Your daily dose of the ever so polite Canadian punditry.
Hicks on Six
No one can question the success of the Canadian and American government trickle-down programs.
Tax breaks for the rich and for powerful corporations have resulted in over a million new jobs.
The jobs are located in China, India and South Korea.
Greg Weston
Charged with ensuring the prime minister's safety, the RCMP security service has instead been forced to become the Conservative party's armed public relations agency for the election campaign.
Last week, the Mounties were used to corral a television crew doing their job. Yesterday morning, it was about a dozen angry autoworkers losing their jobs who threatened Harper's sound bite of the day, and wound up on the wrong end of the Horsemen.
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All of the federal leaders have RCMP bodyguards for the election, but none we have ever seen has been forced to do political dirty work like the squad assigned to Harper.
The best bodyguards in the business -- and always nice to me -- they are now being forced to use their authority to protect Conservative photo ops.
(Don't blame the officers -- they're just following orders, and my bet is most are embarrassed all to hell at having to dirty their hands in political swill.)
Murray Mandryk is tired of Conservatives and the NDP telling him what they don't like about Dion's "Green Shift." He wants them to explain what's right with their own environmental plans and how they compare point-by-point with the Liberal plan. (As background for Americans, the "Green Shift" is a plan to create a carbon tax in Canada and use the taxes raised from it to drastically lower income taxes.)
The Edmonton Journal questions the intelligence of using the best farmland in Alberta for more McMansions and urban sprawl.
Carol Goar worries about the gutting of literacy programs in Canada over the last few years and the total lack of any discussion about it during this election.
Regrettably, the federal government is withdrawing from the field. Eight months after taking power, the Conservatives chopped funding for adult literacy by $17.7 million. They replaced the National Literacy Secretariat, set up Brian Mulroney 21 years ago, with their own Office of Literacy and Learning. But it deals only with national organizations. The network of provincial and local literacy organizations that linked thousands of volunteers has withered.
This spring, there was more bad new from Ottawa. The centre of excellence for literacy, anchored at the University of Western Ontario, lost its bid for a renewal of its seven-year mandate. Its funding ran out on March 31.
Thomas Walkom discusses the almost religious economic orthodoxy of the Conservative Party and the current economic troubles in the US. Asking if it is a good idea to maintain such orthodoxy in times of adversity?