HEADED FULL-TILT FOR THE FISCAL CLIFF

After the election of Andrew Furey’s Liberals, I waited with bated breath for the suspiciously delayed Dame Moya Greene report on a plan that is supposed to provide a road map to the province’s economic recovery.

This plan, which we were promised, would deftly steer us away from the fiscal cliff that we have been speeding toward since the days of the Dunderdale government, some eight years ago. Dwight Ball was going to fix the problem but instead signed a labour agreement with our bloated provincial bureaucracy that contained a no-layoff clause. This latest Liberal government seems intent on whistling past the debt graveyard while being firmly determined to address all problems except the most pressing one. Send medical staff to Ontario (we’re all Canadians aren’t we?), rename Red Indian Lake, and most importantly, continue borrowing money to pay the bureaucracy.

And the borrowing continues even in the face of acknowledgment from all quarters that the provincial government does not have a revenue problem but a spending problem of Oxycontin-addiction proportion.

It appears this Liberal government is waiting for the federal government to offer a bailout; a bailout from a government who has yet to come across a cause that it wasn’t prepared to throw billions at and has succeeded in doubling the federal debt in a few short years. If anything is to be learned by history, this younger Trudeau is well on the fiscal debt path laid down by the senior Trudeau some 40 ago. I suggest it would be wise for Furey to hustle to the head of the federal money line before the feds have to appeal to the International Monetary Fund for its own bailout.

I despair at the financial future of this province and of the legacy of debt we are leaving our children and grandchildren — a legacy our elected politicians appear not to care about.

With apologies to Winston Churchill, never in our short 150-year history as a country, has so much money been spent, by so few, to such questionable effect.

Barry Imhoff

St. John’s