Oxygentax

A little cheering up as the Conservative's budget passes through the House of Commons

British government urged to follow the Canadian debt reduction strategy.

The problem is that Canada's strategy in the 90s really doesn't help the British government reduce their deficit now. It wasn't that Canada necessarily reduced the size of it's bureaucracy in the 90s, it's that the federal government had the benefit of the GST growing into its own (the original deficit reduction strategy, brought in by Mulroney's Conservatives to erase the deficits which first started in the 60s), added to by a reduction in transfers to the provinces, which more or less forced them to increase taxes or make due without.

Y'see Mr. Butler, Canada's federal governments at the during the late 80s and mid 90s DID make some tough decisions to their budgets in order to erase the deficits, but those choices weren't just a matter of reducing the size of the bureaucracy... they were more about raising taxes (some of which should have been raised in order to make a couple of programs self-sustaining) and off-loading expenditures to the provinces than they were about real cost cutting.

If Britain truly wanted to follow Canada's model, then they should take a good hard look at emulating our future, not our past.