Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
No government ever manages to cut as much spending as they say they will. The nature of the beast is that people defend their vested interests bitterly. If they propose a flat budget before they're in office, it'll grow by inflation just on inflation indexed union contracts and escalation of construction prices.
I'm not in favour of stopping government spending, as underinvestment in the 1990s really hurt the province (blowing up hospitals, no new LRT, etc) My biggest political problem with the current government is they appear to have no direction, and seem untrustworthy. The PCs have been in power long enough, and the WR party seems like the best alternative.
I'll give you one example of "smart spending of only the money we need." I mentioned before that the WR party's platform had a line item for a fully funded mental health initiative. If that is thoughtfully designed, it could help a lot of people, and reduce the burden of homelessness on our social system, saving the government in the long run. While I'm not naive enough to imagine that will solve the problem, it's a start. It's also better than Stelmach declaring he'll end homelessnes. Really Ed? How are you planning to do that?
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We probably don't even disagree on much here. Its just that I'm not sold on the Wildrose as some great panacea to fiscal restraint and conservatism. I think that they got lucky in terms of timing and the recession and its easy to take shots at the current government at this point. No government can entirely stop a recession from having any effect, so no matter what they do you either (a) promise you would've done more and avoided the pain entirely or (b) say the government did too much and that this has prolonged the pain.
Its a good political strategy, but isn't enough for me to give them a vote.