This means, as I mused upon first hearing of the news, that the title of this column had to change – perhaps, to My Five Canadian Cents.

But instead of thinking up a new title, I have decided to go a different route.

Relaunching my old blog, The News Cruncher, in a new format, my column will become part of that new site (note that the Cruncher is now at a Canadian domain).

My column will be part of the site (and/or via this link)

My Two Canadian Cents will stay up for the next few months before the domain www.wernerpatels.com is redirected to the Opinions section of The News Cruncher.

As for archiving the My Two Canadian Cents column, I will compile a book of the best pieces taken from a period covering the last two years. This will be, I think, an interesting trip down memory lane, and also a good “snapshot” of politics in Canada – the last two years, in particular, have been monumental in my view, setting Canada on a new course into the future.

So, this leaves nothing else but to ask you, my loyal readers, to update your bookmarks and point them to The News Cruncher - and, of course, to buy the book once it comes out.

Yours truly,

Werner Patels

But when Danielle Smith, leader of the opposition, stood up and presented her list of demands for the government, I was shocked to hear that she wanted special powers that no opposition party had been granted before: the ability to introduce “opposition bills”, as opposed to private member’s bills.

That power belongs to government, whether you agree with the party in power or not. In a democracy such as ours, it’s the government that controls the levers, while the opposition has to do its best to oppose whatever it disagrees with.

If we allowed opposition parties to table bills, we’d do away with that fine line that tends to separate the government from the opposition. It would also award quasi-governmental powers to a party that’s been defeated in an election.

The Calgary Herald feels that such a plan would result in gridlock. Absolutely, particularly seeing how the Legislative Assembly isn’t in session all that frequently throughout any year (a clear argument for cutting all MLA salaries in half, at least). There’s never enough time to give government bills the consideration and debate they require, with many of them being pushed through the system, even in the middle of the night.

Nothing is worse than rushed legislation, and we already have too much of that in this province as is. The last thing we need is for an opposition that acts as if it were the government and stuffs even more bills into the pipeline.

As my readers well know, I supported the Wildrose party in the last election. But my sense of fair play, as well as common sense, dictates that Smith’s demand must be rejected. Elections are about winners and losers for a good reason – voters deserve certainty and finality once a new government is in place. Elevating the loser to quasi-governmental status is a big no-no.

It’s ironic that such a request should come from the Wildrose of all parties. It smacks of the current system we see in our schools, where kids aren’t supposed to be “embarrassed” (and scarred for life) by grades, or where in school sports no scores are to be kept so as not to intimidate the little ones. You know, all that “everyone’s equal and everyone’s a winner” nonsense.

In politics, like in all other spheres of life, not everyone’s equal, and there are, indeed, winners and losers, and sometimes the losers get kicked in the groin for good measure. That’s what life is, and contrary to what left-wingers and the politically correct keep saying, this is what it is.

The Wildrose, and Smith, should know better than to advocate for some wimpy “everyone’s a winner” cop-out.

Even centuries later, the elites in Ontario and Quebec cling to this design as if it still held true. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is commonly referred to as “Central Canada” today should be renamed more appropriately to “Marginal Canada”, because that’s what Ontario and Quebec have become – marginalized bit players and, seeing how they stretch out their hands for alms donated by the powerhouses in Western Canada, bums and laggards.

The term “Central Canada” should be applied, to reflect today’s and tomorrow’s reality, to British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Not long ago, one of those Marginal Canadians, Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, attacked Alberta and its oil wealth, blaming it for a high Canadian dollar that, in McGuinty’s interpretation of fundamental (voodoo) economics, was responsible for killing off Ontario’s manufacturing industry.

Another Marginal Canadian, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, has now repeated McGuinty’s thoughts almost word for word.

It’s hard not to advocate for a guardian of some sort, one who’d have to be from the West, of course, to be assigned to those Marginal Canadians, because it’s obvious that the Marginals can’t handle math or economics at all. Nor do they show any trace of common sense. Like a demented senior, they need assistance with balancing their chequebook and all manner of routine tasks. If Mulcair’s comments are any indication, they may also soon require help with changing their adult diapers.

