Apolitical Staples

The ADQ is a federalist party?

March is a busy month. Pundits who want an election don’t really understand what is going down this month.

The Quebec election and “re-devolution” is just the symbolic tip of the iceberg. There is a bigger issue that the fiscal-imbalance -denier pundits won’t deal with. It’s about the Ponzi game that the Natural Governing Party has played with our wallets for years. Flaherty’s budget not only has do deal with fiscal imbalance to mute the Separatists and their co-dependency with the Liberals. The Budget also has to deal with issues like this one, because most Canadians live in cities and they are crumbling and they are in big fiscal trouble … Today’s Red Star reports this:

“Toronto’s debt was $1.7 billion in 2005 but will increase to more than $2.6 billion this year and is expected to balloon beyond $3.1 billion by 2011. This year, the city will spend 12.6 per cent of its property tax revenues on debt servicing. That figure is expected to rise to 15.4 per cent by 2011. … Where is the money to fix the roads, asked Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong. “How in God’s name can we have a budget like this? The city is slowly crumbling, and there’s no plan …”

It would be a good idea if Harper and Flaherty give these issues some time to sink in with Canadians and then call for an election that will give Harper a mandate to deal with them . .that would take until the Fall at the earliest.

Didn’t Harper just announce a Billion Dollars plus for Toronto transportation infrastructure?

MrED , Yes but $1.5 billion is peanuts.

We have 3 big problems.

1. $6 billion a year flows out of Toronto a year, nothing came back until the announcement that you mentioned. The Liberals talked about the issue but did nothing. The city is growing and old infrastructure is decaying. Half of Canada’s annual 300,000 immigrants arrive here. Some downtown schools have 40 dialects in them, the cost of assimilating immigrants is enormous.

2. Our Dipper Mayor does nothing to cut the costs of his CUPE employees who should all be outsourced. The city is heading down the same path as NYC in the 70’s when unions ran New York into the ground and high real estate taxes drove Corporations out of Manhattan.

3. Given the size of our city, our transportation system is a disgrace compared to other world class cities. We have gridlock causing productivity issues and environmental problems. People like James Bow on this Blog are knowledgeable about these issues.

Again, the fiscal imbalance goes way beyond dealing with the Separatists in Quebec, but that is a start and we’ll know more by the end of March where the “re-devolution” is going.

Greg, yes the ADQ is a federalist party.

Nomdenet, for a guy who knows nothing about international diplomacy, you seem to have a good grip on the domestic shit.

Here’s the problem that I see regarding our crumbling cities. As you articulated about Miller’s NDP roots, how do the feds trust a red cent to the idiots in Toronto’s city hall. Dennis Mills stated on CFRB a couple of years ago quite passionately that they deplored the socialists in city and didn’t trust them. I believe this lack of Liberal commitment to city issues was a little more than just routine Liberal sloth.

City politicians just about everywhere seem to be about the lowest form of the vocation. It looks like provincial governments have similar problems with their municipalities too. But at least they can exert pressure under their constitutional mandate, no?

Maybe the solution is quite simply to abolish municipal governments and replace the with new cabinet positions in the province. Just thinking out loud.

You heard it here first.

Andrew Clearwood will be the next Quebec Premier.

Keep talking.

No QC polls in over a week. I guess they don’t jive with the ADQ-is-surging rubbish.

Dr Strangelove, I think “diplomacy” is something that should be left to the weak-kneed appeasers like Rumsfeld …Miles are you listening.. : >)

I’m with you, I don’t know what the solutions are yet and for that reason I think Harper needs more time before an election because he has to get a lot of information out.

Who’s Andrew Clearwood?

Ah, it’s an anglo-ization of Andre Boisclair.

I wonder what Peter Waterhole would do if he were still around. ;)