Election 2015

“Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.”

  - George Santayana

“The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.”

  - Edith Sitwell

Well the federal election is only a week away, so I guess it is a good time to revive the blog with my thoughts on the matter.  Most of you have probably already made up your mind who you are going to vote for, so this is not an attempt to sway you.  This is just my take on matters that are important to me.

One of things that I have noted is that all of the parties are getting much better at buying your votes with your own tax money.  Handouts are coming so thick and fast that you have a hard time keeping up with them.  Even other parties are obviously having a hard time since they seem to forget what other parties are offering; only what they are dropping. The governing party seems to be particularly good at the giveaway game.

Two of the party have promised to honour the god of zero deficits.  This may be understandable by the governing party because they have probably got a better handle on the real state of the economy.  But it seems to me that an opposition party making this promise seems a bit premature.  The third party has, wisely in my opinion, said it is prepared to run deficits in order to stimulate what can only be described as a moribund economy.

The problem I have with the zero deficit declaration is how all of the promised tax cuts and giveaways are going to be accounted for.  We know that the current budget surplus was achieved by some pretty draconian cuts in government programs, among them the defence budget.  As an ex-military person, that bothers me at a time when we need to re-equip the Canadian Forces.  Further efforts to maintain zero deficit budgets plus the cost of promised new giveaways can only exacerbate this situation.  The Defence budget is, after all, by far the largest discretionary program in the entire government.  The recent announcement that the Navy will only get 11 new surface combatants instead of the 15 to 18 that are really needed tells me that the current government wants to reduce the Navy to a mere token.  And that is only the capital part of the budget.  The operations and maintenance side, the part that allows ships to sail, aircraft to fly and all to be maintained, has often suffered for the past several years.  I cannot see this situation improving if a new government sticks to the zero deficit idea. 

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
 

 - Abraham Lincoln

Have you got sick of the attack adds yet.  I did weeks ago, even before the writ was dropped.  All of the parties use these to one extent or another, and they have got to the point of being annoying.  It would be such a breath of fresh air to see some party in an election run nothing but a positive adds campaign.  If any party ever did that, I would be very tempted to vote for that party no matter what its platform might be.

“Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.”
 

  - Dalton Camp

“Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”
  - John Kenneth Galbraith

Oh, and one more thing:

“Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.”

  - Harry S Truman

It seems to me that the current government would like to be an efficient government.