Canada underwent an election
in the 2015 fall. That first sentence contains a pun, something I, along with
newspaper editors, always enjoy. It was fall, that is, autumn time, but it was
also the fall of the Harper Conservative government, a double fall situation.
The victorious Liberals promised this was going to be a change from dark opaque
government to transparency and disclosure.
The Harper Record
First of all, was the Harper
government all that disastrous? Den
Tandt, whose writings I increasingly appreciate along with those of Andrew
Coyne as I proceed with this blog, acknowledges that it is fashionable “to
belittle and insult the outgoing PM. What good he did is forgotten amid the
rush to assign blame for the loss.” At
the same time, he strongly argues that Harper’s was a government marked by
“responsible fiscal management” that handed over balanced books and a growing
economy. Harper may have had his nasty
dictatorial and centralizing side—and I fully agree with that—but Den Tandt’s
list of five positive points for the defeated Conservative government was not
balanced by a charge of lack of fiscal transparency, something he would surely
have included in his article of November 2, 2015. Nasty personality? Yes, that
was Harper’s downfall. But fiscal opaqueness? Lack of fiscal transparency? None
of that surfaced—except of course from the victorious Liberal side. But that’s
to be expected in the Canadian political culture of nastiness, blackball and
blame; it has nothing to do with truth or fact.
The Transparency Tumble
Den Tandt
Half a year after the above
Den Tandt article, he wrote a column with the title “Liberals hiding budget plans.”
Now that does not sound like transparency to me. So, let’s see how he unpacks
this charge. There is this institution called Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO)
that apparently keeps an eye on the Federal budget. According to Den Tandt,
this office had been given data by the Finance Department “that would have
allowed for a five-year breakdown of the government’s taxing and spending
plans.” However, Finance prevented PBO from releasing this data because it
allegedly is “confidential.” The problem
here is that it was not deemed confidential under the Harper or even the
Liberal Paul Martin regime. Den Tandt lashes out:
The fair questions, then,
which only a cretin (Boer: from a Webster-- stupid, vulgar, mentally retarded)
would not think to ask: Why is this information confidential now, when it was
not before? And how can this Liberal
party, whose leader lashed himself to the mast of transparency long before he
became PM, justify a move that appears to limit the PBO’s power to publicly
dissect government projections, and thus, this independent office of
parliament’s freedom of action?
The article contains more of
the same. There is the talk of openness, but not the walk. There is the claim
of transparency, but it is not an honest claim. Den Tandt did not expect a
reasonable answer from the PM himself, for, he charges, “The PM himself
responds to fair questions with the most outrageous nonsense” (VS, April 8, 2016).
Coyne
Coyne chimed in on a similar
strong, not so pleasant, note. “The face
on TV may bespeak a commitment to idealism and honesty, transparency and
fairness, but the government behind it has already amassed a record od
cynicism, deception, secrecy and cronyism that for most governments would take
years.” He hands us a long list of
things promised on which they have reneged. I won’t go into the gory details,
but, as I noted above, nothing pretty about it. Words and phrases used in his article
include “political chicanery,” “carelessness,” “recklessness.” “the scent of
money and expediency” that surround this government. He concludes his piece
with this statement, “The Liberals are building up a deficit of trust and
ethics to match the fiscal deficit. It has been just six months since they were
elected” (VS, April 21, 2016).
Den Tandt and Coyne are two
writers for whom I have the highest regard. They don’t play politics; they are
straight shooters, the kind I go for.
All I can say is, “Phew! Wow! Was
there something substantial after all about the Conservative election claim that Trudeau was “not ready” for the PM office?”
Aboriginal Transparency
But to take it one step
further, there’s the case with Canada’s Aboriginals. Everything one reads about
them leaves the impression they wallow in poverty. That is a terrible shame,
especially since the Feds pump so much money into them year after year without
any apparent success in raising them up out of the poverty level. I have
written earlier posts to which I refer you in which I discuss how the Harper
government began insisting on disclosure on the part of the chiefs who were/are
the beneficiaries of that government largess.
The reports I have read indicate that this was a good move supported by
most Aboriginals, especially the commoners among them. During an RV trip to
Canada’s far north some years ago, we stopped in various Aboriginal communities
and spoke with some of their inhabitants. We were surprised how open they were
with respect to the corruption, especially amongst their own chiefs. I could
not believe how they freely volunteered such info to an unknown white couple.
Things were obviously bad.
But now comes the clincher: The Trudeau
government is intending to unwind that disclosure standard! Now that leaves me totally floored. Disclosure
is part of the gold standard of modern progressive nations. Joe Oliver, the former Conservative Minister of Finance, writes, "The Transparency Act was designed to protect Aboriginal people" (VS, May 3, 2016). On what basis would
one lower a demand for disclosure when, as has been revealed abundantly, that
many Aboriginal chiefs receive millions while their people live in absolute
misery. The documentation is there all over the place for people to see.
I am simply dumbfounded!
I need to change to another subject, for
I don’t want to be seen as a negative politician who loves to berate the
current government. I surely don’t. I am
basically a positive citizen who appreciates good government, but what we’re
facing now seems to be something else!
No comments:
Post a Comment