Scott Brison is the latest former Liberal cabinet minister to break publicly with his former colleagues. In a LinkedIn post , he derided a column in the Globe and Mail by former Finance Canada executive Claude Lavoie that defended high taxes and big government. Brison called it “socialist bafflegab.
” While he was not explicitly critical of Justin Trudeau or Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, Brison said Lavoie’s article “reflects the sort of advice offered to finance ministers who don’t know any better or simply do what the inexperienced ideologues in the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) tell them.” Brison is right, even if he is late in the day in going public with disquiet he felt long before leaving government in early 2019. The old saying about politicians is that they look for trouble whether it exists or not, diagnose it incorrectly and then apply the wrong remedies.
That just about sums up the Trudeau government’s economic policies. The die was cast in 2012 when Chrystia Freeland wrote a book about the super-rich called Plutocrats. In it, she made admiring use of a quote by former U.
S. Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, that “focusing on redistribution makes more sense than focusing on growth.” In a TED talk in 2013, she made explicit her belief that economic growth does not necessarily result in prosperity.
“Since the late 1990s, increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases in wages and employment ...
To be sure this new economy ben.
