Stagg Editorial- March 1995

MOVE THE RECESSION TO OTTAWA

The federal budget is to be unveiled in classic fashion in February. Finance Minister Paul Martin is showing disturbing signs of the abject cowardice of all his recent predecessors. Unfortunately this has all the signs of being a typical gutless Liberal plan where the comfortable company town of Ottawa will escape the serious fiscal bludgeoning that it and its obscenely overstaffed public service so desperately deserve.

When the Liberals spend three days in a Toronto caucus letting party buffoon John Nunziata preach about the Liberal government's dedication to preserving high spending, it becomes obvious that the Canadians who invented irresponsible deficit spending will not let common sense get in the way of a cynical re-election plan full of trivial program cuts and dedication to preserving a bloated payroll.

The whole of Canada outside the government towns has foundered in a decade -long recession while the civil service sector recoils against the most minor suppression of their grab for more of our tax dollars for their pay cheques.Ordinary,weary taxpayers are ready to see a full fifty per cent reduction in the government payrolls and in services. In any contest between lower tax burdens and reduced services the private citizen will take lower taxes in an instant. This means inflicting hard times on the public payroll and that is a state of affairs that the vast majority of Canadians would enjoy to the utmost.

Canadians are ready for the government to declare a war-like state of financial emergency where vastly reduced services and public salaries will be the necessary state of affairs for a country to save itself from a cannibalistic public debt.

Ottawa is the company town of the federal government and its workers of all levels have to learn the hard way that the tax-paying citizen/shareholders of this nation are cutting back on the recession -proof careers of the public service in a drastic and final way. St. John's is Newfoundland's own company town and Premier Wells could wisely absorb the same lesson and reduce the number of comfortable paws getting unproductive hands on the dwindling supply of cash in the Exchequer account.

Paul Martin and Jean Chretien and regional ministers like Brian Tobin must sniff the wind and learn that gutless pandering to whiners on their own payrolls will lead to a certain devastating repudiation at the election polls next time when outraged and tattered taxpayers teach the reactionary Liberals the same hard lesson arrogant ,vacuous Kim Campbell and her Tories received in 1993.

Cut taxes and cut the payroll or face electoral Armageddon .

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