The Rest of the Story

It must be the training that lawyers get that makes them so good at telling only part of every story. Recently, Liberal mouther Britt Dysart penned a piece in the TJ that allegedly quoted the Globe and Mail as being supporters of the recent provincial budget.

What Dysart quoted was some glowing comments, but unfortunately he left out the part that the comments were not written by the Globe and Mail editorial board, but they were found in a column by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies that was reprinted in the Toronto paper. And while the quotes were complimentary towards the tax cuts, AIMS overall rating of the provincial budget was a turkey. As the column rebuts itself: “Even with fewer and lower tax rates, the New Brunswick tax system will still be disproportionately dependent on job-killing personal income taxes.”

What the President of the Liberal Party was doing is the equivalent of an ad that quotes a famous reviewer as saying “Go see this movie...” - when in fact the full quote from the movie critic was “Go see this movie if you want to waste $10 and 2 hours of your life”. Only in this case, the Graham Liberals are putting us $2 billion dollars into debt and wasting 4 years of opportunity.

For the record, the Globe and Mail editorial board had this to say about the recent budget: “Some of this restraint is sensible in tough times; while private-sector jobs are being lost, there is no reason for generous pay increases to be dispensed to public employees. Nor is a move to a more competitive corporate tax rate to be frowned upon. But personal tax cuts - particularly those that go toward upper-income earners, whose rate will drop as much as five percentage points on their highest earnings - are less likely to provide economic stimulus during a recession than well-targeted spending, since some of the money will be saved rather than spent. Moreover, the long-term cut to revenues will make it difficult to balance the books even by 2012-13, as the Liberals have optimistically projected.”

Far from a ringing endorsement.