What's to say. The week didn't start well.
The 3 stooges had their little meeting on Sunday and by the end all 3 had clearly worked themselves into an ecstasy of moral outrage. Moral outrage bores me and usually makes me suspicious. It's up there with patriotic furor as far as scondrelism goes.
I've waited awhile to see if any real outcomes would happen either yesterday or today but Curly, Larry and Moe in the good vaudevillian style I, at least, have come to expect of them don't seem to know quite what their stage directions are.
So, today natter, natter, natter. More moral outrage. More likely tomorrow.
Generally quite a disappointing week so far.
Ralph Goodale, the Finance Minister, delivered the economic update and more importantly the very long awaited plan on Canada's future - A Plan for Growth and Prosperity.
The Finance Minister said today on T.V., no sorry it was on the local CBC this morning, he had been working on this document for 7 or 8 months. Well nothing to write home about Ralph.
At this point all I can do is pick holes in it. Just as an example in the executive summary under the heading increasing government productivity the initiatives that are listed are really nothing more than measures to tighten up accountability likely because of the sponsorship mess. Also, how is productivity actually measured in the civil service. As I remember, it was a struggle to develop any real productivity measures in service sector industries [clearly I need to check this as the world may have moved way past what I remember.]. More, the document indicates that the feds maybe back at trying to harmonize consumptions taxes across the country. I note they didn't mention their consumption tax is the GST nor the really old promise now to get rid of it which was in the Red Book.
With friends like these characters down South thumbing their noses at free trade you really have to start considering other options and this is not addressed in the xx pages of platitudes and feel good bromides included in this document.
Also a Red Book wish to have a better dispute resolution mechanism. Oops, should I be mentioning that. It might have been better to focus on the dispute mechanism rather than scrapping the GST.
The latter got us the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) large bribes, in effect, for Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick along with another Quebec irritant - Quebec had sensibly and for good policy and political reasons (their administer both the GST and the QST within the province) harmonized their provincial sales tax with the GST prior to the Red Book promise so they got nothing.
The issue won't go away so I wonder why "Growth and Prosperity" is raising the mess again.
Ah history.
But just for some light amusement, Arctic politicians of Inuit organizations really take the cake for retreated ideas.
Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated is reopening discussion on the issue of a single time zone for the territory of Nunavut. The land claim organization debated the matter yesterday at its board meeting in Cambridge Bay. Six years ago Nunavut experimented with one time zone, but many people were opposed to it.
Six months after Nunavut was born, its government created a single time zone. But instead of unifying people, it created disharmony. Parents complained their children were leaving school in darkness. Hunters did not like hunting at odd hours. The territorial government went back to three major time zones. But Nunavut Tunngavik President Paul Kaludjak wants to revisit the idea. He says it would be easier to coordinate activities in the three regions.
“We can do it the right way. It was done the wrong way before. Because it was done by some government staff that didn’t understand Nunavut at all. And now we’ve learned from that, we can try it again. I think it is doable.”
CBC
News North
November 15, 2005
But who knows maybe this one's time has come even though first time around it had a bit of trouble.
Wonder what government staff didn't understand about Nunavut. That maybe it includes 4 time zones Atlantic, Eastern, Central and Mountain but only uses the last 3.
Oh, I know they didn't know how to turn back or move forward the hands of a clock. Worse, they couldn't remember or lost the instruction booklets for their electronic clocks and watches.
Technorati Tags: Canada, Economics, Finance, Nunavut, Politics, Stupidity
