TIME TO MAKE THIS COUNTRY AS PROSPEROUS, EXCEPTIONAL AND PROGRESSIVE AS IT CAN BE.

its terminal attacks of political immaturity and occasional disposition to satanic collective wickedness.

But it had to rebuild entirely after 1945, has admitted several million awkward “guests,” mainly from Turkey, and recently a million improvident Middle Eastern refugees, and is still trying to assimilate the backwardness of tyrannized Communist East Germany, just 25 years reunified with the West. Australia has a smaller population than Canada, a more challenging geography, immense distances from the main countries with shared traditions, though perhaps, on balance, a kinder climate than Canada, but it consistently has a somewhat higher standard of living than Canada.

The point is that we are doing well, but not as well as we should. Some of this is due to the challenge of Quebec independence, which caused large transfers of resources to be made in annual commitments to make clear the benefits of federalism to French Canadians, who do possess the critical mass of population, cultural distinctiveness, territory and resources to set up a country if they chose.

I never criticized that investment ability; and the provinces passing on most of the additional burden to municipalities, whose revenue sources are very narrowly limited.

And of course, only the federal government can seriously influence the money supply (which in a simpler time was called “printing money” — if provinces or municipalities do that, they are mere counterfeiters). Stephen Harper had a Friedrich Hayek-like distaste for public-sector spending and believed that if the HST (as GST became) could be reduced, it would create a permanent restraint on government spending as a share of GDP. Both prime ministers were inspired by commendable motives.

When the Great Recession came, for reasons of which Canada was guiltless (the housing bubble and imprudent debt-binge of the financial systems of almost all Western countries), the bounce-back required some deficit spending and this prompted the incoming Justin Trudeau government to promise a brief exploration of traditional pumppriming, which Finance officials now warn will keep us in a spending straitjacket and a deficitory poorhouse for 35 years. Of course we must do better than this, which is presumably why the authors of the Finance department’s gloomy piece took such a lugubrious view.

I suggest (once again) a flexible HST — raise it on elective spending (luxury goods, complex financial transactions and the mere velocity of money in financial markets) to eliminate the deficit, and reduce taxes on small personal and corporate incomes to ease the conditions of the most vulnerable and provide affordable stimulus. We are not going to rake in any bonanza piling on energy costs, as the climate change-alarm well has run dry, so rely on marijuana sales as the next formerly immoral source of necessary funds, following in the well-trodden tracks of casinos and alcoholic beverages.

Reduce corporate tax to compete with Trump’s America in attracting investment and secondary sector jobs, and shift stimulus from the sterility of traditional welfare, other than where there is no practical alternative because of the acute needs of the seriously disadvantaged, to meet our two per cent commitment of GDP for national defence. Let us finally, for the first time in peace, give Canada a military commensurate with our status as a G7 country that will back up a sensible voice in world affairs.

All the personnel expenses in defence outlays go to adult education and training-up citizens, and all the hard spending is in high-tech and key industrial areas such as aerospace and shipbuilding. With imaginative tax policies, we could move the annual growth rate to three to four per cent (as the United States is likely to do), from an elective HST, and the minister can use this absurd departmental report as fuel for his stove at his ski lodge.

The insane prison-building program of the Harper government should be repurposed to assisted housing or convalescent homes and all non-violent criminals should pay community service penalties in Spartan but