The view from Calgary (and the Toronto Star) “The NDP grassroots won’t even go door knocking anymore . . . the party only appeals to the mushy middle,” says Mitch Diamantopoulos, head of the journalism school at the University of Regina, a longtime activist and observer of Saskatchewan politics. For Diamantopoulos, the problems began in [...]
Grant Devine
When do you stop spending?
Jim Flaherty said today that he would spend to defend Canada from another recession. Under questioning from opposition MPs, Flaherty said for the first time that the Conservative government would move in with another round of stimulus spending if the world economy suffers a double-dip recession. “We would obviously do what is needed” if there [...]
The Shape of Things To Come
60 Minutes had a feature on the budget crisis’ that are happening at the state level. Stay with me on this one. "The most alarming thing about the state issue is the level of complacency," Meredith Whitney, one of the most respected financial analysts on Wall Street and one of the most influential women in [...]
Move over California, Illinois is broke as well
From The New York Times Even by the standards of this deficit-ridden state, Illinois’s comptroller, Daniel W. Hynes, faces an ugly balance sheet. Precisely how ugly becomes clear when he beckons you into his office to examine his daily briefing memo. He picks the papers off his desk and points to a figure in red: [...]
A look back
My early ideas on Social Services were shaped by the Devine Tories. As some of you know, the first campaign I worked on was the 1986 provincial election campaign that saw Grant Devine and the Progressive Conservatives re-elected. Devine was confronted with a large budget deficit, an extremely effective NDP opposition party, an ongoing drought [...]
We need to cut back
Back during the Devine era, I listened to Grant Devine give an impassioned speech about the deficit. The point was “yes we have a deficit but where do we cut back. You can’t close hospitals, you can’t have crumbling highways, you can’t cut essential services”. At the time the speech stuck with me (obviously as [...]
Deficits are Devine
Well it’s official, deficit financing on the scale not seen since the Devine era is back in Saskatchewan. The government of Saskatchewan is going to run a billion dollar deficit this year based on the fall of potash prices. As told by the Star Phoenix. The release of the government’s mid-year financial report Thursday shows [...]
GigaText 2.0
Long time Tories in Saskatchewan still cringe at the name but it actually looks like Google has done what the Devine Tories and GigaText could not, provide an accurate and automated translation from French to English or English to French. Too late to save Grant Devine’s political career though. Timing is everything.
