Friday, September 12, 2008

Harper wants to sell off more of Canada...

This is from the Globe. Harper is a great admirer of the U.S. and has several times been very critical of Canada. It is not surprising he wants to sell more of our companies and resources to foreigners. Here are a few choice quotes of Harper before he became our prime minister:

Your country [the USA], and particularly your conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world."-Stephen Harper, then vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition, in a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing American think tank."A culture of defeat..."- Stephen Harper, negatively describing Canada's Atlantic provinces! May 2001."Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it. Canadians make no connection between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state and the fact that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living substantially lower than yours, a massive brain drain of young professionals to your country, and double the unemployment rate of the United States."- Stephen Harper, then vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition, in a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing American think tank

Note that the U.S. measures unemployment rates differently and in a way that makes it relatively lower than ours but as of now the U.S. is even with us, so actually worse.

Harper promises to relax foreign investment rules


STEVEN CHASE
Globe and Mail Update
September 12, 2008 at 8:09 AM EDT
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said today a Tory government would change federal law to open Canada to more foreign investment, including the airline and uranium mining industries.
But it would also give tougher scrutiny to takeovers by non-Canadians, he vowed, promising a new national security test for buyouts that might threaten the country's strategic interests.
Mr. Harper said a new Tory government would raise the threshold for automatic government reviews of all foreign takeovers to $1-billion in gross asset value from $295-million today. This would be phased in over four years.
A Conservative government would also seek to open Canada's airlines to more foreign ownership, raising the investment limit for outsiders to 49 per cent from 25 per cent.
But this would only apply to foreign jurisdictions — such as the European Union and the United States — once those nations granted the same rights to Canadian investors through bilate

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