What will it take for Canadians to rebel against the mismanagement of their hard-earned tax dollars?
Photo Credit: DoobyBrain.com

If you can’t tell right off the bat, I’m blatantly plagiarizing the not-yet-late and great Bob Dylan. But whereas Bob was talking about peace and love, I’m talking about pure old cash. That’s right. The evil force that makes our world go round (second most powerful force after gravity). You see, I’m getting exasperated folks. Unemployment rates are sky-rocketing while many individuals and businesses have been forced into bankruptcy because their money-making niche has flat-out disappeared. Governments are cutting back on social programs, dipping their hands into public coffers while denying the public of much needed community programs. Everyone’s running in the red. What is going on, we wonder. It’s a recession, we’re told. You and I both know that if I were to join the crusade of investigative journalism, all I would have to report are useless and senseless facts and figures which even the most uneducated person in Canada with a wit of common sense would disparagingly shake their head at. Not to mention a bunch of “did not return my call” and “refused to comment”. In the face of so much adversity, how can we possibly get at the truth?
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The Canadian government's bureaucracy is hiding the ineffectiveness of our current political system.

My esteemed colleagues here at InformedVote.ca have done an amazing job over the last week bringing to light non-publicized, yet incredibly important facts and figures normally lost in the massive bureaucratic vacuum that is organizing and leading this country of ours down the road to…where? I no longer know what to think. What are we achieving as a country? Delinquent on our promises to reduce emissions, maintain economic integrity, fight terrorism and protect social services, it’s becoming obvious to me that Canadians as a whole have lost their idealism. We can blame our politicians all we want, but the sad fact is that these public figures we’re so quick to criticize are elected by us, the Canadian public.

Once every few years, a steadily declining number of us don our thinking caps, pay attention to a few of the insults thrown back and forth between political parties, and decide to grant stewardship of this great nation to the group that appears to be the least ignorant, arrogant and threatening.
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Premier Gordon Campbell with a bad case of Olympic fever.

A friend of mine recently used her Facebook status to pose the following question: Can some one please explain the harmonized sales tax in layman’s terms? The first comment she attracted was a sincere attempt to explain the details of BC’s newest tax structure without any criticism of the hike. My irritated brain immediately commanded my fingers to type – “Everyone in BC starts to pay 12 percent tax on everything. The government gives themselves raises with the extra money and the rest of it gets mismanaged on things like useless projects that lines the pockets of their friends who own big development companies.” There, I thought to myself after posting my contribution, that should incense a few people, perhaps prompting some serious discussion on the topic and awareness of how little taxpayers know of what is actually going on with their money behind the proverbial closed doors. My self-satisfaction lasted as long as it took for two more comments to appear after my own. The first one read “I like glitter and bunnies.” The second? “I like glitter and bunnies too!”
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