we are stuck with.

Displaying characteristic poker face of one who knows he is trampling on truth but has gotten away with it enough to make it worth another try, McGuinty took a further leap by recalling the sacrifices of previous generations. His attempt to become the great motivator in hard times, cheapens the history he invoked:

"Why is it that our grandparents and parents have always found a way to step it up and do something for the next generation, but somehow, we say we can’t adjust to these things…"

The short answer is that our forefathers were confronted by an enormous challenge that threatened them and their immediate loved ones. That later generations benefitted from their tremendous efforts, is a legacy which will keep us indebted to them for all time. The difference between then and now is that our challenge does not come from some confrontation with a threat of biblical proportions, as McGuinty implies, but with the aftermath of his own economic incompetence. The employment statistics point an accusing finger straight at the heart of McGuinty’s ineffective seven years of bungling.

He warned of the need for more taxes, because of "high energy costs, government deficits, and balloning health-care costs". But none of these can be blamed on some evil force from afar which we must confront to survive. In each case, he himself played a significant part in the status quo. His own government is the very challenge we must confront. 

Imagine how future generations would compare the two. Our grandfathers sacrificed their own blood to keep future generations free, while our generation, swallowed another of McGuinty’s endless tax gouges, so we could keep his inept government solvent. If we are remembered in history’s annals at all, it will be because, unlike our forefathers, we laid down and surrendered to this charlatan.

PS: One of the comments points out that my claim that Ontario created no jobs in April, is incorrect. In fact, Statscan says that 40,000 jobs were created. My error resulted from the media report that the Ontario unemployment rate remained unchanged. Nevertheless, the McGuinty record remains a disaster, and the point of my blog remains true. From what we saw happening in world markets last week, we can conclude that Ontario is still in a poor position to weather an economic reversal. And, the HST is still gasoline on the fire.

 In the movie “Independence Day”, one of my favourite scenes shows a stereotypically air-headed young lady, atop a tall building, with a gathering of similar dreamers, staring up at a hovering alien ship. While they wave banners which profess the anticipation of meeting the presumably benevolent aliens, they stare in awe at the colourful brilliance of a massive weapon that is being energized and aimed at them.

 Allow me the license to call on this image as typifying the vision implied by physicist Stephen Hawking’s comments on space research. Hawking’s warning – evidently going over like a lead balloon – is a dispassionate appraisal of all the efforts we have made to make intelligent contact by sending unmanned probes and other hardware into the unknown. He has warned us to be careful what we wish for lest our presumptions about amicable meetings with galactic strangers, are founded on wishful thinking.

Then there is Paul Hellyer, whose vision of aliens is more like ET. Mr. Hellyer is convinced that our ETs are already living among us, dispensing incalculable benefits, and extending a helping hand to draw us out of our relatively backward state. True to Liberal tradition, Mr. Hellyer is convinced that aliens are here to group-hug us, not harm us. Taking a tiny leap of faith further - he is also probably convinced that the great Liberal tradition of his former boss, Trudeau, can still pay dividends. That is, purchasing the favour of ethnic constituencies in order to cultivate their lifelong Liberal vote. What can be more Liberal than to welcome ET with open arms and a red policy book?

Personally, I hope Mr. Hellyer is right - except for the part where they vote Liberal. (I would then conclude that there is no God and no logical order to the universe.) However, I am inclined to consider Mr. Hawking’s warning seriously. We should remember, before we presume alien benevolence, what mankind’s own history has shown us. Wherever there is an instance in our history, where two races have met, the more technically advanced one, has seldom shown any signs that we are intelligent life. We have subjugated and enslaved, butchered and exiled, plundered and pillaged, or otherwise tormented any race that displayed inability to defend against the other race’s technical superiority. By what illusion now, do we believe that if they have the capability to traverse the light years, they won’t make short work of us?

