“Who Wins the Next Election Simply Does Not Matter”

You heard it here first.

After speaking with former chief economist for Toronto-Dominion Bank Don Drummond, the Ottawa Citizen’s Dan Gardner concludes that it really doesn’t matter if corporate taxes get cut or not, and all the squabbling between the Liberals (who oppose the cuts) and the Conservatives (who support them), is just smoke and mirrors obscuring the fact that the Canadian economy would look basically the same no matter which party was in charge. “There is widespread consensus about the basic questions of economic policy,” writes Gardner. “Who wins the next election simply does not matter.” All the words wasted in Parliament and the op-ed pages on a measly three per cent difference in tax rates is symptomatic of a country in which we largely agree on major issues to the point that our politicians are left to “focus on their differences and magnify them until a minor squabble … becomes grounds for electoral war.” Gardner’s got a good point, but don’t repeat it too loudly because the writers in The Mark Newsroom would like to keep their jobs.

In the Winnipeg Free Press Frances Russell throws out a bunch of scary statistics about Canada’s growing economic inequality, including that 3.8 per cent of households control 67 per cent of the country’s financial wealth and the poorest fifth of the population’s income has declined 20.6 per cent since 1980. Worldwide, economic inequality is becoming such an issue that many credit it with sparking the 2008 financial crisis and even right wing stalwarts like the Economist and the International Monetary Fund are dropping their monocles in astonishment at the growing gap between rich and poor. Russell attempts to seize the zeitgeist and attributes current uprisings in Egypt and Libya to a resurgent populism and social fragmentation caused by economic disparity. “Today, the Middle East. Tomorrow, who?” she asks. Presumably this is some kind of warning, but considering Gadhafi and Mubarak’s regimes have not been the most economically beneficial to their people, we’re not sure why she’s so negative about it.