CANPOL: Today is election day

[Ben Kenobi]

The GST was a good idea, and it remains a good idea, unless you think there should be no break on consumption.

It was a good idea in the days of large deficits. Of all the Liberal promises, I think ditching the GST was the best one they made.

Why do we need a tax on consumption? Alberta has eliminated their sales tax, and enjoys a competitive advantage particularly with respect to British Columbia. Businesses would rather sell things in Alberta where their own taxes are lower, and they can sell things more cheaply then they can here.

[Ben Kenobi]

That's some of the worst backpeddling and revisionism I've ever seen. Good job, Ben.

Hey I never took 12 years to axe the tax.

[Kontiki]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi

Why do we need a tax on consumption? Alberta has eliminated their sales tax, and enjoys a competitive advantage particularly with respect to British Columbia. Businesses would rather sell things in Alberta where their own taxes are lower, and they can sell things more cheaply then they can here.

You're right. The Alberta government gets over 28% of it's budget (that's almost $7.7 billion) from resource revenues. Why can't every province follow this economic model? I wonder what the reason could be.....

[Hot Mustard]

Originally posted by Kontiki


You're right. The Alberta government gets over 28% of it's budget (that's almost $7.7 billion) from resource revenues. Why can't every province follow this economic model? I wonder what the reason could be.....

[Kontiki]

Forgot to mention that's $2 billion less than last year.

[Flubber]

Economic success tends to allow greater economic success.

Alberta enjoys a huge advantage with its resource revenues so the province can afford lower taxes even with equivalent services. This leads to more businesses and individuals wanting to be here which means more revenue etc etc.

The problem for most provinces is that they NEED that revenue brought by the taxes. Dropping taxes would push them into untenable deficets

[Flubber]

All that said, the feds have had a sufficient surplus for a number of years that they can begin to look at dropping taxation levels. Dropping the GST a point is a decent start.

[notyoueither]

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1138056611738&call_pageid=968332188774&col=968350116467

Big promise, faint purpose
Canada's 21st prime minister couldn't demonstrate why he wanted the job he'd pursued for so long

Vulnerable to handlers and hyperbole, he flitted from one `priority' to the next, writes Susan Delacourt
Jan. 24, 2006. 12:01 AM
SUSAN DELACOURT
OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF


It's over.

Paul Martin's epic-length journey to lead Canada is now at an end. He had roughly a month in office for every year he toiled in the Liberal trenches toward that goal.

As one of his closest advisers, Richard Mahoney, predicted a few years ago, they found out that the journey was more fun than the prize. Martin is the 14th of Canada's 21 prime ministers to lead his party into defeat in a general election.

He was a successful businessman, running Canada Steamship Lines, and had a perfect pedigree as the son of a veteran Liberal cabinet minister, Paul Martin Sr. Then he sought the Liberal leadership twice, losing in 1990, but winning in 2003 after presiding over an incredible, five-year palace coup from inside the party. Once upon a time, this formidable former finance minister seemed invincible.

The news stories this week will focus on how prime-minister-elect Stephen Harper defeated him. What is more interesting, and significant, is the story of how Martin defeated himself.

Where did it all go wrong? Everyone knows his or her own moment. For this reporter, writing about him and his quest for the better part of two decades now, the retrospective keeps circling back to a fall day in 2002, when Martin was beginning the open part of his campaign to replace Jean Chrétien.

He had left the cabinet a few months earlier in June 2002 — a highly explosive departure — and then spent the next few months in what can only be regarded as political utopia. He was the heir apparent. He had no onerous responsibilities, save for quietly touring the country in between long bouts of golf and relaxation at his farm. Wherever he went, Martin was hailed as the most popular politician in Canada.

His forced-hand techniques had worked: Chrétien had announced in late August he would leave, albeit on an extended departure schedule of 18 months. But Martin had the world at his feet. He could now openly campaign for a job that was pretty well already locked.

In mid-October, he summoned the national media to Osgoode Hall, to announce his much-awaited plans to slay what he called "the democratic deficit." This was his Number One priority. He had attracted many MPs' support with promises to make their jobs more meaningful; he had told Canadian voters he would not be any iron-fisted dictator or centralizing bureaucrat reducing cabinet ministers to mere focus-group participants. He would be everything Chrétien was not.

