Strong economy!!??.. are you on drugs, Walter
Free Trade, Monetarism, Deregulation and Privatization. all of the tenets of Economic Liberalism, profoundly contravened the National Economic policies which had built Canada from Confederation.
Here we are 22 years after the signing of the FTA. The revolutionary paradigm set in place by Mulroney and Chretien is still in effect. The country is increasingly de-industrialized, its scientific and technological infrastructure being dismantled.
We have the first generation in perhaps its history that is substantially poorer than that of their parents. Single income families, lifetime employment, pensions and benefits have become things of the past (MP's excepted!).
The empty aphorisms of the 'knowledge economy' have replaced that of the integrated industrial economy. The latter's high wages and high expectations have been replaced with transient, dead end, low paying service jobs for all except a small segment of highly trained specialists in abstract disciplines.. perhaps 20% of the workforce, leaving millions in the dustbin of the New Economy.
Our 'progress' now means our children must compete with the most desperate Maquilladora Free Trade Zones, the other half of the Free Trade profit equation, for productive wages, the real legacy of Chretien's 'Team Canada' trade junkets.
Canada is left in the tidal wash of a chaotic international financial order where greed infused derivative instruments of no productive value can devastate the lives of millions.We have been laid bare to the fangs of the wolves of international finance by their running dogs in government.
We have seen a vast polarization of wealth. A steady drumbeat of repeals of social guarantees, so hard won, to ensure an equitable sharing of the nation's wealth. The taxation system has become regressive and consumption based (another forgotten campaign promise of Chretien's).. slanted toward an ever narrowing, parasitic and grotesquely rich oligarchy that is picking from the spoils of an unravelling society.
I debate who our worst Prime Minister was, Mulroney or Chretien..their administrations were both mired in corruption.. but i usually side with Chretien because the little merde de poulet from Shawinigan lied to us repeatedly and then renigged on ditching NAFTA and the GST. Mulroney was sycophantic petty ideologue, but Chretien was truly amoral, someone completely without any political principles.. just a nose for what he could sell to the public for success.. regardless of the consequences to the long term sustainability of the country.
I have ambiguous feelings about Trudeau. He was the last economic nationalist in the PMs office, except John Turner who was only there for a matter of weeks. It was he who set up FIRA and a host of programs to promote a sovereign Canadian identity. He was a fierce fedaralist, taking on and subduing the grasping provincial potentates and their insatiable demands for more power.. again the last of this type in office.
He also imposed the Constitution on us which in all practical terms set up a unelected and unaccountable judicial tyranny of the intellectual mediocrities that inhabit the High Courts (especially Bev MacLachlan, the 60's era feminist Chretien appointed to Chief Justice).
Trudeau did it because he was fixated on Quebec separatists unilaterally declaring independence or persecuting the the english speaking minority, but the real result was that we saw marriage reduced to an absurdity, and the killing of unborn infants declared a human right.. and the moral relativism and radical individualism of the New Age become the pervading spiritual ethos of our society.
Trudeau was far from perfect and all of this is on his ticket, but compared to the political sludge that came after him, he was a godsend.
