Bailing Out

Jim Arnett, appointed only 3 weeks ago as special auto industry advisor to Stephen Harper and Dalton McGuinty, has quit his job. Although he will continue to work with McGuinty, he appears to have had irreconcilable differences with the Harper Conservatives over the plan for restructuring the auto industry.

Federal insiders said yesterday the Conservative government never really saw eye-to-eye with Arnett on what needed to be done, and Ottawa has no immediate plans to look for a successor.

That sounds pretty bad. This sounds even worse:

Instead, Ottawa will rely on internal advice on how GM, Chrysler and Ford can be made more competitive.

Fantastic. Hopefully, these advisors will be as productive and credible as other giants of Conservative "internal advice":

Wajid Khan: Harper's former special advisor on mid-east affairs. Khan's report on the middle east was so top-secret it was never released to the public, and so influential that Stephen Harper was single-handedly able to use it to bring lasting peace to Arabs and Jews. Khan worked all of these miracles while possibly only violating Elections Canada spending laws to the tune of $30, 000, which most Canadians considered a bargain.

Jim Prentice, Lisa Raitt, John Baird: Together, these three intellectual superstars comprise Harper's environment & energy committee. Just like Obama's energy czar Steven Chu (who won a Nobel Prize in Physics and is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), this team's scientific credentials speak for themselves. Prentice is a lawyer who specializes in physical property rights and served as director of the Calgary Winter Club. Raitt is a lawyer who was the former CEO of the Toronto Port Authority. And Baird has a Bachelor of Arts from Queen's and has been a vegetarian since 1997. Toss in Rona Ambrose, and you have a true scientific powerhouse that has helped to make Canada the envy of the world when it comes to action on the environment.

With internal advisors like this, I have no doubt that Canada's New Government can guarantee the automakers a rosy future, just as Jim Flaherty projected bugdet surpluses for the next five years. And we all know how that turned out.

Prentice Bitchslapped by Bonner

Kudos to Susan Bonner for holding Jim Prentice to account on today's edition of Politics on CBC. I almost felt sorry for Prentice out there. It must be hard having to fill in for an absentee Finance Minister on marching orders from Grand Wizard Harper to disseminate lies and disinformation to the general public. Today, the CPC propaganda continued unabated, with Prentice trying his best to lie through his teeth about not only a Liberal spending platform that has yet to be released, but also (incredibly) about the previous Liberal government record with respect to deficit reduction and balanced budgets.

When Prentice smeared Liberals as "tax & spend", and tried to credit Harpo with being the first to balance budgets, Bonner quickly jumped in to point out that it was successive Liberal governments under Chretien and Martin that delivered balanced budgets and paid down a deficit in excess of 40 billion dollars left by Conservative Lyin' Brian Mulroney. Despite being challenged by such facts, which are a matter of public record, Prentice huffed and puffed and responded that "we could debate these things all day".

As an incredulous Bonner further pressed him on how one could "debate" the facts, Prentice's response was to say that during the previous Liberal governments, he credited "the Canadian taxpayer" for balancing the budget. He neglected to explain how precisely the taxpayer accomplished this all by his lonesome. Nor did he delve into explaining the overall benefits of a Harper GST cut that seems to have impacted few except for businesses and other organizations that are pocketing millions in the form of pennies per transaction not passed on to consumers of most small ticket items purchased every day.

A decent rebuttal by John McCallum followed, but the bitter taste of Prentice's douchebaggery lingered in my mouth. What kind of a person appears on national television with nothing but a pack of lies and a total lack of integrity? If I were Prentice, I'd be writing an angry letter to Mssrs Harper and Flaherty tonight. It doesn't speak much for Prentice that he has been chosen by his masters to be thrown to the wolves in this manner. If the PM and Finance Minister want to dig in the ditch of disinformation and revisionist history, they should grab some shovels and do some of the dirty work themselves.

Postscript: Can we just put Don Newman out to pasture? Susan Bonner appears to be a superlative host in nearly every way.