July 31, 2006

 

This Show Has Too Many Lies


Browsing throught the Mercer Report Archives, I came across this piece on equalization. Now, I've said before that Rick Mercer frequently succeeds at being very funny while completely failing at making a valid point. This time, however, he does a lot worse than that. After describing how Alberta and Ontario are the only "have" provinces who currently support the equalization system for everyone else (the "have not" provinces), he says:
Now, Harper says this is too complicated. For example, the Liberals cut a side deal with Newfoundland, leaving their oil out of the equation. So Prime Minister Harper wants to fix things by cutting a side deal with Alberta, leaving their oil out of the equation.
Um, no. Alberta's oil revenue is already left out of the equation. There are certain provincial governments who are agitating to start including it, but the current formula does not, despite what Mercer says.
So let's take a look now at the revised list of who now has to pay more:

Ontario.
Mercer compounds his orginal error. He claims that without Alberta's oil, Ontarians would have to pay more to support the system. Not only is he wrong about the current situation, but if Alberta's oil were to be included in the calculation, it would throw the average off so badly that Ontario would become a "have not" province, leaving Alberta's 10% of the population to support the other 90% of the country, including Ontario. (Alberta's and Ontario's combined populations are roughly 50% of Canada's total.)

But wait, there's more!
Now, let's go over the list of who didn't vote for Stephen Harper:

Ontario.
Really? Ontario didn't vote for Stephen Harper? Well, let's check on where the Conservatives got the seats that won them the election:
Ontario           40
Alberta           28
British Columbia  17
Saskatchewan      12
Quebec            10
Manitoba           8
Nova Scotia        3
New Brunswick      3
Newfoundland       3
As you can clearly see, Ontario didn't care for Stephen Harper at all. :P

Methinks someone's grumpy that their big endorsement deal was cancelled...

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Comments:
He's basicly parroting the McGuinty line on equalization.
 
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