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Canada is suffering from a prolonged drought of imaginative government

There is no approach to taxing and spending except raising both, and no discussion of penal reform, though at least the Javert-like severity of the Harper-Toews tyranny has abated. There has been no attempt to make welfare and poverty-reduction more effective, and, as was recently mentioned here, all that has happened with the aboriginals is to dismantle the commendable Harper government requirement for accountability of the native governments and leaders — thereby providing some of their leaders with a blank cheque to go on squandering billions of dollars devoted to that population, which deserves better, but not necessarily more mis-invested money.

It is an outrage that anyone in this country and in these times should pay an income tax of 53 per cent; it is the money of the people who earn or otherwise legitimately receive it — that income is their money, not the state’s. Canadians have become so passive and docile, no one seems to utter a peep about governments taking more than half the income of the wealthier section of the population. Such a condition can only be justified in a state of emergency, and Canada has not had such an emergency since the Second World War. Everyone agrees that governments provide essential services, and there is general agreement about what most of those services are, but few imagine that they are being provided as efficiently and imaginatively as possible.

Canadians are always preoccupied with the proximity of the United States, and that country is in shambles

Canadians are always preoccupied with the proximity of the United States, and that country is in shambles because the population has constitutionally rebelled against 20 years of bipartisan misrule that gave the world the Great Recession, the Iraq War, the migration crises, the appeasement of Iran and North Korea, a flat-lined U.S. economy, oceanic emissions of debt, and the enthronement of witless political correctness that forbade even the utterance of the words “Islamist extremism.” This leaves us under the mistaken belief that Canada has no need to aim for better than its current status quo. It is similar to the reflex to believe that because the least prosperous third of our people receive better health care than their American analogues, we have a world-class health-care system.