Weekly Bulletin #13

This week there have been only a few major events, which I will discuss below. Harper made five more appointments to the senate giving the Tories a plurality. While not a big deal for me, I personally think the senate should be abolished. Besides being un-elected, it is just another layer of bureaucracy and doesn't seem necessary as all provinces have uniceremeal legislatures so I don't see why we cannot federally. However, since this would require a constitutional amendment, the best thing would be to appoint only independents and the senate would make recommendations, but if the House of Commons choose to ignore them, the senate would not try to block or override the legislation.

This week both major political parties discussed the issue of dealing with the increasing deficit. Personally, I feel both are not taking it seriously enough. Raising the GST by two points as well as major spending cuts is what is necessary to balance the budget and we should take action to try to balance it within 3 years rather than wait longer. My proposal would be to freeze spending in all departments and then to review everything and make spending cuts where possible. An overall spending reduction of 5-10% should be done, not restrained growth, but an actual cut. The GST should be raised back to 7% while all other taxes should be frozen at their current levels until the budget is balanced. The Liberals discuss job creation which is important, but this should primarily come from the private sector, not a larger public sector. Large public sectors do not create more jobs long-term, in fact they crowd out jobs in the private sector and lead to higher unemployment rates. Countries such as France who have large public sectors have generally had much higher unemployment rates, so we should avoid going down this path. Instead the focus should be on trying to create a more competitive and stronger economy which in turn will create more jobs.

This week was the deadline to submit our climate plan to the UN. I think the government is dead wrong on blindly following the United States. We are a sovereign country and although we are closely tied economically, we should make our environmental plans based on our own interests not the Americans. But by the same token, we should blindly follow the EU, UN, or give what various third world countries want. We need to develop our own plan for dealing with the environment based on our national interests. I believe global warming is occurring and humans play at least a partial role, but I think the threat and the extent of human involvement is greatly exaggerated. I for one think the IPCC prediction of warming between 1.4C to 5.8C over the next century is totally exaggerated and that 1.4C is probably the high end, not the low end. In the last century, we warmed by 0.7C so I don't get why they are positive we will warm by twice as much considering our technology is cleaner today, people are more environmentally conscious, never mind the fact most developed countries have birth rates below the replacement level so I think it is quite possible the earth's population will be less not more in 2100. In addition I believe the earth was warmer during the medieval warm period and noticeably cooler during the Little Ice Age, so some of the warming but not all is natural.