In her recent guest column, Oakville Beaver, April 26, Oakville MP Bonnie Brown misled Oakville voters by using the same name for Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), created in 2003, with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada under Brian Mulroney, which hasn't existed for five years.

Clearly, she either doesn't know the difference or is intentionally trying to confuse Beaver readers.

Brown also tries to re-write Canadian history by blaming the PC Party under Brian Mulroney for Canada's debt, which was intentionally created by her party - the very same Liberal Party that elected Pierre Trudeau as their leader when Canada had one of the smallest debts per capita of any country in the world and no deficits. When Trudeau was elected, Canada's debt was $11.3 billion and the deficit was zero. Post Trudeau, in 1984 our debt was $128 billion and our deficit had skyrocketed to $38 billion - totally out of control.

It was Trudeau, who announced that deficits don't matter and in the early '70s went on a massive vote-buying spree, purposefully expanding the size of government and social welfare programs far beyond our ability to pay for them.

That was when Canada's federal debts got out of control, not later. By 1979, the Liberal government borrowed more money than its total spending was in 1968, the year Trudeau took power. This spending drove inflation so high that the Liberals reversed a major 1974 election promise and froze Canadian wages and prices in a desperate attempt to control it.

By 1984, when the people of Canada elected a Progressive Conservative government, the federal annual deficit was the highest in history at $38 billion. Over 30 cents of every dollar collected went to pay interest on the debts the Liberals had intentionally created. Unemployment was the highest in Canada's history - a painful 12 per cent. The Progressive Conservative government under Brian Mulroney was faced with firing up the economy to get Canadians back to work using the 2/3 of revenues left after paying interest, and a deficit like a giant snowball rolling down a hill increasing in size every hour.

That is the dreadful and impossible deficit and debt situation the Liberals left our country in. And it was PC initiative in 1991 that finally defeated the national deficit! Our national debt never stopped growing until 1997 when revenues from the Progressive Conservative GST finally outstripped Liberal deficit spending, ironically a tax the Liberals swore they would cancel to win the 1993 election, and once again reversed once in power."
 
Mark Fleiszer