Liberals Paul Martin, r, and Jean Chretien, l.: Lucky bums, 1993-2006Story here.
ht: National Newswatch
Paul Martin, as Finance Minister under Liberal PM Jean Chretien, did, indeed, happen to preside over a period during which the federal deficit disappeared and turned into a continuing, growing surplus.
But he's delusional if he believes that he himself made it happen, like some kind of hero.
Why? The world was booming. Pretty much everyone else eliminated their deficits too, at least for a while. This made it really easy to grow revenues, as the economy boomed, also helped along by low interest rates and a low dollar, which pretty much had nothing to do with Martin or his government at all. Lucky bums!
Most important cheat of all: They broke their big election promise to "scrap, kill, abolish" the hated GST. That guaranteed massive piles of billions of dollars would pour into the federal coffers and save their cheating, lying asses.
He slashed transfers to the provinces for such things as health care and education. How mean-spirited, eh?
He nearly starved our military, RCMP force, national security, etc... to death.
Never will I forget the time his boss, the mercilessly selfish bully, Chretien, ripped a hundred million dollars from the military's budget to buy two brand new jets for his own use as PM, even though he already had access to a perfectly good jet, plus there was the one mothballed that he could use but didn't- former PM Mulroney's "Cadillac Plane", an Airbus. How do you like that? Disgusting!
He kept taxes too high for too long, and only began to move to reduce them when it appeared that if he didn't, then the conservative opponent (now the Conservative government) would pick up support at the Liberals' expense.
Of course, with all the luck he was still having with the booming worldwide and domestic economy, with the booming surpluses due to high taxes, he could afford to cut taxes a little bit for optics.
Now he's claiming that the Conservative government has screwed up all his supposed "hard work"? Oh, come on! Listen, Paulie, the whole frickin' world is facing a recession, or worse, and there's nothing either the current government or you or anyone else could do now to change that.
However, Paulie, there IS something that can be done to avoid a deficit, and it does NOT involve raising taxes. You know, there's billions and billions of dollars of unnecessary spending that have been identified since the Nineties by the Reform Party, and these wasted dollars are still being wasted. So, you know, it will finally be possible politically to look at these wasteful things and slash them. Don't ask me what they are; you know full well what they are, as I'm sure you read, what was it called, the "Waste Report"? (I remember looking at the list of wasteful stuff way back in the Nineties when I attended university and where there was internet access). I believe at the time it was estimated that thirteen billion dollars could be saved without hurting anyone (except whining entitlists and loyal Liberal patronage appointees doing next to nothing of value, of course). Ah, and we still have the Long Gun Registry, which has proven utterly worthless and far too expensive, already having hosed the taxpayers for billions.
Not impressed with your fearmongering and conceit, Paulie. Now go back to bashing Mr. Chretien. He's responsible for your downfall, after all, as well as the downfall and future in the wilderness of the Liberal Party... if it even survives, a question totally up in the air now, as it would appear that they're flat broke, deeply in the red and probably won't recover...
Oh, well, politics sucks, doesn't it, Paulie?
No pity, though. The Liberals brought it all upon themselves, letting their great luck go to their heads, deluding themselves that it was their "hard work" (bwahahaha) that did it. Sheesh, they fell back-asswards into luck and money... and became so corrupt that they couldn't hide it anymore...
The rest is history. Like, perhaps, the Liberal Party itself. And who in their right mind would want to lead it now? With a virtually nil chance of being Prime Minister in the next election, or even the one after that, etc., if ever.
Canada can't afford to move backwards with Liberals; the days of boom are probably over for good, and they would only make things worse by returning to Trudeaupian socialism to win votes from the unemployed and the refuse-to-works.
We must stay smart, stay the course, do what we can to ride out a recession if it happens, though it's not really being predicted; we can expect more or less zero growth for the next year or so, with growth resuming in 2010...
And thank goodness Canadians rejected the Liberals' Tax On Everything! That could have really hurt!
