if what carney ends up doing is reducing or cancelling the relatively progressive (in the sense that the wealthy pay more) consumer carbon tax and replacing it with a regressive consumption tax on imports by wrapping himself in the flag to sell it (and from this point on, i will refrain from using the word "tariff" or the terminology of "retaliatory tariff". i will instead strictly use the terminology of "import tax" or "regressive consumption tax"), that will work out to a massive shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor, which is exactly the kind of policy that bankers love and have been pushing for the last sixty years. since 1970, we've seen an astronomical downloading in the tax burden, and continuing that shift seems to be the entire point of carney's fiscal strategy. he's also calling for a cancelling of the carbon tax rebate and to replace it with income tax cuts on the "middle class", which in liberal party terminology is just code for the rich. it's a massive shift upwards in wealth, consistent with and an extension of everything else that has defined the neo-liberal era, fiscally. i've been nailing trudeau for ten years for being too right-wing on economics, but he seems like a socialist in comparison to carney.

worse, he wants to balance the budget. this is not the time to concern yourself with the irrelevance of balanced budgets. nobody cares about balanced budgets, and to the extent that it concerns your average voter, most people just hear "cuts in services" when politicians talk about balancing budgets. canada is not in the poor fiscal position it was in in the 90s, and we have no motives to incur the kind of difficult cuts in government spending that we had to endure through the 90s to chase off the vampires at the imf, which mark carney is basically one of. the issues we have in front of us are poor healthcare delivery, mass poverty, a housing crisis, drug addiction, environmental degradation, climate change....we should be talking about dramatically increasing government spending as a percentage of gdp to deal with these massive problems we have in front of us that are in a large sense a consequence of previous attempts at budget balancing, not talking about balancing the budget. the imf isn't on our ass right now at all. in that sense, carney is very much the wrong person at the wrong time. shifts in the tax burden from the rich to the poor and cuts in services to balance the budget is not what canada needs at this time, but what canadians should be rallying around each other and strenuously fighting to avoid. that prescription will severely harm us, make us weaker and make us easier to invade.

i'm not going to support these shifts in fiscal and tax policy.

rather, i'm going to aggressively campaign against them and do everything i can to explain them to low income people so that they understand what the proposals are and don't vote against their own interests.

the simple analysis is that mark carney is a banker and his fiscal and tax policies reflect that fact. they're exactly what you'd expect from a banker. do you want to vote for a banker? does that sound like a smart choice to you?