The vast green prairie, the boundless blue sky, Polaris & a Tiger Lily

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Response to Huffington Post article by Ross Macnab

After a most frustrating time wading through the Huffington Posts requirements to comment on an article, I gave up and respond here to this article by Ross Macnab (Is Saskatchewan the New "It" Province?). He says (about Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan Party):

"If you love this province, you should love the party."

I have no doubt there are many people here that love our province but do not share that love for the Saskatchewan Party. I was whisked away as a baby, and for many years swore I would never return to a place where winter can kill you. Personal record in my front yard, -57F with the wind chill.

I brought my (then) young family home in 1997, leaving behind an NDP administration in BC. I had survived a previous NDP government in BC and it was not good economically for the province either time. As W.A.C. Bennett used to say "The NDP couldn't run a peanut stand". My friends thought I was nuts, moving to not just another NDP province but one so firmly in the grasp of the collectivists.

The first polity to elect a socialist government in North America has firmly turned it's back on the successors to the CCF, the very party that had a proposition debated last year at their convention (and rejected, it might be noted, shortly before the 'hockey' riots) about removing the word 'socialist' from it's constitution. The provincial wing of the NDP has not sent a member from Saskatchewan to Parliament in many years, and the voters have rejected the socialists in two successive provincial elections.

For many decades our biggest export was people but the diaspora has ended, because the Saskatchewan Party is not the NDP. But do not mistake the SP for conservative right-wingers, for they are not even close to the center-line, only closer to it (and therefore to the right) of the NDP.

You cannot mix PROGRESSIVE conservatives and LIBERALS and expect to get a CONSERVATIVE party. And that is how the Saskatchewan Party came to be, the PCs and the Libs shed the blue tories and the red-dog libs and became the 'not the ndp' party. Certainly not conservative, not while growing the size and spending of the government, creating new Crown corporations, etc. (During the 2011 election the subject of the Crowns was brought up only once, by Ezra Levant, in an interview with Brad Wall on the Sunnews network, the only national media to provide any in-depth coverage of our provincial election, btw).

Given a huge mandate by the electorate in 2011 did Mr. Wall respond with (as did Mr. Harper, the known right-winger with a much smaller mandate) a rollback of many of the damaging socialist policies that kept the economy of Saskatchewan moribund for so long? He did not.

The surprisingly (to me anyways) muted response to one of the sacred cows of the left, the film industry, having a tax credit removed, shows how not conservative or right-wing the SP actually is. Ask yourself, how large would the response be if the Federal Government were to touch (or even muse about touching) the Federal tax credits offered to the film industry? Every other jurisdiction in N.A. dares not offend this industry by refusing them taxpayers money, except one.

The SK/SP governments bookkeeping has been criticized by the last 3 Provincial Auditors, for maintaining most if not all the sketchy passing around of Crown funds in systems largely set up by the socialist party currently serving as Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

And as long as the NDP were in power, business continued to shy away from investment in a place where socialist principles continued to dictate, well, most things. That's changed now.

As for the tax credit lacking for the film industry, there we share some common sense with Arizona, and they don't do that daylight saving thing either.

Update: I gave it another go to leave a comment at their site and trying to create an account using my usual gmail failed as it was already in use! By me!! I am Dana57 and I have commented at the Huffington Post.

2 comments:

  1. Dana,
    Thanks for reading the article.
    Ross.

    ReplyDelete