Flaherty was a great friend to the 1% and corporate Canada. He was an enemy to the commons, and to the poor. He was a pandering, bumbling fraud artist, who perhaps by way of poetic justice died before getting his chance to gorge with his Bay street pals.
Flaherty never balanced a budget, and squandered the small surplus he had before the 2008 meltdown.
In 2009 Flaherty tabled yet another austerity budget, and claimed that there is no recession in Canada. Under howls of protest by the other parties, and skewering by the media, he revised the budget to create $40B is stimulus spending. The money was distributed in a partisan manner to provinces that were not suffering from high unemployment, and spend disproportionately in Conservative ridings. Add to this that not all of the money promised was even spent.
Flaherty facilitated the $114B secretive bank bailouts, which at first were denied and then rephrased as preventative asset swaps. This ‘unnecessary’ move to create liquidity, did nothing but add the horde of cash that banks were already sitting on, and increased the risk held by the people of Canada.
Flaherty raided the Employment Insurance fund (as did he his fellow 1%er Paul Martin), and then raised the premiums on workers. He also rescinded the guarantee for provincial transfer payments to cover healthcare.
Between 2007 and 2012 the Corporate Tax rate was further slashed from 22% to 15%
In recent years he has fired 38,000 Federal employees.
He raised the OAS age from 65 to 67
He slashed funding to the CBC.
He eliminated:
National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy
Katimavik
National Aboriginal Health Organization
Experimental Lakes Area
Canadian Immigration Interim Federal Health Program
Arctic atmospheric research lab called PEARL
In his first budget he defunded: the Kyoto protocol, and the Kelowna Accord
As a Mike Harris crony, and part of the ‘Common Sense Revolution’, in his capacity as minister of labour he fully supported Workfare, and drastic cuts to welfare benefits.
His record speaks for him. Good riddance.
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