One thing about Danny Williams and the Government he ran, was that the son of a gun told you like it was. If it was good, he told you it was good – if it was bad, he told you it was bad and if it was just OK, then he told you it was OK.
That’s why people liked Danny – he wasn’t a politician’s politician, he was more interested in playing the game for his personal amusement than anything else, and it amused Danny most to see the politicians squirm when he didn’t play by the rules.
Such is not the case for the current Government, though, I’m afraid. This is a Government who plays the political card right to the bitter end – it’s a Government that feels they were elected to be politicians above being representatives of their respective districts.
It’s a Government that still plays games – but not with each other, but rather with the people of the province.
For weeks, Dunderdale and Marshall have been ‘warning’ people about how terrible things were going to be with the provincial budget. But once again, it’s been downplayed to the extreme when the thing actually got released. All the news reports say things ‘aren’t as bad as we thought.’
But wait a second – the people saying that, are the same people who told us it was going to be bad. Not only that – they’re the ones who prepared the budget! So are we to assume that Tom Marshall woke up on Tuesday, checked his email, and said to himself ‘oh, well look at that – all that stuff I said before was a huge stretch. We’re actually doing pretty good!’
Of course not! We got played. We got swooned – bamboozled – all in an effort to give the illusion of a trusting Government who brought us back from the brink of disaster. Meanwhile – they’re the ones who control everything in the first place. It’s up to them what kind of surplus they run, and how far they drive us farther into debt. They knew the results of this weeks, maybe even months ago – but yet, they lead us down the garden path, almost ‘preparing’ us for the worst, so that we’d be happy when it turned out better than hoped for.
That’s classic politics, and classic political drama – and both things is something this Dunderdale Government is becoming increasingly famous for – which is why you should be upset that the people we’ve elected to lead us, are playing games with our emotions and our lives as a whole.
With that said, though, Marshall did get one thing right this week. With a deficit predicted for the next couple of years, we’re scheduled for another surplus in 2014.
How convenient, right in time for an election.
- Rudy Norman