That Ontario has shed hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs isn’t the West’s fault. The jobs have gone down the drain because of mistakes made in Ontario, not anywhere else.

For starters, unions have been playing too large a role in Ontario, driving away businesses and killing jobs. Unions aren’t about protecting workers’ rights anymore; today’s organized labour is focused only on creating a land of perpetually flowing milk and honey for their members. All they want is less work, but substantially more money and perks.

For a look at how unions kill, not protect, jobs, simply compare Air Canada and WestJet. The latter is union-free and successful, the former is being dictated to by unions and crashing.

Companies are also to blame. For years, they have ignored all good advice and refused to innovate and become more productive. Former Liberal federal finance minister John Manley has been railing against the laggards in Ontario’s manufacturing industry for years. When the Canadian dollar was low, those companies coasted along on the exchange rate without ever boosting their productivity, according to Manley. They failed to make vital investments in capital goods, and innovation, if any, could be seen only through a magnifying lens or an electron microscope.

The global recession, then, and most notably the crisis in the automotive sector, forced those companies to face up to reality. But they don’t seem to have learned their lesson and continue to blame anyone but themselves for the deep hole they’re in today.

Political leadership would require telling them to wise up and get their act together – as Manley has been trying to do. Failure of political leadership, as embodied in the comments made by McGuinty and Mulcair, is when politicians pretend it’s all good and play along with the misguided blame game.

The fast decline and, possibly, march to bankruptcy court of RIM in Waterloo, Ontario, is a textbook example of what happens to once-successful companies if they’re never challenged – not by others, and not by themselves. One can coast and goof off for only so long, and Ontario has now reached the end point.

There’s no one to blame for that but Ontario itself.

I’ll consider you cool if you read books or publications that use multisyllabic words and convoluted syntax. You’ll get extra brownie points if you can quote some Ancient Greek, Latin, or even the occasional Sanskrit, to me. If you’re able to converse in more than two languages, I’ll consider you a peer and my equal. Screaming at a big-screen TV and images of football, baseball or hockey doesn’t make you look cool in my world. (Extremely proud to say that at our house, the only thing we watch on CBC these days is Coronation Street, but absolutely none of the other stuff currently occupying most of the schedule.)

Does this make me better than you? No, that’s not how I see it. We simply have different definitions of “cool” and what’s interesting.

But when it comes to politics, then my answer to the above question must be yes. A politician must be erudite and capable of words that contain more than one or two syllables. Following hockey can be a nice pastime for some, but a person sharing my interests and pursuits in life is more likely to be a competent political leader than the former.

US president Barack Obama is busy appearing to be cool. How that “special skill” of his is going to help the American economy and millions of unemployed and/or underemployed Americans is beyond my grasp.

"Yeah mon, I'm such a cool dude!"

Republican candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, is grappling with accusations from the media (not the voters, mind you) that he isn’t cool enough, that he’s stiff in a Harperian sort of way. So, like Harper before him, or Michael Ignatieff, he’s now forced to look cool doing things he clearly doesn’t enjoy.

I think it’s the media’s way of forcing a candidate they don’t like (i.e., anyone representing common sense and/or a conservative platform) to make himself look ridiculous, which they all invariably do when they have to go against their better judgement and personal nature. The media are probably hoping that such embarrassing spectacles will turn voters off.

In other words, the media are happy only if there are “bread and circuses”; real substance or real ideas be damned.

Time and time again we’ve seen that Obama really isn’t all that smart when he needs to talk without the aid of a TelePrompTer. His alleged oratorical gift isn’t all that impressive, really, because the few times he’s made audiences swoon by the power of his words, they weren’t his words at all, but the polished product of a writing pro – and where he himself came up with those words, it took him not only weeks but months, as well as many sleepless nights, to write them down.

Nor has Obama shown himself to be capable of arriving at any crucial decision on his own brain cells. On all major issues, from health care to fixing the economy, he’s always relied on the advice of a team of “experts” whose words he then proceeded to regurgitate.

For all intents and purposes, Obama has been a puppet with different people’s hands inside of it moving its mouth. A good-looking, cool, puppet for sure, but not a real or competent political leader.

