From a speach from former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna
Mr. McKenna's speech, while rejecting as political role models the two "polar opposites" of the U.S. and Europe, seemed to have particularly harsh words for the direction he said the U.S. seems to be taking, especially since President George W. Bush came to power.
"When you look at the model that the U.S. represents right now, it's a model of unbridled capitalism and it's a model that in many ways is fundamentally flawed," he said. "I believe we're seeing increasingly the results of an administration now that is so private-enterprise, and so capitalist, and so committed to reckless tax cuts for very wealthy people that they are creating a society which is not the kind of society that we want to create in our country."
Whereas Canada is balancing its budgets and paying down its debt, Mr. McKenna said, the U.S. is expected to have $1.4 trillion more added to its debt "by the time the genie's finally back in the bottle or when George Bush finally leaves office." The U.S. system, he said, has seen the doubling of the gap betweeen rich and poor in the last two decades, and has created a society with three times Canada's violent crime rate, where one in every 32 adults is in prison.
"What we are seeing is perhaps some of the results of capitalism at its worst - a failure to pay attention to all of the people on the bus," he said.