 Michael Savage, host of the American radio talk show Savage Nation, is the kind of speaker who puts voice to most of your politically correct taboos, and often at the top of his radio lungs. I last heard him accusing American fathers of abandoning their children to a devolving and uncertain new America. He berated them for their political passivity and an attention span which is confined to the ballpark. He yelled into his mike, “Look what’s in the Whitehouse! Your forefathers would not have allowed this.”

 Unfortunately, I can’t just be passive and bemused, just because he is American. He may as well have been speaking of Ontario. It is a worthwhile mental exercise to assess which of Obama or McGuinty, will leave behind a relatively greater legacy of destruction.

The controversy over elementary school sex education, is the latest assault on our ravaged logical signposts. By what stretch of the imagination does the province’s educational community need this new challenge to their already questionable outcomes? Should the luxury of pursuing exotic new fields of endeavour, come before demonstrated success in teaching the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic? But wait! How silly of me to think this actually has anything to do with learning. That goal has long taken a back seat in the operations of our education system. Sex education is likely motivated by the same goals as full day kindergarten. Create a need, and occupy it with as many newly dependent, Liberal-voting, government employees. At the same time you appease certain loud-voiced segments of the population which tend to vote in blocks.

That McGuinty backed off only shows that he knows how to add. The votes of the new teachers required, added to the votes of the gay community, and subtract the votes of a newly inflamed, habitually Liberal Catholic community. Therein lies the moral of this post. We can become so easily inflamed – even if rightly so - over a societal intrusion, but allow this government to play us for fools on the far more consequential issues of taxation (HST) and energy policy (the loony Green Plan). Paint any pig green, these days, and tax the hell out of everyone to pay for it, and at worse you risk becoming as popular as Al Gore.

To paraphrase Michael Savage, Ontario fathers have abandoned their children to a future of oppressive taxation, and job-destroying energy costs. Glued to their playoff monitors, and oblivious to the world that is forming around them, they have forfeited their responsibility to the generation that they have placed on earth. The HST is now only two months away, and opportunity to stop it is nearly lost. While Quebecers march the streets angrily by the tens of thousands, in common outrage of budgeted tax increases… While British Columbians prepare  - by all indications - to exact a terrible price on their HST-wielding Liberal government…The dormant, mush-headed middle of Ontario society, remains blissfully indifferent to the wrecking crew which runs the province, and oblivious to the tax rape we will soon know.

 This was the April 6 headline in the Windsor Star, “US Investors Flocking to Ontario, Duncan Says”.

 At first glance I concluded that the great exodus of business from the US had begun. I had predicted (and still do) that Obama’s radicalism, his spending habits, his scapegoating of business, and the uncertainty these are causing, would drive sensible entrepreneurs to a next-door neighbour where the cost of doing business was relatively decreasing. And, I was not surprised to see Ontario’s minister of finance taking credit for his hapless premier and his administration.

I was wrong, however. The substance of the article was instead, about Ontario’s deficit borrowing, and its content was even more disturbing than I thought. The credit Mr. Duncan was seeking, was for a job well done in successfully marketing Ontario’s bonds, and thus keeping the province solvent – for now. The Globe’s Investor  blog clarifies that the 30 year bonds sold by Ontario, went at a price that was  87 basis points higher than the federal government’s corresponding securities. That’s around twenty-five percent over the previous market price.

Congratulations Mr. Duncan. You managed to give away the farm and threw in the cows. That the success of the sale comes as a surprise and that he seeks acclaim for it shows that this government lives in a make-believe world. La-la, look at me. Someone just gave me billions for a bunch of paper promises! Hell, if this is all there is to this, we gotta do it more often. Stop the presses! Promise Windsor, CUPE, and the teachers anything they want. And tell Miller we’ll pave his subway with gold bricks.