I don’t care for puppets, cool or otherwise. I want leaders who actually know what they’re doing. I don’t want them to perform for me: don’t blow your sax in my face, and please don’t sing or tickle the ivories on my account, and, least of all, don’t try to impress me with your “athletic” prowess.

A good and competent leader is seen but rarely heard. The only thing cool about him or her must be his or her head when making decisions, including inconvenient ones.

We don’t need showmanship. What we do need is statesmanship.

That is, no to Obama, and yes to Romney (in case that wasn’t perfectly clear already).

The Liberal government of Canada’s own version of Greece, Ontario, for example, recently struck a deal with the NDP opposition, in a move to prevent the government from falling in a confidence vote. Thus, virtually overnight, “tax-the-rich” brackets were created, and the rates were adjusted across the board to ensure that the rich pay more than their “fair” share.

Here’s the thing, though: with the amount of taxes Canadians pay at all levels of government (according to the Fraser Institute well over 40% of a family’s annual income, and thus more than what families spend on the basic necessities of life, like food, shelter or clothing), you’d think we’d already managed to build a fair and equitable society.

Alas, we appear to have failed. Despite a suffocating aggregate tax burden on Canadian families, there never seems to be enough for all those important government programs to help the poor – or anyone else, for that matter, as the crisis of the public healthcare sector proves year after year.

Richard Wilkinson, a British “income gap guru”, believes that the poor haven’t really been left behind. They’re on their way up and forward all right, but the rich happen to be running a bit faster. Surely, they can’t be faulted for being a tad “nimbler” than the rest, can they?

In 2006, two Swedish economists, Jesper Roine and Daniel Waldenström, studied income (in)equality in “egalitarian” countries. What they found is that the gap between the rich and the poor is virtually the same no matter where you go, including socialist and utopian countries like Sweden. The rate of government-driven “redistribution of wealth” didn’t make one iota of a difference – the rich simply keep getting richer at the same rate all over the world. Ironically, the rich keep getting richer at higher rates especially in countries that are said to have a social conscience (i.e., generous welfare system, Big Government, etc.), such as Sweden or even Canada.

From this it follows, one can reasonably argue, that no matter how much we tax the rich, (a) they will find ever more ingenious ways of avoiding paying tax, (b) as creators of jobs, they will take their opportunities to other, less fiscally demanding, jurisdictions, and (c) the gap between the poor and the rich will invariably stay the same. Besides, these findings also seem to indicate that some people will end up poor regardless and that this has nothing to do with what the rich do and pay or don’t do and pay. Nor should it be forgotten that the higher the taxes to be paid, the less revenue government actually ends up taking in, because people, when faced with a steep tax bill, always become extremely creative (while still remaining within the scope of the law) and find ways of reducing that bill – in some cases, all the way down to zero.

This is why the British (Conservative) government reduced the top bracket of 50 percent in its last budget, because the numbers had shown that the government’s take was a far cry from what the previous Labour government had hoped to earn from “supertaxing” the wealthy to death. Former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown’s plan, like all socialist fantasies, was thus proved wrong and a colossal failure – and it may also have accelerated the erosion of jobs in the UK, as more and more wealthy employers and job creators simply upped sticks. That Britain has just entered yet another recession is a direct consequence of Brown’s Big Government, Big Stimulus solutions, the aftershocks of which are still felt today, despite current prime minister David Cameron’s hard work and efforts to fix as much of the Brown-inflicted damage as possible.

It goes without saying, however, that countries, states or provinces that drive away the wealthy job creators, innovators and investors through punitive taxes will not only continue to have an “income gap”, but will also experience something even worse than the so-called wedge between the rich and the poor: general, widespread unemployment and poverty in absolute, rather than merely relative, terms.

The age-old fact remains as true as ever: only you can extricate yourself from poverty – through hard work, through education, and a general sense of responsibility for your own actions. Those who rely on others, i.e., the state, are doomed to failure long before the “rat race” has even begun.

Always pointing fingers at some perceived scapegoat (“the rich”) can yield some short-term satisfaction and can make you forget about your lot, but it won’t change anything. Only once you begin to point that finger at yourself and identify the underlying cause(s) holding you back in life will you have a chance to move on up in the world.