And then, with attendant fanfare, the plan was unveiled at Osgoode. It turned out to be a damp squib of a thing, a six-point schedule to fuss with the process of Commons procedure, votes and committees. The announcement had a few snappy lines — a vow not to link power to "who you know in the PMO" but no grand vision or creativity. It was a revolution designed by a committee, bleached of colour and substance by a second-guessing squad.

It would prove to be the template for Martin's style of government: promise big, filter it through a vast squad of handlers, deliver something incomprehensible, filled with large talk and process. It didn't look like bold new leadership.

The "Number One priority" of democratic reform eventually disappeared, swallowed up and overtaken by other priorities. Every initiative met the same fate — spoken large, focused on process and quickly discarded when the next priority came along.

Why had Martin come to office? It depended on which media cycle he was in. He was mad as hell about the sponsorship program; he was obsessed with waiting times for health care. He'd spent 20 years trying to become prime minister and during the 2004 election, it turned out that his overriding mission in political life was to stop Stephen Harper, a man who had become the leader of the united Conservative movement only a couple of months earlier.

Sooner or later, it became clear to all except those around him that he hadn't come to office for any great purpose of governance. He was there for another reason: He felt he owed it to the people who supported him all these years. There was nothing ignoble in this in itself, but because these backers lacked purpose, too, it rendered him a blank slate, vulnerable to those same people to whom he felt he owed his position.

His ambivalence about the nasty side of politics also harmed him — while his team vanquished the Chrétien-led wing of the party, they were reluctant to obliterate them. The bitter and disgruntled weren't strong enough to ward off the takeover, but they were nasty enough to start helping Martin's enemies from the outside.

The IOUs between Martin and his loyalists had little to do with money and everything to do with single-purpose dedication and, more importantly, celebrity for its own sake. Chrétien and his people liked winning. Martin and his people liked fame. They picked their friends and associates that way, and would discard them, or pick them up again, accordingly.

They weren't wrong to think that a prime minister could have no purpose in governance: they had learned from Chrétien's example. But because his backers had no purpose but him, and vice versa, the vacuum was mutual. The media filled that vacuum. The Prime Minister of Canada was a reaction to the day's news or the polls. Everything was hyperbole. Martin would utter anything he was told to say by the huge, sprawling team around him, so it would become the news.

So the 2004 election became "the most important election" in Canada's history. Martin would deliver "the politics of achievement." He would "make history." He was, for one unfortunate week or two, "a wire brush" who would scrub the government clean of the taint of corruption.

Last fall, when he finally announced he was knuckling down to the act of leading the country and focusing himself, it turned out that the surge of China and India onto the world stage was his overriding mission as prime minister. The mind reeled. What next?

Education was the most important thing one day, then it was the environment, then yelling at the United States was job No. 1. In this last campaign, he suddenly revealed that fighting separatism was part of his genetic code and that he had a previously undisclosed passion for opening up the Constitution.

It was hard not to get cynical watching this, or, at least, it was hard not to believe that cynics were running the show. What tempered this feeling was the underlying sense that Martin was a decent man, who could have been a pretty good prime minister if he could have found his own core and communicated that to the world.

One day, during that same idyllic summer of 2002, it seemed he came close. It was in a small meeting hall in Strathroy, Ont., and an audience member asked him a direct question: "What is your vision of Canada?"

He stammered and stumbled, then blurted out an answer. Canada, he said, was a nation forged out of collaboration with others. It didn't go to war for its own reasons; Canadian soldiers had died in common cause for other nations. Canada didn't push its will or vision down others' throats; it was quiet, it listened and then knew what to do.

Martin, on his best days, led in this image: he collaborated, listened, and knew what to do. But for his crack team of advisers, this wasn't sexy enough. He had to be a celebrity. This celebrity-worship was vividly displayed when he won the leadership in November 2003, and the whole thing was all about putting rock star Bono on stage and finding the right music and triumphalist rhetoric to stir Liberal hearts.

