OPSEU Region 4

Utter fiscal incompetence, moral bankruptcy, a total abdication of responsibility, election fraud, voter suppression, corruption and scandal, on a scale not seen in modern Canadian history. These are the hallmarks of the Harper Regime.

Income inequality is exploding; there are record numbers of homeless people sleeping on our streets. Working full time, the minimum wage cannot be stretched to cover the basic costs of living. Our veterans are being cheated out of the supports and services they earned, while CEOs pay nothing, no tax on stock option income, costing us one billion a year in lost taxes. Over 400,000 children go to bed hungry every day in Canada, and this government has quietly cut the tax auditors who investigate offshore accounts.

A Train full of toxic sludge explodes incinerating a whole community because the federal government cannot be bothered to emplace and enforce safety procedures that would protect Canada’s citizens, because that would be red tape. That would interfere with corporate profit. Instead they let the rail companies write the regulations, just as they allow drug companies to underwrite 65% of the cost of drug approvals. I was recently told by a national expert on pharmaceuticals, never to take a drug that has been on the market for less than 5 years because there is no longer anyway to trust that it is safe.

Even after seven years in power, they have no national industrial plan, not even a science advisor to turn to.

Forever on their knees before the alter of corporate greed, this Regime has offered up in near entirety our nations lakes, rivers and oceans without protection. They have transformed Canada into a petro state surrendering over 500,000 manufacturing jobs for 16,000 jobs in the world largest open pit waste land. Forget about secondary refinement and the 26,000 accompanying long term jobs that would bring, instead they have committed to the full banana republic plan, and will ship the toxic bitumen by train, ship, or pipeline anywhere. Objections be dammed. Legitimate Protesters are relabeled terrorists.

Our youth are forced into long term debt peonage, to obtain a higher education which is no longer a guarantee of better employment, or even any employment. While this Regime is quickly and quietly destroying our national public Health system and replacing it piecemeal with the worst system in the industrialized world, the private one south of our boarder.

Foulest of all, beyond even the secret trade deals designed to ensure corporate power and privilege, is their unjustifiable shackling of future generations of Canadians and indeed this nation through the borrowing of tens of billions of dollars annually to finance utterly useless, wasteful corporate tax cuts.

The Harper Regime’s incapacity for empathy, to even acknowledge the obvious, is staggering. Near daily now we hear from Harper, that he is in charge! But not responsible! Not even for what happens in his own office.

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