It’s all about the money

“My country, ‘tis of thee.”—Samuel Francis Smith.

With many Canadians rooting for the American team (which does have more Canadians on it) than the Canucks during the Stanley Cup Finals, it shows that national unity is not just questioned along linguistic lines.

The productive parts of the country have been conditioned into accepting that they must indulge the East as an adult indulges someone less mature or responsible. The Have/Have-Not federal policy redistributes taxpayer dollars according to how Ottawa sees fit—supposedly equally. When it must bribe B.C. and Quebec in order to “harmonize” another rip-off tax, a sane person would wonder how we went from having self-reliance and a pioneering spirit to relying on nanny Ottawa to grab money from some to give to others—with nobody being happy at the end.

This is but one example of numerous government programs that keep growing like Topsy, as does Ottawa’s reach into our lives. We all know about Tax Freedom Day being somewhere in the middle of the year. This means we only get to directly spend 50 per cent of what we earn. The other half is allocated into programs, many of which offer little or no benefit to anyone except the people getting or granting the largesse.

It’s very difficult not to get cynical about applying for government money, regardless if one is a large corporation with revenue in the billions or one of the truly needy that the original programs were meant to serve. After all, if there’s money to be redistributed, why not get in line, apply for it and see what transpires? It’s like a taxpayer funded lottery whereby anyone can apply if one has the know-how or the ability.

We pay $500 million each year for a Privacy Commissioner—who does what, again? China, despite having nuclear weapons, a brand new state of the art aircraft carrier and trillions in reserves, still gets foreign aid from us. Is there something in the water over in Ottawa that allows them to run a deficit when most Canadians during the past years have had to budget for an uncertain future?

There’s actually a good rationale here. It’s explained by the attitude of young people here, the Greeks living in Europe and the Americans. They all have no savings, put expenses on credit and in the case of the sovereign nations, have no intention of ever paying off the bills. The Greeks know the Germans and Dutch will bail them out. The Americans know that when they finally can’t re-up their debt ceiling, the Chinese, who are owed money, will write it off or down. Life will go on, not necessarily without great geopolitical upheaval, major loss of face and some real belt tightening.

Of course, that happens to anyone going bankrupt. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. It’s all happened before.