I believe in transparency–but only when I’m right.
That seems to be the mantra for Canada’s prime minister, who’s taken to calling out his new parliamentary budget officer for daring to voice an economic prediction that was worse than what Harper’s finance minister, Jim Flaherty, offered to both parliament and the public. The budget officer, Kevin Page, who was appointed by Canada’s current government as a direct response to the financial mismanagement during the previous 13 years of liberal rule, warned that without either increased taxes or decreased spending, Canada would be looking at a significant debt that would survive for at least a decade. Harper more or less called the prediction, and the resulting idea, dumb–saying escentially that he wouldn’t be doing either.
Now, granted I’m neither an economist nor a politician, but it doesn’t exactly inspire a whole lot of confidence in me as a voter when a department, created by the currently in power government, gets pretty much lambasted by the said government over doing its job. And, I’ll add, doing its job with less than the apparently necessary resources required with which to do it–also courtesy the current government. Did Page piss off the prime minister at some point previously and now is well within drop kicking range? Or is Stephen Harper really that much of an idiot? Personally, I could really care less which one of them is right–unemployment’s well above 8% and not showing signs of decreasing, prices of everything from electricity to groceries are on the rise, and in an economy that will see the average person not looking for a job in retail or fast food having to wait an average of 15 months, the best unemployment insurance arangement I’ve seen only sees you through for 9. But if you want to win votes in a situation where you desperately need to win votes, slagging on a department you created for doing what you created it to do doesn’t seem like the smartest move ever pulled out of the political playbook. Unless of course your objective is to not run the country beyond October of this year–Canadians will, I’m sure, love you for that, too.
