What it a surprise it must be to Canadian voters to suddenly learn the much promised budget surplus won’t arrive after all (see The Globe and Mail: “Tories back off pledge to show surplus by 2014-15”). The reality is a surplus won’t arrive for at least ten years. Mr. Flaherty hasn’t got a budget or economic forecast right since his billion-dollar deficit days in the Ontario legislature or since his most recent pre-recession predictions when he was six months late even noticing the economy was heading south, and then repeatedly got wrong the size of the coming defit as well. I guess all those slick Harper-Land promises to Canadians of income splitting due when a surplus finally appears will just have to wait, though we all should notice the corporations will get their tax cut on time, as promised.

Let’s realistically review a Conservative economic stewardship that:

1) After inheriting a huge Liberal surplus, the Harper Conservatives almost immediately created a deficit prior to the recent recession by awarding a large corporate tax cut as well as cutting the GST (a populist policy driven by ideology rather than sound economics).

2) For the first eight months of the recession the Harper Conservatives repeatedly denied Canada was in a recession, insisting there was no recession, no deficit and that the budget would balance.

3) Suddenly realizing there was, indeed, a recession, Jim Flaherty tried unsuccessful on multiple occasions to accurately estimate the coming deficit, arriving finally after months of incorrect guesses at a final figure of $56 billion.

4) The $56 billion deficit figure is twice what it should have been given the loss of the Liberal surplus, the GST reductions, and the corporate tax cuts.

5) The $56 billion is the largest deficit in Canadian history, second only to a previous record deficit established by the Mulroney Conservatives.

6) The Conservative economic action plan for the $56 Billion wasted much of it disproportionately on Tory riding projects.

In spite of the deficit, the Harper Conservative regime continues to spend:

Further adding to the deficit by having to borrow another $1 billion to fund photo ops, a fake lake and an over-the-top, often illegal and repressive police presence at the G8/G20.

Adding yet more to the deficit by borrowing another $8-10 billion for prisons we don’t need.

Topping up that deficit by another $30 Billion ($16 billion by the voodo math of the Conservatives) for single engine, F35 jets.

Rewarding corporate Canada once again by giving them an additional $6 billion in unfunded corporate tax cuts.

With that kind of economic leadership, the country hasn’t a chance of recovery.

With the election of a majority Conservative government, Canadians have opted for what must have seemed to many of them to be the promise of political and economic stability. Much of this will turn out to be an illusion. We are challenged to ask what the next several years are likely to bring as Harper extends his command and control approach to governing this country. To begin, the deficit will take at least a decade or more to be eliminated, as opposed to the four years being put forward. Harper also will appoint four of the nine members of a progressively more conservative Supreme Court. All the opposition parties will be ignored since a majority gives Harper a completely free hand to do as he pleases. The politics of fear and loathing has won the day in this country, and its masters will continue to attack the reputations of those who show the strength of their convictions. People who otherwise might have disagreed with the Conservatives are now even less likely to speak out. Intimidation and public humiliation are now understood to be the reward for those to dare to speak the truth. This parliament will no longer have to worry about what people think as right-wing ideology and manufactured census data will routinely become the measure for funding. None of this is new to the Conservative party which for the past several years has systematically undermined many of our democratic freedoms, or has attacked or vilified those brave enough to oppose them. One day, perhaps a year or two from now, Canadians will wake up and recognize just how repressive their government has become, just how much it has hidden from sight or the things it has done in secret. Our democracy has entered a very dark period in its history, one likely to be affected for a generation or more.

Keith Maillard and I recently were discussing the process of editing and somehow we arrived at a point in the conversation where we talked about the notion of truth, and just how much is too much or two little to say. In the middle of that tributary he said, “If the truth I told in a manuscript included “everything”, you wouldn’t want to read it”. I quite liked that statement, and later we exchanged the following emails.

I began by saying, “It says something about the notion of too much truth being too much to absorb, bear, or to be of interest. Maybe we instinctively know ‘everything’ is no longer the truth, or rather is a truth that has no meaning or relevance in our lives. In a sense a truth that has become ‘everything’ is no longer the kind of truth we’re looking for or that satisfies us. It seems the whole truth isn’t whole at all, but is made up of a selection of parts from the whole where together their sum has become greater than the whole. The truth we humans are interested in is always the one that has been focussed and interpreted, which brings me to the act of selecting/editing from ‘everything’.

“I don’t think the notion of making selections (the absolute tyranny of choice) makes something less true; what it does change is the perspective we have of the truth. Selection doesn’t diminish truth, but gives it a stronger face and focus. It doesn’t take us further from the truth, but closer. Think of it like the sculptor’s block of granite that gradually is chiselled into the truth of its particular being. In this sense, the silence of saying/writing nothing is an extreme at the opposite end of ‘everything’, both of which convey nothing of themselves, or of truth, being too little or too much of a truth we struggle so hard to apprehend.”

In response, Keith wrote, “If I told you ‘everything’, you wouldn’t want to read that story because it would be thousands of pages long and you would be drowned in the details of mundane life. In order to tell you something you might want to read, I have to select a smaller amount of what to tell you. Each time I make a selection, it becomes more readable and less true–although it’s still all ‘the truth’. By the time I have it boiled down to something that resembles a publishable book, it’s far far from the original ‘truth’ – even though it is all still true. I don’t see any way to avoid this. It just seem to be a simple fact of the writing process.

“The selection is exactly that–a selection. The selection process has to try for a kind of truth too, but all the untold stories hang around afterward, like ghostly presences in the background, saying, ‘Hey, buddy, don’t forget us. We’re just as true as the stuff you told’. Making the selection is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. That shorter pattern has to make its own truth, and it has to feel true enough that you’re willing to live with it. We do this all the time whether we write it down or not. We all continually narrate the stories of our own lives. The truth is the pattern that we make on any given day just to stay alive.”

Edward Carson & Keith Maillard