Friday, September 06, 2013

At the recent G20 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced his government intends to return to balanced budgets and reduce the national debt to 25% of GDP.  He has also urged the provincial and territorial governments of Canada and G20 countries to follow his leadership.  Now here are the facts!

Prime Minister Harper once claimed if elected as Prime Minister that he would never run a deficit budget.  He now holds the record for squandering billions of surplus funds when he took office, running continuous budget deficits and running this country into the highest national debt in the history of Canada.  Harper claims he will try to return to balanced budgets by 2015, but that is dependent on our economy, the world economy, and at this point neither look very good and Canada’s national debt continues to rise.  It is now over 616 billion and rising and Canadian taxpayers will have to pay for this one day.

Further, in the many Middle East conflicts our Prime Minister has committed millions of taxpayer’s dollars for humanitarian aid.  He recently announced further aid to those affected by the crisis in Syria bringing Canada’s contribution to $203.5 million for humanitarian assistance to the crisis in Syria since January 2012.  Harper claims this is necessary to assist the millions displaced to neighboring countries due to the conflict and that 100,000 have died since the conflict began.  Harper now supports the US position of a military strike since the United Nations concluded the Syrian regime used gas to kill people in this ugly conflict.  If we were going to intervene in a conflict that is not ours then we should have done it sooner, saved a hundred thousand lives and $203.5 million of Canadian tax dollars.  There were over 800,000 Rwandan’s killed in the Rwanda Genocide back in 1994 that only lasted one hundred days while the world, including Canada, stood by and did nothing.

How are we to continue supporting the Harper government unless he gets our national debt down balances the annual budget and establishes a foreign policy Canadians can understand and support.  Prime Minister Stephen Harper needs to get his feet back on Canadian soil and start looking after the interests of Canadians.