Move closer to home and to the immediate past to see the damage of the Martin culture. Two ministers stood out as stalwarts in the Martin constellation: Finance Minister Ralph Goodale and Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan. They were impervious, indestructible, competent and well-liked. In the haste that has come to typify the Martin regime, they were both compromised needlessly in the past couple of months.

Goodale rushed in the pre-election days to put out an announcement on changes to the tax regime on income trusts. The details aren't important, here. What is significant is that he got caught in a hysterical dash to announce things, anything, before the election. In the flurry around putting out a flood of spending announcements, Goodale became the target of allegations that the news had been leaked early to the markets. The RCMP's investigation into those leaks is coming to be seen as the bullet that finished off the Liberals when it was announced on Dec. 28.

McLellan, a constitutional professor, pronounced herself surprised when Martin announced during the TV debates that he was abolishing Ottawa's power to opt out of the Charter of Rights with the so-called "notwithstanding clause."

It was a barely kept secret, too, that McLellan was one of the cabinet ministers who had strenuously opposed the pre-election spending spree. But she and other ministers were ignored. The deputy prime minister was a spectator to the machinations and manoeuvres of the Martin team. So much for making the jobs of ministers and MPs more meaningful. The democratic deficit was not slain.

It has become a rule in recent decades that prime ministers are never remembered for their reputation when they enter the job. Pierre Trudeau wanted to be all about ideas and reason, but he's remembered with emotion. Brian Mulroney wanted to be liked and had few ideas, but his policies live on and his popularity is still in the tank. Chrétien came to office as the little guy from Shawinigan, but ended his career seen as a dictator.

Martin was seen as competent and steady. The legacy and the experience indicate otherwise.

He will be fine. He has a famed ability to bounce back from defeat and he will no doubt throw himself into something internationally oriented in the not-too-distant future.

Many of his supporters will not be so fine. They had a single purpose: to make him into a success. What's happened in the last few days, the last year, is defeat. It is the polar opposite of the Martin team's single-minded goal. It cohabits with that other bane of politics: regret. So much of this seems like an opportunity missed. And more importantly, expectations dashed.

[notyoueither]

Heads are exploding.
Audio Link

[Fake Boris]

I mean c'mon. Who sincerely ever expected Martin to be competent?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Oncle Boris
I mean c'mon. Who sincerely ever expected Martin to be competent?

Actually I did, 6-8 years ago. As Finance Minister Martin exuded competence and confidence. Budgets seemed reasonable and a much better reflection of reality than the Mulroney years.

But as a leader, my assessment of Martin is that he is an abomination. That article quoted by NYE captured my feelings pretty well. I was left with the feeling that Martin STOOD for nothing except getting elected.


With Harper, the proof will come soon but as it stands I do believe he stands for things and I respect that even when I disagree with him. My hope and belief is that one of the things Harper will always stand for most strongly is democracy . .. So once he gets done having his free vote on gay marriage (and loses) he can then rail against it to appease his base before proceeding to drop the issue.

[Fake Boris]

OK, so I knew then and you didn't

[Ben Kenobi]

You're right. The Alberta government gets over 28% of it's budget (that's almost $7.7 billion) from resource revenues. Why can't every province follow this economic model? I wonder what the reason could be.....

As opposed to British Columbia?

Interesting, the numbers I get are 30 billion in total revenue and about 2 billion of that in resource revenue. We have lots of resources, offshore oil and the like, the problem is that Alberta makes better use of them then we do.

I don't see why BC can't eliminate their debt and their sales tax.

[Ben Kenobi]

Alberta enjoys a huge advantage with its resource revenues so the province can afford lower taxes even with equivalent services. This leads to more businesses and individuals wanting to be here which means more revenue etc etc.

The problem for most provinces is that they NEED that revenue brought by the taxes. Dropping taxes would push them into untenable deficets

And this is the cycle that the BC government needs to get on. We need to pay off our debt and eliminate sales tax, in order to attract businesses back to BC.

Someone could say that we can't do what Alberta has done, but then I'd rather elect folks with a can-do attitude.

[Jon Miller]

I don't like sales tax either. Too regressive for me (in general).

Jon Miller