Stephen Taylor, Author at Stephen Taylor

Liberal Monopoly

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I created this Windows desktop wallpaper yesterday. I figured that since the Liberal Party of Canada seems to have a ‘monopoly’ on power in this country, I’d make a Liberal-themed Monopoly gameboard! The properties on the gameboard detail Liberal scandals and how that party has failed Canadians as a government. Set it as your desktop background and pass it on to friends!

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The Liberals have passed GO three times, let’s stop them from playing this game with our country.

Canadians react to Liberal scandal

Good news for Canadian democracy.

The numbers this weekend provide hope for our political process — when a party is involved in corrupt practices, giving taxpayer money to party-faithful, the Canadian electorate will react and send a powerful message to Ottawa that they are upset and that they will be heard. Democracy isn’t dead. At a time when the Conservative Party of Canada is gaining momentum, this latest turn of events may indicate that Canada may indeed escape the Liberal Limbo in which it has been suspended for the past 11 years. A competitive political environment is alive in Canada for the first time, in a long time, and Canadians deserve nothing less.

The numbers this weekend are supportive of this fact with 1 out of 5 liberal supporters effectively turning their backs to the party. The Liberals are down 9% from 48% to 39%, the Conservative Party of Canada is up 5% from 21% to 26% and the NDP is up 2% from 16% to 18%. These numbers indicate that the Liberals would not likely form a majority government if an election was held today.

A valid alternative choice to the Liberals is what Canadians deserve and the Liberals are giving Canadians reason to shop around.

The $2 Billion Boondoggle

Paul Martin and the federal Liberals are not having a good week.

CBC News reports today that the cost of Canada’s national gun registry has soared to $2 Billion. Critics of the Liberal boondoggle have only recently pegged this figure at about $1 Billion dollars. Conservative MP Bill Casey’s website at gunregistry.ca compares the billion dollar pricetag of the program, which has been largely ineffective, to what else could be bought for $1 Billion. Mr. Casey, you’ll have to double that figure today.

The program was introduced in the mid-1990’s under the fiscal eye of then finance minister Paul Martin. The now Prime Minister has declared that he will not scrap the wasteful program. As always, the Prime Minister has stated that he will ‘review’ it and then make some changes. Mr. Martin, as some psychologists would declare, suffers from entrapment bias which is defined as an increase in commitment to a failed course of action to justify the investments that were already made. The original cost of the program was estimated, by Mr. Martin’s department, to be $2 million. Now, the program’s costs have burgeoned 1000-fold. When’s the last time that you spent 1000 times more on a purchase than you originally intended? In a hypothetical comparison, no Canadian would finance a $25,000 car at a cost of $25,000,000.

The program itself isn’t an effective measure for crime prevention; gun registration requires compliance. Most of the guns used in crimes are largely unregistered illegal weapons. Meanwhile, every farmer and hunter in this country is being told to register their rifles.

If we are to update the figure on Mr. Casey’s website, we’d be astonished to learn that in the realm of crime prevention (which is the intent of the program), $2 Billion dollars could buy: 66,666 police cruisers at $30,000 each or it could pay for the salaries of 2000 police officers forever ($2 Billion invested at 5% interest). Alternatively, the money could have paid the tuition for almost every single university student in this country for 2 years.