Today is Budget Day

Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty is pumped. Today is budget day, and Flaherty (suprisingly still a politician after his participation in the murderously incompetent and corrupt Ontario government of Mike Harris) believes that:

"We're going to resolve once and for all this continuing problem we've had, this bickering between governments in Canada about fiscal imbalance, ... We're going to restore fiscal balance on a principled long-term predictable basis in Canada."

Given the fact that Flaherty is both a moron and a liar, this is probably not even remotely true. My guess is that Flaherty will simply give this money to the provinces with no strings attached, thus crippling the federal government's future ability to fund national programs and giving neo-liberal provincial governments the freedom to give the money back to voters in tax-cuts, or to pay down their deficits, or any other version of the brainless sort of non-policy that is part of the neo-liberal campaign to drag Canadians' material standard of living down to that of the United States.

(By "Canadians" I mean, of couse, the vast majority of the population, who work for a living or who now subsist on our patchwork of social programs designed to keep the reserve army of the unemployed from rebelling. By "United States," I refer to the conditions of the vast majority of Americans who work long hours for low pay, who have shitty, or no health insurance, or who live in abject poverty. I acknowledge that their are Canadians who, under Harper, will see their living standards rise substantially, approaching those of the tiny minority of Americans who benefit so handsomely from wringing-out the lion's share of the wealth produced by their own economy by hook or by crook.)

What else will Flaherty be doing?

"The finance minister is also expected to introduce tax cuts and credits totalling about $3 billion that would give each taxpayer about $200 a year."

This is part of an already well-established process of destroying the surplus and the federal government's ability to fund programs that benefit the majority and that do so far more efficiently that does the private sector.

Flaherty says that it's up to the Opposition if they want to defeat this budget and force an election. The Conservatives are ready for an election, though it's not his sense that the public wants one. Indeed, as a minority government, Harper has assidiously been tossing money around (again, with no focus or direction, though it might come under nice-sounding titles making one think that it's going somewhere) and being "reasonable." Paul ("I raped Haiti") Martin jr. did the same thing when he was in a minority situation. Like Paul Martin, Stephen Harper is merely biding his time, hoping for a majority that will give him five years to abandon even the pretence of using the majority's money for the majority's benefit.