O’Toole, Carrie missing the facts

Dear Editor,

It is with something akin to amusement that I read the comments of Erin O’Toole and Colin Carrie with respect to their shadow cabinet appointments.

O’Toole wishes to maintain a “balance between ensuring that we have a free and diverse and open society with the appropriate level of security and ability for police to investigate and foil attacks.”

This from an enthusiastic supporter of Harper’s Orwellian Bill C51 and “snitch line” for the reporting of barbaric “cultural practises.” This, a bill that ends any pretext as an open and free society and instead a racist, intolerant and Islamophobic venue for bigoted informants. Steps towards a Canadian Stasi.

Then we have Carrie’s not so truthful statements. He claims that the Liberals reduced health transfers to the provinces by $25 billion. He neglects to say that the cuts were a response to a deficit of $42 billion inherited from the Mulroney government. He neglects to say that the Liberals restored funding later in their terms and that they signed a 10-year accord with the provinces to increase funding by six per cent annually

Carrie then fails to add that the accord, which ended in 2014, had not been renewed by the Harper government in which he served. That will, if is not renewed by the Trudeau government, result in a reduction of funding of $36 billion over the next 10 years. He also fails to note that Harper is on record as being determined to end the federal involvement in healthcare, as well as other social programmes.

Both Carrie and O’Toole seem to have learned little from the rejection of the regressive administration in which they shared. They still talk of having the right policies and of simply failing to communicate them properly.

The reality is that Canadians finally found a way to rid the country of the most socially destructive government in Canadian history. Canadians finally reacted to the fantasy of economic responsibility and soundness: a fantasy that masked the slide into an abyss of poverty, unemployment, low growth and international irrelevance.

John Peate