The Conservatives Are Winning Their Guerilla War against Economic Stimulus: Canada Is Not Heading out of the Recession

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and a bunch of big banks announced yesterday that the world economy is turning around. China, Italy, the UK and France are leading the way, but Canada is nowhere to be seen. The news is reported everywhere this morning on radio and in the newspapers, but I’ve only found interesting comments about why this is so on the Radio Canada Première chaine hourly news.

The Liberals and NDP point out that most of the projects which were supposed to relaunch the Canadian economy and for which $ 4 billion has already been approved, are still awaiting the go-ahead. One of the big reasons is the fact that cities and towns who are supposed to cough up two-thirds of the projects’ costs in most cases, are running on empty, Thomas Mulcair, the NDP’s finance critic, said. The Liberals’ finance critic John MacCallum is quoted as saying that the government simply “has not succeeded in getting the money out the door.”

Stephen and the boys don’t want to spend the money, is what it amounts to, I think. They included the funds in the budget they brought down under extreme duress in February, remember. They didn't make it any easier for cities to finance capital improvements, too.

Just as they have a science minister who won’t say whether he subscribes to the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm “for religious reasons” and are cutting science funds left and right, they are trying to avoid economic stimulus by dragging their feet because it doesn’t fit their ideology. If you can’t win in an open fight, you try to win by stealth. Might be good in warfare, but it shouldn’t happen in government.