Finkel, naturally, isn’t too thrilled about the outcome of the recent provincial election, as he notes:

“When the Alberta Democratic Renewal Project (DRP) was formed in 2008, we often cited Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.” Alberta’s three relatively progressive parties at the time, the Liberals, NDP, and Greens together had the support of four in ten voters. Regrettably, their refusal to cooperate made the election of a progressive government increasingly unlikely.”

Showing a good dose of honesty, Finkel admits that his own group hasn’t really set a clear course or path for the future. Admittedly, after the shock of seeing the PCs win another majority, everything is up in the air, and clueless head-scratching is the most common response to political questions these days.

Finkel styles himself as a “progressive”, and he reiterates his desire for the “progressive” parties to cooperate (which, as we have seen, will never happen – if they couldn’t be motivated for this election, where a lot was at stake and when there was the first real chance to beat the PCs in forty years, they’ll never pull it off).

While a I don’t agree with “progressive” (which, in fact, is the very opposite of the actual meaning of progressive), I can relate to what he says about doing the same thing again and again and still expecting different results.

But he shouldn’t have any reason to complain about any lack, perceived or real, of “progressiveness” now that the PC is a left-wing party, with Alison Redford having become the first “NDP premier” this province has ever had.

If change is what Finkel and his ilk are looking for, they should have thrown in their lot with a different party: the only real change in this election would have come from the Wildrose.

Now, I agree that the “bozo moments” didn’t help, and I did make myself perfectly clear, in public, that those people should have been vetted better and shouldn’t have been allowed to run – in any party.

The Wildrose party might actually collapse before 2016, as Finkel ventured to predict in an early draft of his article, if the leadership remains stubborn about its laissez-faire attitude and puts “bozos” on the roster for the next election again. It doesn’t help either when a defeated candidate goes back on his word and decides not to return money to the taxpayers – that has the smell of wet blankets to it, and it doesn’t look pretty.

Now, leave that aside and focus on the positive.

• A Wildrose government would have returned us to a surplus again.
• A Wildrose government would have reformed public health care modelled after the successful UNIVERSAL and PUBLIC health care systems in place in Germany and most Western European countries, where people don’t pay a dime for services (or no more than they do here in Canada) and still don’t have to wait for months or years (or die) before they receive the surgery or treatment they require.
• A Wildrose government would have ensured proper and fair compensation for MLAs – and not the platinum-plated enrichment scheme/scam the PCs are running (and will continue to run).

Those three aspects alone did it for me, which is why I voted Wildrose – yes, regardless of the “bozo eruptions” or the “Dani dollars” (which, personally, I think was a really bad idea, because it would have been cheaper to administrate if we had simply allowed people to keep more money in their pockets by reducing personal income taxes).

Coming back to the re-elected PC government, it needs to be said that NDP leader Brian Mason actually has a more transparent and more honest plan for running things in Alberta, and although I’m not of that particular ideological persuasion, I would have welcomed Mason into the premier’s office with open arms – because even he would make a better, more honest, more accountable, and more sensible premier than Redford ever will.

Heck, even “right-winger” Ezra Levant wrote in a pre-election column that his two choices were Wildrose first, and NDP second. I fully agreed with him then, as I do now: if we can’t have a Wildrose government, then at least put Mason in the premier’s chair, because he, at least, knows what he’s doing, and unlike the current government, he isn’t out to fleece voters and taxpayers.

I wouldn’t normally encourage people to vote for a Liberal candidate, but in this case, it’s a matter of public safety. We simply can’t allow Trudeau to return to his civilian job should he ever leave politics.

He may want to consider other options, perhaps, but given his “passion”, if that’s what it is, for teaching, there’s a strong probability that he’ll go back to the classroom if the voters of Papineau ever decide to kick him out of the House of Commons.

In light of Trudeau’s recent comments that have revealed what he thinks of education and “empowering” children, it’s obvious he doesn’t have a clue about the real world. He’d create a class of future adults incapable of succeeding in the real world.

Whenever a teacher uses words like “power” and “empowering”, we know that we’ve just left the realm of the real world and gone off into the shady underworld of political correctness and left-wing indoctrination.

