I hate to say I told you so but....

... I told you so. It looks like the Harper Tories are going to bury their heads in the sand like they were going to do during the first dip of recession. Basically Flaherty has told the Commons finance committee that spending is the cause of the recession and that there won't be anything coming down the pipe but cuts and balanced budgets.

That strategy of tax and spending cuts worked all so well for R.B. Bennett during the Great Depression and I suspect if the Harper Tories stick to their ideological guns they'll reap the same reward of decades of non-Conservative rule. Here's why:

First off, by not stimulating the economy and only providing tax cuts, the Harper government will encourage the people with the money to hold on to it. As can be seen in the US (and noted by that well known leftist Warren Buffett) tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations have not lead to job creation but the opposite in fact. The same will happen here and the result will be the same as it was during the Bennett administration. Lots of unnecessary hardship for the unemployed (mostly in southern Ontario) which will fail to bring the votes in to the Conservatives next election. Not that this will stop the Harper Tories as they don't care who gets hurt in the name of ideological purity.

Such a path may even hurt them in the west, primarily outside of Alberta. With the Harper Tories hell bent to eliminate the Wheat Board, regardless of the outcome of a plebiscite about the central desk's fate and the economy about to tank, this could cause much hardship for prairie farmers as well. Given that outside of Alberta many of the races were quite close, this could also not bode well for the re-election bids of many Conservative MP's. The irony being that the Wheat Board was set up as a re-election bid by, you guessed it, R.B. Bennett.

So we have the Tories bent on being ideologically blind as we head into the second dip of the recession. From the looks of things past, this will mean large amounts of unnecessary hardship for Canadians. The silver lining in this nasty storm cloud is, that if history holds any lessons, it will be decades before Canadians elect another Conservative government again.