by Klaus Rohrich
June 24, 2004
Most people don’t like it when someone tells them "I told you so." and while I am not the type of person that goes around saying "I told you so", the truth of the matter is that I did tell you so. On November 17, 2003, on this very site, I wondered "how many of [Dalton McGuinty’s] 231 election promises will he break in his first year in office? I’m putting what little money I have left after paying all my taxes on a bet that he’ll break most of them within the first year..."
Either I’m an awesome psychic that has the power to foretell the future, or I really know my Liberal politicians. as the only fortune telling that I seem to have success with is predicting how badly and how often voters are lied to, I suspect it’s the latter.
I’ve often wondered how much crap Canadians will take from their politicians before they say "I’ve had all I can take and I won’t take any more." It seems to me that we are rapidly approaching this point as the national pundits as well as opinion polls are all talking about the voters’ "anger".
For some time I have thought that Canadians as a nation are a bunch of wusses who don’t have the stones to demand better from their government. Maybe that isn’t true and another way of looking at it is that Canadians are so steeped in innate goodness that they can’t imagine their government doing them wrong. and maybe there really is a Santa Claus who rewards all little boys and girls that have been good.
Whatever the reasons, there appear to be some straws that have broken the camel’s back. It wasn’t enough to have a billion dollars disappear from the Human Resources Department, or to have a 50,000 percent cost overrun on a gun registry that criminalizes rural farmers, while bullets continue to fly through the streets of our major cities. It wasn’t enough that the Business Development Bank of Canada was used as the Prime Minister’s personal piggybank to fund dubious loans for his supporters or to have federal contracts steered to relatives of Liberal cabinet ministers.
But steal a measly $100 million or break a lousy 231 campaign promises and the voters get all up in arms and want to start throwing Liberals out the window!
Dalton McWeasel’s recent budget, coupled with the federal Liberals’ so-called adscam scandal seems to be the splash of cold water in the face of the voters that’s bringing them out of their somnolence. Finally there is a reaction to the decade of arrogance, theft and mismanagement.
a very troubling development is that there is a real possibility of a Liberal minority, meaning that Canada will move so far to the left, it will make Sweden seem like a right wing dictatorship. With John and Yoko Layton dictating the terms under which the Liberals can govern, we can be sure that government will get bigger, more intrusive and that our tax burden will increase significantly.
The reason this appears to be a possibility, is that many Canadians have bought the pap fed them by the Libs and NDP about the Conservatives’ "hidden agenda", that will destroy public health care, criminalize being gay, make abortions illegal, introduce tax cuts for the rich on the backs of the poor and make fundamentalist Christianity the official state religion. This is why I tend to think Canadians are wusses rather than being steeped in goodness. How else can one explain their obsession with whether or not the Conservatives are ready to govern?
I don’t believe that Canada can withstand a further shift to the left and I certainly don’t think it could survive five more years of Paul Martin’s brand of democracy.
as you go to the polls this Monday, let me remind you that the same promises Martin is making today were also made during the last three election campaigns. If a party can’t keep its promises during three mandates, what makes anyone think they can do so during a fourth?
My advice to voters is to give Harper and the Conservatives a chance. If not, I’ll only be put into the position of having to say I told you so.