Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Liberals Listening?

Could it be the federal Liberals are listening to me?

A couple of months ago, I had an op-ed in the Toronto Star advising the Liberals on how they could win the next election.

One of my suggestions being, the Liberals should become the champions of "fiscal conservatism".

Well lo and behold, former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley recently gave a speech in which he suggested the Liberals need to start talking about cutting taxes and government spending.

Saying Canada has lost its "fiscal anchor", Manley stated "We are collecting too much tax, and it is time to benchmark spending as a percentage of GDP."

Thank you John Manley.

Now if I can only get the Conservatives to start listening to me.

H/T Kirk

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Now if I can only get the Conservatives to start listening to me."

Amen, brother. Amen. Seriously, it amazes me how un-conservative the Conservatives have become. And it gets worse every day.

I was listening to Diane Francis, the Editor of the Financial Post, this morning and she was talking about how corporations in this country cannot compete because Canada has one of the (if not THE) highest corporate taxation rate amongst industrialized nations.

If the Conservatives actually listened to anybody, they'd realize that they CAN be fiscally conservative and make it work. With all the brouhaha over Canadian companies being taken over, you'd think it would be an easy sell to Canadians to say that we need to lower the corporate tax rate to help our corporations in the international market, while at the same time cut personal taxation to spur spending growth.

Honestly... how can Canadian corporations run competitively if our taxation rate is capping their knees? And how can our internal economy get better if Canadians don't have as much money to spend?

Here's hoping we have an actual fiscally conservative option in the next election.

Brian said...

Don't get too excited, there is no hope in Hades that Stephane Dion listens to him. More likely Dion will want to abandon GDP altogether and use some airy-fairy environmental measurement like the British Conservatives are talking about.

NB taxpayer said...

He did address spending as a percentage of the GDP. But we all know what that means when it comes to Liberals. Keynesian economics!

Sitting on large surpluses while offering modest tax cuts and wasting money on useless government programs. If this is fiscal conservatism, I'll take the alternative.

Furthermore, he also suggests that the government "should encourage the development of big global companies because they are able to fill the role of "national champions". National champions? Sounds like Walter L Gordon economic nationalism to me, not to mention, picking winners and losers through targeted corporate tax credits is not a libertarian idea at all. And it's not a tax cut, it's spending!

Anonymous said...

That's right, remember how the Liberals predicted that the 1% cut in the GST was going to be the end of civilization as we know it.

Unknown said...

You know it's bad when John Manley is more into tax cuts than Stephen Harper.

On the bright side, it can only be a matter of time until it becomes so blatantly obvious that we can (easily!) cut taxes that the CPC will stumble onto the opportunity and act like it was a hard decision, but a principled one.

Anonymous said...

if the Liberals have to steal ideas from somewhere it may as well be Gerry. They don't exactly corner the market on ideas of their own don't'ya know.

That's unfair! You don't know what you speak about!

Iain G. Foulds said...

... It's true. It was a strange strategy of Mr. Dion to regain power by curiously committing his party to competing in the crowded left lane- abandoning the entire center/right ground to our faded fiscal champion.
... However, it is too late to take seriously any sudden economic conversions by Mr. Dion. It is better that he go down in left field- fantasies intact- allowing another to refocus the party in a mature, responsible economic direction.

Anonymous said...

"Now if I can only get the Conservatives to start listening to me."

Conservatives?
What conservatives??
Do we have any conservatives in Canada???

Nope, haven't seen any of those in awhile!

On the other hand, Mr. MacKay was out in full force trying to try and buy Canadian voters with their own money in NS today.

Monkey Loves to Fight said...

I certainly agree with much of what he said and it is good to see at least some Liberals still think this way. I sometimes long for the Liberals of the mid 90s when they were more for small government and at least they didn't have all the radical right wingers the Reform Party had.

As for the Conservatives, as I have said before, they can only be conservative if one either party will back them up. Without a majority, they cannot do anything without the support of at least one other party.