It’s also a teacher’s way of saying, “Look, I don’t really want to teach. Let those little bastards do what they want. As long as I have a protected job, excellent perks, and a pension plan that ordinary hardworking Canadians can only dream of, I don’t care what becomes of those kids.”

Trudeau may be only a very prominent example of this trend, but the number of educators who actually deserve to be called teachers is dwindling fast. Unless their students “empower” themselves, that is, by seeking a genuine education elsewhere or teaching themselves, they will end up as useless existences that no employer will ever be able to hire.

Let’s look at the facts:

Because of misguided political correctness, we’ve already removed any possibility for teachers to instil respect and discipline in the young generation. I’m not talking about caning students (although that might not be such a bad thing for some), but the fact that teachers can’t take any disciplinary measures anymore, including additional homework as punishment.

Increasingly, grades are falling into disuse, because giving the poor kiddie an F on a paper could turn him or her into a serial killer later in life.

Same thing with athletic endeavours: more and more we hear about schools removing competition from competitive sports. Thus, kids play hockey, football or baseball, but without keeping score. Dividing them into winners and losers, so say certain educators, would be an atrocity.

Since the real world is all about winners and losers, by not teaching our young these crucial life lessons, we’re setting them up for colossal failure. Placing them in a bubble where everyone’s a loser, we also deny them a chance to develop the proper emotional and intellectual responses to losing and defeat – because they will be confronted with that in the real world – and thanks to teachers like Trudeau, they will experience failure not just occasionally, but several times every single day.

When all taxes, including hidden and indirect ones, at all levels of government (local, municipal, provincial, federal) are taken together, the average family loses well over 40 percent of its annual income.

The worst part of it is, though, that all those taxes make up the top spending item for any household, ahead of the basic necessities, such as rent, food or clothing.

It is my view that such a situation poses a gross violation of basic human rights. When a family’s ability to pay for the basic necessities of life is seriously jeopardized, the tax burden is obviously too high and must come down immediately.

It is simply unconscionable that a family, struggling as most families are in Canada, should have to pay the taxman first before they can put food on the table, clothe their children and keep a roof over their heads.

The aggregate tax burden in any civilized society should be no more than twenty percent of a family’s annual income.

Since the 1960s, when the tax burden started escalating to a point where it violates basic human rights, Canada’s middle class has virtually disappeared. There are now the poor and working poor on the one hand, and then the wealthy on the other, but the middle ground has disappeared.

It must surely be galling for a hardworking family that makes “OK money” based on their pay stubs to then end up near or even below what constitutes the poverty line after the taxman has done a number on them.

One could argue in favour of such a high burden if Canadians actually got good value in return. But as columnist Lorne Gunter has explained, despite the excessive tax burden, Canadians are still not getting timely medical care (many actually die waiting), and the poor are still poor.

Unfortunately, electing a Conservative federal government in 2006 hasn’t helped Canadian families at all, as the Conservative government has built up immense deficits, and rendered the tax code even more complex due to “tax credits” for marginal groups of taxpayers (tax credits are not tax cuts, no matter what the prime minister and his finance minister keep saying).

It is not the poor or the rich that make or break a country, but the middle class. Without one, no country can survive over the long term.

Small-c conservatives, and anyone subscribing to common sense, were thrilled: the corrupt and wasteful Liberals, as well as their social-engineering apparatus, were gone.

But not long into Harper’s first term, critical voices started to be heard. “Where are the conservative policies?” they’d say, and just as quickly Harper came to be known as a “Liberal Lite”.

Easy does it, was the party’s response. In a minority government that could be brought down any moment by the opposition, or the left-wing media and elites, conservative thinking had to be inserted incrementally.

When Harper won a bigger minority two years later, there was more of the “Liberal Lite” stuff. Fair enough, he’d managed to face down the left-wing opposition parties that had attempted a coup d’état, but surely more could be done – or so small-c conservatives thought.

At the height of the global economic crisis, Harper managed to disappoint many, if not most, small-c conservatives and common-sense thinkers in Canada when he decided to base his economic policy on flawed, leftist, Keynesianism. Thus, Canadians, although they didn’t need it at all, because the Canadian economy was really fine for the most part, were treated to the same ill-conceived “stimulus spending” that has wrecked the American economy for generations to come.

