Billion Dollar Bastards: you call these "small" cuts?

Last week, this page promised to tell you this week what a deluded malevolent prick Stephen Harper is. Unfortunately, this page gets to deliver this week. As illustrated, what constitutes "small cuts" is really in the eye of the beholder. The Conservatives' yanking of a billion dollars in program spending may appear insignificant in Ottawa's big fiscal picture, but to the Canadians who rely on those programs, that billion was going a long way up until the axe fell.

canceling the Court Challenges program renders the Charter of Rights and Freedoms useless if one can't afford to access the Supreme Court of Canada to defend your Charter Rights. That move foreshadows the hate-minded agenda of a Conservative majority government, as do cuts to women's programs and research into medicinal marijuana use. A billion dollars is a small price to pay for the advance campaign to outlaw same-sex marriage, criminalize a woman's right to choose, and kick off a Reagan-style war on drugs that only drives dealers into a harder, more lethal trade and further underground.

Another area where a little goes a long way (at least all the way to Kandahar) is Canada's military. Remember how pleasantly surprised we were when the first thing out of the new PM's mouth was committing to asserting Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic? canceling a radar early warning proves the Conservatives never had any intention of following through on standing up to the Bush Administration. That commitment is just like their "commitment" to reducing hospital wait times or universal child care, so I guess that makes them equal opportunity offenders. The Arctic may be remote and inhabitable for most of us, but at least its Canadian territory and spending defence dollars there won't prop up the opium trade and America's perpetual war war machine like it will spending them in Afghanistan.

These "small" cuts show Canadians the big picture: this is a government intent on playing to its right-wing fundamentalist base and doubletalking swing voters in order to gain a mortal lock on Parliament. Hopefully, the cuts to Harper's caucus will be a little more severe after the next election.