26 September 2006

Spend less when we have more

AAAaargh!!!! I would personally like to throttle the necks of every single person who voted for Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party of Jerks.

Why, why, why would you cut one billion dollars in government spending when you had a freakin thirteen billion dollar surplus!! It just doesn’t make sense. You make cuts when you don’t have enough money, not when you have too much! —I! Hate! Stephen! Harper!

Of course all of the cuts go to lefty-loosey-hippy things like museums, First Nations, conservation and adult literacy. I don’t know about you, but I think illiteracy costs our society a lot more than the 6.7 million that was being spent on that programme. And tourism, whose advertising funding is being cut, actually generates billions of dollars for our economy. Why would you cut funding to something that is making you money? It makes no sense! Conservatives make no sense!

Although all of the cuts are upsetting, none more so that cuts eliminating the Court Challenges Programme which assisted advocacy groups in funding court cases which they would be otherwise unable to fund; notably, but not limited to, the case which brought equal marriage before the Supreme Court. Also cut is the Law Commission of Canada. How convenient for the Conservatives that they would cut funding to two agencies which fought for the rights of the little people against bad government and big business.

This is so clearly and transparently an attention-getting scheme for the idiot hicks in 905 and Alberta that everyone involved should be flogged with copies of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People. “Hey- lets all be knob-wads and cut the programmes that the bad-ol Liberals created because we’re Conservatives and the Liberals suck.” Could you be more infantile?

Hey Stephen– If you want to appeal to a broad range of voters and win a majority in the impending election, you should know that cuts to social programmes don’t exactly appeal to anyone except the people who would have already voted for you anyway.

–I find Mr Harper’s offensive actions an attack on humanitarian values and an attempt to make us more like George W’s lapdogs. I can’t wait for the day when I can say “Good-bye to bad rubbish!” Pwpth!! I spit on you, Stephen Harper!

(Toronto Star article here)

5 comments:

Miss Ash said...

I can picture you with your hands in the air shouting

"It makes no sense! Conservatives make no sense!"

Tokyo Tintin said...

I was talking to one of my friends about it last night and I did that very thing, all flustered, waving my hands in the air.

It's true though; it makes no sense!

Anonymous said...

nicely said Dano.

Tokyo Tintin said...

I figured out why these cuts make no sense:

They cut are petty, vindictive and spiteful and really have nothing to do with governance, or even paying off the debt. It's simply about erasing things attached to the Liberals.

Hey Stephen- How about doing something that's good for the country for a change, instead of doing things that are just good for the Conservative party?

Tokyo Tintin said...

The Conservatives Make No Sense!

As further proof, here is an article from today’s Star:

Harper, wife on different pages
Laureen joins literacy crusadeOn Monday, Tories cut reading program
Sep. 29, 2006. 05:26 AM
SUSAN DELACOURT
OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF

OTTAWA—Literacy — it's all about reading, writing and getting your story straight.
Or so it seemed this week in Ottawa.

On Monday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government axed $17.7 million from the human resources department's Adult Learning and Literacy Skills Program as part of a wave of spending cuts.

Yesterday, Harper's wife Laureen was on the streets of Ottawa, promoting literacy.
Clad in a yellow T-shirt and handing out newspapers in the drizzle as part of a CanWest media company promotion of child literacy, it seemed that perhaps Laureen Harper hadn't seen the memo about the literacy cuts earlier in the week.

Ditto for Harper's chief of staff, Ian Brodie, who coughed up a $20 literacy donation when he came across his boss's wife on the street in front of the Parliament buildings.
Treasury Board President John Baird, who announced the cuts on Monday, was also part of the CanWest street campaign.

"It appears that the Prime Minister and his wife are reading from different pages these days," Bonnie Brown, the Liberal MP from Oakville, said yesterday in the Commons.

"Now that the Prime Minister's wife has publicly demonstrated the error of her husband's government's ways, will the Prime Minister immediately restore funding to literacy programs?"

The CanWest promotion is called "Raise a Reader" and is aimed at improving literacy in children.

The Conservative cuts are directed at adult-literacy efforts. So the difference, it seems, revolves around when the government should pay for people to learn to read and write.
This appeared to be the distinction that Baird was making yesterday, as he performed the simultaneous feat of explaining literacy cuts and campaigning for literacy at the same time — outdoors, on the street, no less.

"I think if we're spending $20 million and we have one out of seven folks in the country that are functionally illiterate, we've got to fix the ground floor problem and not be trying to do repair work after the fact," Baird said as he handed out newspapers alongside Laureen Harper.

In the House of Commons yesterday, meanwhile, Human Resources Minister Diane Finley showed how well she reads her talking points, saying that Liberals did the true damage to literacy, freezing programs during the deficit-cutting budget of 1995.

"Hypocrisy has a new spelling. It is L-i-b-e-r-a-l," Finley said.

Finley also argued that if Liberals were in favour of literacy, they shouldn't have voted against this year's budget, which contained $307 million for such programs.

(with files from Canadian Press)



Now, hypocrisy is a pretty fancy world for a party which budgeted for literacy programmes and then turned around and cut 17 million of that funding.

I find it unbelievable that someone would suggest that we shouldn’t spend money on adult literacy because those people should have learned how to read as children. Who actually thinks like that? We might as well prevent babies being born to save on the cost of schooling when they are kids. —And think of all the money we’ll save when the never-born babies don’t become an elderly burden on the health care system! Then we can pay down the debt and cut even more social programmes! Brilliant!

I should start a career as a Conservative policy planner. I’d really be great.