Some more un-liberal, not-socialist thoughts have already leaked out this week from the mainstream media in Canada, and it’s only Tuesday. We may have an epidemic on our hands. Somebody should contact the appropriate authorities. (Liberals speed-dialing CRTC and COTLER!!! at this very moment…)
It’s no wonder liberal-left Canada was so anxious to get that hideously anti-conservative state-run media back on the air and ramp-up the fullest and most glorious socialist pap outside of Cuba. The hatred and abject intolerance that some left-wing Canadians feel for conservative Canadians and everything that they stand for is now fully outed, after a few stressful (for them) weeks of less than adequate anti-conservatism from the state. And I imagine the CBC division of the liberal-left will service them extra ’specially well when they’re back in full socialist mode again over the next week or two. I expect a socialist propaganda media orgy of sorts. I mean outside of the usual one that we have during each election.
But anyway, on the bright and positive side, this time the leakage came from the increasingly liberal National Post newspaper (owned by liberal Canwest/Global). Columnist Lorne Gunter said intelligent (un-liberal, not-socialist, pro-Canadian) things this week in his National Post column. Yesterday he wrote “True believers in the welfare-state cult”, and it had these good paragraphs:
[…] Ontario, like every other government in the country—Alberta’s included—is hopelessly convinced that the only obstacle to nirvana is a lack of public spending on social programs. If only there were more tax dollars to spend, every hip patient would get replacement surgery tomorrow, every public school student would graduate with honours and every poor family would be livin’ large.
This faith in the link between social progress and public expenditures explains recent hints by Ottawa, Ontario and some other provinces that Alberta might have to be made to “share” a greater portion of its oil wealth.
If the feds and provinces could be disabused of their belief that just a little more spending will produce heaven on earth, they wouldn’t covet the new pot of gold that sits at the end of a rainbow in Calgary.
This devotion to expensive, public solutions to everything borders on the millenarian.
By a conservative estimate, we have spent nearly $4-trillion dollars on social programs in this country over the past 40 years. If the problems that spending was meant to solve still exist—and indeed, some have gotten no better or even worsened—the conclusion of a rational person might be that big, expensive social programs aren’t the answer.
They’ve been tried and failed. Move on.
But too many Canadians and their politicians have become True Believers in the welfare state cult. If the $4-trillion we’ve already spent hasn’t produced the expected results, that just means we need to keep spending. Lay out even more and the Promised Land will materialize there, just over the horizon of the next budget or the next first ministers’ conference or intergovernmental transfer agreement.
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