The billions of deficit have addled the minds of the McGuinty administration, and the projected debt accumulation has ripped them from reality. They should be sweating with fear at the debt monster they are creating. All the time popping out new spending schemes willy-nilly. I have a better chance of giving birth in eight years than these people have of slaying the deficit. In fact, they have long since begun spending the HST which they were relying on to save them.

You can be forgiven if you are part of Ontario’s hospitality industry and you have been driven to the conclusion that Dalton McGuinty is trying to exterminate you. The VP of the Ontario chapter of Canadian Restaurant and Food Services Association reports that 3000 Ontario restaurants have been driven out of business since 2003 (the year we were saddled with the Ontario Liberals). You will note that 2003 is well before McGuinty’s catch-all excuse for his economic bungling (the Great Recession). Furthermore, I’m not certain if this number includes bars, and I suspect that the full number of hospitality places is much larger.

The list of measures which have harmed this sector resembles a broadside of torpedoes, and has not abated yet. It began with the smoking decrees and their overzealous application, to the point where every patio umbrella was a potential source of trapped toxicity. The ratcheting of drinking laws in an attempt to rekindle America’s temperance days, was another blow. If you had survived so far, you were swept by the economic mess we are now trying to recover from. 

While McGuinty cannot be blamed for the economic blizzard of 2009, Ontario was perhaps the most poorly prepared province to weather the storm. Business and personal taxes remain some of the highest in North America. And the Ontario taxpayer had paid handsomely to maintain Ontario’s public servants in the style they have grown accustomed to, and voting Liberal.

Those businesses in the hospitality industry who were still standing after these blows, have now been kneecapped by an eight percent jump in the minimum wage. Who is receiving eight percent wage increases these days? Does McGuinty know how to read the papers? Is it worth asking whether McGuinty has consciously traded the votes of a business constituency which was more likely to vote Conservative, for one which votes Liberal if it can be made to come to the polls?

Sorry to say, but it is not over yet. The new energy regime assembled by McGuinty’s propeller- headed visionaries is about to reap its first reward - a ten percent increase in hydro rates, which promises to be the tip of the iceberg. And of course, the biggest wrecking ball of all has not even hit yet. The HST will pile even more cost on top of rising energy rates, further dampen the spirit of weary taxpayers, depress their enfeebled desire to go out and enjoy life, and crush what remains of tourism which is already embattled with a rising Canadian dollar.

Can we afford another year of this unfolding disaster, and can anyone possibly have the vision to repair it once "the Exterminator" is gone?

Federal Liberals and their Thinkfests should forget the past. It is not the substance of past Liberal governments which should inspire the Liberal future. The actions that characterize the Trudeau and Chretien years can inspire pride only for reasons of Liberal chauvinism.

Trudeau’s indifference to economic realities encouraged him to spend us into penury to purchase his just society. In doing so he established that Canadian voters were equally indifferent to economics. Chretien, on the other hand showed that he could lie - “the GST is a dead duck” – and generally lower the moral backbone of government, to the point where theft of taxes for party use was thought defensible. He, too, demonstrated that voters seldom paid attention. Both were elected and re-elected far beyond their merit. Hence the chauvinism and the false belief that therein lies a winning strategy.

What remains from these stumbling legacies, is not just memories, but the inspiration for more of the same. It is no coincidence that Ontario’s McGuinty is an economic dilettante and that his government has lied to us repeatedly about no new taxes. His reign is typical of what the two former PMs taught him – high taxes, social engineering, economic indifference. And, guess what. So far it has worked and the somnolent Ontario voters, who did so much to extend the reign of Chretien and Trudeau, have given us at least eight years of McGuinty.

The obvious lesson - if you can only get elected first - is don’t waken Ontario. Unfortunately for all Liberals, McGuinty’s incompetence, and the HST, are about to waken the sleeping giant.   

 When Dalton McGuinty says “our world has changed”, he means that some divine pestilence has marred his green Ontario fantasyland. The pernicious gods that rule over these things, decided for whimsical reasons that Ontario should be made to suffer economic calamity…just when Dalton was in the midst of creating a new Utopia.

