Save during the good years

Dear Editor:

It’s good to see that the KLKK (Kelowna Liberal Koffee Klatch) letter to the editor writing chapter is back in business. They have been sadly missing these last few months, like their beloved leader.

A writer suggests that the coronavirus is linked to expensive travel, with people from Ontario, like Uncle Rufus, flitting from country to country (Courier, March 4). Is she suggesting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is responsible, given all his recent trips trying to lobby foreign countries to support his bid for the Security Council position? I suppose not.

However, it is odd that he was begging for support from the Iranians, shortly after they shot down an airplane filled with Canadian citizens.

Perhaps the writer is unaware that the world’s worst pandemic was the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919, where it is estimated that up to 500 million people worldwide were infected, with an estimated 10 to 100 million deaths.

Fortunately, air travel was not common in those days so the blame cannot rest there.

The writer suggests that it is unfair to lay the blame for the collapse of the Canadian economy at the feet of our beloved PM, as the Conservatives are recently claiming.

Perhaps she is unaware that the Fraser Institute has identified that the Liberals, under Trudeau, have accumulated the highest federal deficit of any Canadian government in non-war years.

This growth in the deficit was used to finance the reduction in unemployment we have seen, but is really just transferring the debt to our children in the future. And this monstrous debt accumulation has occurred in the good years, where the Dow has risen from 17,000 to almost 30,000 in the same period. How foolish.

Funding growth by borrowing is not sustainable as we are about to see. The Liberals should have been saving in the good years, not spending like profligate children.

The Liberals should have completed the major projects in the energy sector that would have created an additional $100 billion added into the economy instead of blocking any growth by dithering and refusing to enforce the rule of law.

Trudeau will soon be leaving office and his dress-up legacy behind. Somehow, Liberals will try to place the blame for the upcoming recession on the new government, which will be placed in a horrid situation with the financial mess left behind, but we all know better.