Winnipeg prof: austerity next, whoever wins.A University of Winnipeg political science professor says Trudeau called the election before the downside of his overspending became apparent, and whoever wins must put the fiscal house in order..In an interview, Malcolm Bird told the Western Standard the spending party must end..“Regardless of who wins this election, fiscal austerity is going to come to the federal government. It’s going to come to the provincial governments simply because we’re gonna run out of money. And this is part of the reason why Trudeau has called this election…because he wants to cash in on, so to speak, the money that he borrowed and spent in political terms,” Bird said..“Canadians really need to consider this: the money is going to run out, and we are going to have to pare back the expensiveness of the welfare state, including at public employment, and including wages paid to public employees and the larger public sector employees, including people like professors. I don’t want to leave myself out of it.”.Most federal employees and professors have defined-benefit pension plans that guarantee them a rate of return equal to two percent times years worked times the average of the best five years of pay. That means someone who worked 35 years and made $100,000 a year on average in their final five years would be paid $70,000 per year in retirement..“This is a really, really important issue because in order to preserve the welfare state, we are going to have to carefully manage public resources, and we have not been doing that. And I realize that we had to borrow money during the pandemic, and I’m not against deficit financing, but we did borrow a lot, perhaps a little more than was required… but the dough is gonna run out and we’re gonna have to get used to that.”.Conservative Leader Erin O’ Toole said on August 31 he would continue the Liberal stimulus spending for one more year and balance the budget after ten years. His approval ratings climbed after announcing a modified form of Trudeau’s vaccination passport and force vaccination for federal employees. Still, Bird doesn’t think bureaucrats in Ottawa will hand him more seats..“My sense is that Ottawa…will probably stay NDP or Liberal, I don’t see a lot of shift there. A number of the Maritime ridings though, for a whole host of reasons I believe, potentially could go Conservative, which would illustrate wider trends that we’ll see reflected throughout other ridings in Canada.”.Bird thinks Maxime Bernier could win his PPC seat in Beauce, where his father was previously an MP, but his party won’t get much else..“He has quite a bit of personal appeal in that riding with his family and such, so he’d maybe win that,” Bird said..“Our political system, it drives everybody to the center, and so small parties don’t really do well… I really don’t see small parties like the Greens or Mr. Bernier’s party really appealing to people or gaining strength.”.Bird says without proportional representation, it’s hard for smaller parties to make gains. And he’s okay with that..“Whether they’re on the left or the right, the fight is over the median voter. The electoral system favors large parties with a wide geographic attraction. And the wonderful thing about this is it promotes moderation within those parties, and [yet] diversity of thinking because you need to appeal to a wide swath of the Canadian population in terms of geography, but also within the electorate itself.”. EKOS-Poll-Results- .An EKOS poll of 942 Canadians released August 31 placed CPC support at 35.9%, followed by the Liberals at 31.3, NDP at 18.0, BQ at 5.8, PPC at 5.0, and Greens at 3.2, with 0.7% choosing someone else. The margin of error was ±3.2%..Lee Harding is a Saskatchewan-based correspondent for Western Standard.
