Maybe liberal*Vision is just putting on their thinking caps this morning and trying to devise a new reality show based on one of those popular American shows, only it’s based not on reality but BS. Maybe that’s their game.
But when you read this story on CTV.ca, you’ll wonder what Fantasy Island you’ve landed on.
Ottawa plans cuts to green programs: documents
Updated Thu. Apr. 13 2006 9:21 AM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
The new Conservative government will be making deep spending cuts to programs designed to fight global warming in order to fund tax cuts, according to cabinet documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.
The documents show that the government will slash spending on Environment Canada programs designed to fight global warming by 80 per cent, as well as cuts of 40 per cent to budgets devoted to climate change.
First of all, they couch it as a bad news story, which it decidedly is not if you’re a conservative, thereby revealing what they are, which is decidedly rather liberal. Then they casually mention not once but twice within the opening two paragraphs that those funds WERE going to “fight global warming”—the validity of “fighting” global warming being a sketchy goal at best, but which the CTV reporters have obviously given up questioning and simply bow to the liberal-left line and assume to be a bonafide scientifically certainty, but which in real life, learned scientists debate all day long. (The trick here is to not interview any learned scientists—just left-wing enviro-nuts. Then you’ll get all the answers you need.)
Then after a commercial break, they finally get around to revealing what the Conservatives are going to do instead, which is a most practical way to get people out of their cars and into mass transit: cut taxes on transit passes and let folks keep more of their money.
The text reveals that the Tory campaign promise of tax breaks for transit passes would amount to a cost of $2 billion over the span of five years.
But then they rush to deflate any positive out of that initiative by adding this:
However, the government has no evidence the incentives will increase ridership.
Oh darn the luck. They buy the left-wing’s “fighting global warming with taxpayer cash” canard, but don’t buy this. The media game show is wacky!
They further back up what is now looking like a big media scientific thesis by adding notes from a memo prepared for Environment Minister (that’s half the problem) Rona Ambrose, which was no doubt written by one of the former government’s liberal-left conservative-haters and enviro-nuts:
“A wide range of data suggests that people are not very responsive to changes in transit fares,” said a memo prepared for Environment Minister Rona Ambrose last week by officials in the office of her deputy minister. “. . . while the ridership impacts of the tax incentives are not known with precision, analysis suggests they will be low.”
The six-page memo outlines five transit tax-incentive options, making it clear that the government prefers the pass holder tax break.
But its benefits to transit users may be invalidated, the memo states, because “it could be quite easy for the transit authorities to raise their fares to absorb the benefit of the tax credit.”
Yeah. State-run transit authorities are going to raise prices after the tax cuts. Perhaps the game show producers and writers have taken to smoking crack at this point.
And then the admission, deep within the story, that dirty, filthy Liberal-left hands are all over this:
The documents, which were obtained by the opposition Liberals, bolster previous claims that large-scale cuts to climate-change programs are planned.
And then the bogeyman accusation—with hints of past episodes of that stupid soap opera “Conservative Hidden Agenda” which was laughed out of the media long ago by sensible people:
According to the documents, the programs are being eliminated to help fund tax cuts, including the GST reduction, which was a key plank in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s election campaign.
And alas, the inevitable quote from the ubiquitous left-wing eviro-nuts:
The cuts drew fire from environmentalists such as John Bennett, a spokesman for the Sierra Club of Canada, accused the Tories of having a “slash and burn campaign.”
The details from the leak were published one day after Climate Action Network Canada made public its accusations the government plans to cut funding to climate change programs.
David Coon, policy director of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, encouraged the government to make the fight against climate change a priority.
“Canadians need a vision of hope in the face of the frightening consequences of rapid climate change,” Coon said at the press conference on Wednesday. “For that hope they look to their government, and their expectations are high.”
Note that the intrepid reporters didn’t find the time to interview even one of the 60 climate scientists who as I pointed out in this blog entry wrote to Harper last week warning him that Kyoto is bunk in an article called “Kyoto is pointless, say 60 leading scientists”.
They did find the time to dig up that scary looking picture of the Earth which appears to be positively on fire! It’s on fire I tells ya!
But that’s the perfect ending to the show. It’s a reality show based on total unmitigated BS.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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