This week the federal Liberals posted their first budget. After recording a $1.9B surplus for 2015 and a $5.4B deficit for 2016, Canada is projected to incur another $81B in deficits over the next 3 years—with no plan to return to balanced books.
Deficits can be justified and conditions certainly change, but isn’t this vastly different than what Justin just said during the election—6 months ago? When he promised to run short-term losses of less than $10B in each of the next two fiscal years (2016 and 17)? Politicians are known to break promises but this one appears to be deliberate, which calls into question what voters can and can’t believe, and how a person should vote.
Non-disclosure
Before jumping all over the libs, let’s take a look back at Harper. He didn’t lie about the numbers but did fail to disclose his personal position towards the Bible. Because if we had outright known he was a super-Christian, we could have predicted his disposition towards things like minimum sentencing, gay marriage, funding abortions in developing countries, doctor-assist, and policies that were pro-Israel. So he sorta lied too.
Machiavellianism
Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat who wrote The Prince. In this work, the protagonist employs cunning and deceitfulness to achieve an altruistic goal. Linguistically, this “end justifies the means” behaviour has been coined after him.
And if you like a good liar, next time we should get Trump. Can you imagine if Donald partook in our last debate? He would have responded to Justin’s middle-class tax cut with this: “Nobody loves the middle-class more than me. I love the middle-class. But I also love the poor, so I’m going to extend that tax break to them too. Because nobody loves the poor like me.”
Ideology
In his book, My Years as Prime Minister, Jean Chretien wrote that politicians running for office do it for one reason only—power. And that people who crave power will say almost anything in order to obtain it. So voting has essentially come down to choosing an ideology. That’s what our American friends do.
Because they vote twice as often, these people have discovered that it’s mostly about style. After being duped a number of times by campaign lies, they’ve matured to the realization that voting isn’t about discussing issues. It’s about ignoring what everybody says and analyzing who these people actually are. That’s why they use ideology as the driving factor behind checking either box.
The results from our last Canadian election prove this. Stephen Harper would never have socially legalized marijuana or fiscally incurred such debt. So if you’re the type who generally agrees with conservative principles, vote blue. Otherwise, check red. And if you’re ever campaigning for something—just lie.
P.S. What’s funny is that many believe Thomas Mulcair lost the election because he opted to support not running deficits. So either he lost because he didn’t lie, or was planning to do the same thing.