Right on red

Dear Leader tells the National Post, without any obvious sense that he’s pulling Adam McDowell’s innocent leg:

We have a Reform-based Conservative Party which is probably ideologically more right-wing. I’m very fiscally conservative. What I wanted to do in Newfoundland and Labrador was get our fiscal situation under control. We were headed to bankruptcy six years ago. Now we’re a have-province. That’s the fiscally conservative side.

On the other side, I’m very socially conscious. Our poverty reduction strategy has been nationally acclaimed. We’ve doubled our health-care budget. We’ve put a lot of money into education. I felt our transportation and communication infrastructure was very important. I’m trying to give us all the basics to succeed after a non-renewable oil [resource] moves on.

Let’s see… a province whose biggest employer is itself, where the minister once in charge of doling out large swathes of that “socially conscious” side described his own spending as “unsustainable”, where the notionally-arms-length state energy corporation intervenes ever more into the shell of what used to be the private-sector economy, and where the government modestly leads its own parade to celebrate a massive intergenerational transfer payment, that’s a “very fiscally conservative”, “Reform-based Conservative Party” that is “ideologically more right-wing”?

Idealogically more right-wing than what?

What “fiscally conservative” side does Danny Williams have, besides the impeccable timing to sweep into office on a wave of mania and demagoguery just as all those “giveaways” of the past are flushing the provincial treasury with cash?

Somewhere, poor old Liam O’Brien is rolling in his grave.

[Or, he would be, if he weren’t happily still alive. – ed.]

Or, he would be, if he weren’t happily still alive.