Harper, who’d already shown himself to be a big spender, having driven up public spending to unprecedented levels even during his first term, kept expanding the federal deficit by emulating his counterpart in the US, Barack Obama.

In 2011, Harper finally won his long-sought majority, and small-c conservatives and common-sense thinkers were hoping that he was finally finished with his “incremental” approach to conservatism.

Yet, here we are, a year later, and the general consensus is that the first full year of Harper’s majority wasn’t all that conservative either. In fact, most analysts agree, except for one or two policies (tough on crime, abolition of the federal gun registry), anything “Majority Harper” has done could have easily been done by a Liberal government.

If a solid majority government isn’t enough for Harper to turn deep-conservative-blue, so the thinking goes, especially in a country where the overwhelming majority of people see the world through conservative glasses (including majority support for bringing back capital punishment), then there’s no chance whatsoever that Harper will ever be anything but a “wannabe Liberal”.

This explains why “Majority Harper” has been declining in popularity and support faster and more substantially than “Minority Harper” ever did, because now even his support among conservative voters is eroding. During his two minority governments, it would have been unthinkable for the Conservative Party to find itself in a statistical tie with the NDP, of all parties.

Light-blue, or pinko, Tories have never fared well – witness UK prime minister David Cameron’s troubles. But true-blue conservative leaders who weren’t afraid to show their true colours – Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher – were not only extremely popular, but have also been elevated to the realm of legend in later years.

Unless Harper changes his approach drastically between now and 2015, he will go down in history as nothing but a footnote, despite some of his, admittedly remarkable accomplishments.

Mark Milke, always a voice of reason and common sense when it comes to fiscal matters, is scared of Alberta premier Alison Redford, because he thinks that she might consider fiscal conservatism or fiscal prudence to be “ideological” and, therefore, continue her wasteful ways.

As Milke rightly points out, fiscal conservatism is not “ideological”, but rather mathematical correctness, a set of principles, policies and measures that have been proved to be the correct way of doing things by the test of time.

What is “fiscal conservatism”? Milke sums it up as follows:

“an attachment to property rights, solid institutions, independent courts, the rule of law, free trade, competition (and thus no monopolies in the public or private sector), sensible and not overweening regulation, rare instead of routine deficits, and moderate tax levels.”

Milke earns full score for getting this right.

As further proof that fiscal conservatism is not “ideological”, but merely the right thing to do, he quotes a former Liberal finance minister, Sir Richard Cartwright:

“It is the sacred duty of the government to take only from the people what is necessary to the proper discharge of the public service; and that taxation in any other mode is legalized robbery.”

Cartwright said those words in 1878, at a time when Liberals in Canada still had a working brain and were able to see the world for what it really was, that is, long before they were corrupted by the likes of Pierre Trudeau and similar socialists.

As for the current PC government in Alberta, Milke believes that they

“will need to reform government, bring in European-style health care, and ensure public sector wages and pensions do not further escalate above private sector norms and taxpayers’ ability to pay.”

In short, this represents everything the Wildrose party espoused, and still got defeated.

Milke, therefore, might be a tad too optimistic, because it’s highly unlikely at this time that Premier Redford will pick up the Wildrose’s plan for implementing European-style health care – a universal system that ensures speedy treatment for all and is more cost-efficient than the current system in place in Canada. Since Redford has already labelled, incorrectly, such European-style reforms as “American” and “scary”, Milke and Albertans had better not hold their breath.

The same can be said about fiscal prudence, unfortunately. Based on Redford’s post-budget promises made on the campaign trail, she will add close to $7 billion to the province’s deficit in the near to medium term. Once she’s broken the bank, she’ll return to the voters to inform them that their income taxes will be increased sharply, followed by a brand new provincial sales tax – all contrary to her solemn promise not to raise or introduce taxes.

Fiscal prudence is, indeed, mathematical correctness, as Milke says. But the problem is that those who are tasked with practising it are “ideological” creatures, like Redford, who spend all their time playing games of the “pot calling the kettle black” – accusing others of being ideological, and referring to themselves as impartial, when in fact it’s the other way around.

The “Redford Approach” – a mathematically ensured fiscal and financial disaster to come.