 Our very own Nero is in denial so deep that he stands before Rome with a smoldering match in his hand while preaching to the victims about being careful with fire:

“I would invite all of them (Ontario municipalities) to take a… close look at what we are doing at the provincial level…”

This is Nero’s invitation to cities and towns to emulate his new budget’s public wage freeze. That they should indeed do so, goes without saying, but what has also gone without saying is the smoldering match in his hand. It was not the gods of calamity that burned Ontario down, but Mcguinty’s own incendiary incompetence. Remember, as recently as a few months ago, this man’s administration restricted cellphone use. In spite of our economic conflagration, he was still in the leadership fog he has been in since 2003, and still obsessed, in spite of all else, with his banning things to make us the perfect society.

Imagine this man preaching to municipalities about overpaying their public employees, after bankrupting Ontario with his efforts to purchase every provincial public service vote in the province. Ice that with his boundless lust for tax money (health tax, corporate taxes, looming HST) and the source of the fires that burned our Rome, are no mystery. Not to us, anyway. As for McGuinty, his municipal finger-wagging and body language, tell us that he continues to see himself as a great leader interrupted by capricious fate.

Earth to Dalton! Neither the gods nor the economic crisis, lit this fire. History was as clear as glass, on the inevitable outcome. Bob Rae, as well, overcompensated his public servants, raised taxes, annoyed the hell out of everyone with mealy-mouthed social conscience laws, and hired an army to insinuate them on us. His Rome went down in flames, as well. McGuinty should look in the mirror at the smouldering match and spare us his condescension.    

The widening divide between Israel and the Obama administration, is a calculated sacrificial jesture designed to appease the various wolves that have been circling the Jewish state since its birth. Along with Obama’s efforts to prostrate himself before many of the world’s tyrants, this is a concerted attempt to do a makeover on the ugly American. To demonstrate that the perceived bully of international relations is now the teddy bear of a wonderful new world of feel-good measures.

Both sides of this strategy will likely fail miserably. The beggar does not respect his benefactor as much as he resents him as the object of his dependency. This is no more true than it is in the relation between countries. Most middle eastern nationals may admit grudgingly that Americans are far more privileged than they are, but will nevertheless conclude that American society is inferior. When the representative of that society comes bearing gifts of apology, regret, supplication … he is loathed for his generosity and effort at condescension.

If, on top of this, the donor then indicates his willingness to lower the paternalistic defense of a prized ally, it will be like offering his daughter to the mob. The lowering of the guard is an invitation to rape the subject. The wolves circling Israel will never honestly extend an olive branch unless they can cut off the hand that reaches for it.

Let’s pretend for a minute that history had taught us none of these lessons already, and that the messianic arrival of Obama did have a clear chance of defying history’s repetitiveness. Did he know what object he hoped to achieve? Was it an unraveling of the Gordian knot of Palestine, along with its presumed calming effect on Muslim extremism? Was it a broader outcome like the hoped-for redundancy of homeland security measures? Was it a blossoming of democracy in a new middle east, suddenly stricken with reformist awe by the grand gestures of the American messiah.

Not bloody likely. If you apologize for your successes, you court failures, and Obama will be around long enough to taste a few. The appeasement of Palestine through the browbeating of Israel, will never achieve peace. If all of Israel could be relocated out of there, tomorrow, the jihadists would have no fewer reasons to hate us. Nor would we hinder  the worldwide infiltration by Muslims who bear no allegiance to the states that harbour them.

America (at least that part outside the university campuses) has traditionally defended Israel from the wolves, because they share our political system. They are an oasis in a desert of oppressive states and lifestyles. An economic star amongst a constellation of national burnouts. The example of western success that Bush hoped to create with Iraq, is already there, in Israel. If Obama’s futile gestures encourage the wolves, they will eventually need to look for dessert.