Here's the deal, cabinet - my priority is jobs; your priority is to cut things. If you don't cut things, you lose money. So you better be serious about it.
Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services? Cut, cut, cut - delay infrastructure repairs, reduce correctional staff, cheaper foods for inmates. Tough love.
Ministry of Community and Social Services? Reduce service access points - less footprint, less staff. If people really need help, after all, they'll make the effort to come all the way to you, right?
Ministry of the Environment? Studies cost money and besides, you're getting in the way of developing the Ring of Fire. Do less with less.
Ministry of Infrastructure? Let's just delay wherever we can, shall we?
Minister of Children and Youth Services? Actually, why do we need this Ministry at all? Do youth create jobs? Duh.
You can see how this works. It's basic behavioural economics; if you reward people for reduction, reduction will be their focus - not efficiency or sustainability, just cutting.
This will reduce costs in some places, exacerbate them in others and create a growing series of long-term costs as the consequences of thinking small take their toll on our children.
But we're focused on jobs tomorrow - what do we care about the day after?
Like his federal brethren, Hudak aims to implement an ideology he believes in, regardless of what evidence has to say about the infeasibility of that ideology. It may not be a recipe for disaster, but it's a great way to spark the social brushfire many people think we need.
Personally, I know we don't need to tear the whole thing down - society's not a tower, after all, it's a garden.
But Hudak's not listening to me - or most anyone else, it seems. I do hear tell he kowtows to one person, though.
It's a pity. As with all brushfires, though, the catalyst will get consumed and new growth will emerge.
Call it an evolution.
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