Hey CTF,

Take off the clown shoes and open your ears for a bit. Reducing provincial equalization payments by 30% will have the Prov.'s "opt" out and into their own respective tax collecting agencies, skipping the Federal Gov't completely. Most Provinces don't like how its done now. This would effectively cripple Quebec and the Maritimes with a flood of people heading west for work (even more so than now!).

Is your charter the effective disintegration of the Canadian federation or to reduce the amount of taxes Canadians pay? Face it, we can live with the deficit spending for the time being but you buffoons think Canada is "going down with the ship" however that is far from the truth. And you want to do a cash grab on the back of the Canadian civil service, nice. You people seem to think everyone in the Fed. Gov't is making nothing but tons of money. Why don't you look more at the upper management than the grunts because thats who you would be affecting, the oil of the civil service engine are people who work for average pay and I would suggest when compared to Provincial benefits, less than average benefits.  Sure, the only perk is a decent pension plan and you jerks want to jerk it away faster than you can say lickety split.

Why don't you look for other areas of cost savings like an idiotic billion dollar gun registry in a typically Canadian knee-jerk response to one psycho with a gun. Why don't you have CBC completely have to work on their own budget through advertising? How about letting Bombardier go bankrupt instead of continually propping it up with tax payer dough? How about letting Quebec businesses pay their own way? What about the major banks' profits?? They and lawyers are the only ones making money in this recessionary time, how about sending your "investigative" journalists over there for a look? How about you clowns asking the right questions in Access to Information requests rather than your continual regular rhetorical "spin"? Or is the asking too much of your bloated little empire right now?

Something about casting stones and glass houses come to mind right now. How about a re-think of your strategy and subsequent buffoonery?

I can agree with a lot of what you are saying, but somehow picking on Canada Post and VIA Rail seem a little out of touch with what they represent.  The amount of subsidy is very small given the amount of people employed and the Service provided on a National basis.  Kind of small thinking there. 

The idea of hiring freezes and wage freezes for government workers has merit.  I would think it would be best to look at a Cost comparison for Contracting out a lot of Services that exist within branch of the Federal Government.  Paying a person $25.00 per hour plus benefits to clean a floor when the going rate in the private industry is about half of that really is not the intelligent way of operating a Corporation.  There are all sorts of savings that could be ferreted out of the Government departments and Corporations etc, with some sound Management.  Promoting a person into Management from the Unionized masses is really just an extension of the same problem because the mentality is the same----spend--- spend spend.  A lot of this Health and Saftey stuff has gone way way overboard and has skewed away from the core areas of Health and Safety.  It is costing us zillions, for little to no benefit.

What happens is the beaurocrats are in for life, setting ever increasing budgets that they in turn hand over to politicians for approval, basically under threat of the Services collapsing without the increases.  By the time the politician actually figures out that this is not the case, in a few years time, he or she is concentrating on trying to get re elected, or is gone or shuffled off to a different position after an election anyway.  What remains is the beaurocrat, sitll pumping out the bloated budget for his or her department, with basically little incentive to cut back and really after a number of years, loses touch with why he or she is there in the first place.

I could go on and on but really we have sold ourselves out by buying massive amounts of foriegn products.  Nobody wants to admit the truth that we are basically living beyond our means as a nation and just cannot afford all the Services we have become accustomed to since the mid seventies.