Dumping Premier Greg Selinger should only be the start for Manitoba’s governing New Democrats, opines the Winnipeg Sun.
The NDP MLAs who have called on Selinger to step down are concerned mainly with last year’s PST hike, the Sun notes, even though they all publicly supported it “and, for that matter, every other policy brought in by the Selinger government.”
Adds the Sun: “Yes, it’s time for Premier Greg Selinger to go. But it’s time for the entire NDP caucus to go, too.”
Un-welcome mat
Over at the Toronto Star, Shafiq Qaadri blasts the Harper government for having “done more to delay, block, withhold and even invalidate citizenship than any regime in our history.”
Qaadri writes that Conservative policies have reduced the number of physicians offering services in Arabic and six other languages, scrapped a backlog of foreign worker applications, and doubled or tripled the amount of time it takes for a foreign individual to join his or her spouse in Canada.
“In the front entrance of my son’s school, there are two posters which have the word ‘Welcome’ translated into 40 languages,” writes Qaadri. “I hope that Canada will once again be celebrated for such global inclusivity – even while we deal with the very real threats at home.”
Change taxes
It’s time to scrap property taxes and let municipalities raise money through income or sales taxes, argues Andrew Coyne in the National Post.
“The property tax conforms to no known principle of sound taxation, being neither fair nor efficient nor simple,” writes Coyne. “It attempts to measure both ability to pay and resource use at the same time, and fails at both: there’s no simple correlation between the value of the house you own and your income, and scarcely more of one with services consumed.”
Finger pointing
Blame the terrorists themselves, not Canada and its policies, for homegrown terrorism, writes Omer Aziz in the Globe and Mail.
Aziz said the Oct. 22 attacks in Ottawa shattered the national myth that “Canada was immune to the effects of terrorism.”
But it makes no sense to blame Canadian foreign policy, Aziz writes, noting that violent jihadists will kill innocent people regardless.
It’s their party
The recent establishment of a new Quebec-only federal political party spells bad news for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair, writes Tasha Kheirridin in the National Post.
Forces et Démocratie, the brainchild of former Bloc Québécois MP Jean-François Fortin and former NDP MP Jean-François Larose, “promises to put Quebec’s interest forward and end the centralization of power in Ottawa,” she writes.
Kheirridin speculates that the new party could drain support from
both the governing Conservatives and the NDP, whose stronghold is Quebec.
