While Liam O'Brien, the thin-skinned Connie blogger from Newfoundland and Labrador has a penchant for hurling personal abuse at those with whom he disagrees, his most recent post to the CBC blogger forum contains some thoughtful material.
"Canada's long history of debt and pork" discusses the Trudeau and Mulroney years and the amassing of public debt through the 1970s and 1980s.
Liam writes:
"[Author Colin]Campbell also pointed out that between 1964 and 1975, the federal civil service expanded 65 per cent, from 200,000 to 330,000. Some of this would almost seem normal given the new social programs created in the 1960s, until you remember that 99 per cent of that stuff is provincially-run.
So what accounts for the expansion? The short answer is pork. While their grandparents get treated in provincial hospitals and their kids attend provincial schools, most average Canadians only ever see their federal government on their tax returns or on the news, shuffling money from one place to another. With the exception of our proud but underfunded Armed Forces and RCMP, what does most of that central government bureaucracy really do? By 1984, the national debt increased tenfold -– from $20 billion in 1969 to well over $200 billion in 1984."
This section leaps out if for no other reason than Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador have been making a great deal lately of the supposed unfair decline in federal government jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador since the mid 1990s.
They have been crying loudly for commitments from the federal parties to address this problem by shifting more and more federal government workers into Newfoundland and Labrador.
Danny Williams letter to the three major federal party leaders includes at least one section directly linked to the whole issue of "federal presence" in the province.
But if you take O'Brien and Campbell at face value, the expansion of the federal public service throughout the Trudeau and Mulroney years across the country was due to one single cause, namely political pork.
I'll buy that.
But by the same token, one would also have to buy the point that the dramatic decline in the federal public service across the country after 1993 was an effort to tackle the federal debt and deficit to deal with the problem O'Brien is concerned about.
On just about every level, that puts O'Brien at odds with both local Conservatives and his federal leader. Stephen Harper is promising to restore federal jobs in places like Gander and to create new ones in Goose Bay.
O'Brien will undoubtedly try to rationalize this contradiction but it is a stark one. One the one hand, Liam points directly to a public policy problem, skips over the efforts under Liberals in the 1990s to deal with the concern he has, and then ignores entirely the current situation: namely that his political party of choice is determined to return to the very habits of spending for spending sake O'Brien criticizes.
And before he says anything about them again, my parents were married at the time of my conception let alone my birth and no, they were not first cousins.
Then again, even an inbred bastard could spot the fundamental, logical contradiction in Liam O'Brien the CBC blogger and Liam O'Brien's Conservative Party under Stephen Harper.
I will, however, give Liam full credit for posting a well written, thoughtful essay on the debt problem. It's good stuff and I'd recommend it to anyone.