Dear friends

This can be seen at: http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/01/09/Masse/

Any comments? - esp re the Public Health claim above?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	one time canadian director for the international Monetary fund 
becomes Liberal leaders right hand mand
Date: 	Sun, 14 Jan 2007 23:29:26 -0400 (EST)
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Key Dion staff pick shows true economic colours
>by Murray Dobbin
January 12, 2007

Mea culpa. My only excuse is pretty lame: taking a federal Liberal leader's
statements and spin at face value.

In my last column looking at the next election, I got carried away with the
widespread (by his supporters and others) notion that the new Liberal leader,
Stéphane Dion, is a social liberal, a man to the left of his two predecessors,
Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. While anything (well, almost anything) is still
possible, the evidence for Dion's progressive positioning is — as a couple of
friends gently pointed out to me — pretty thin.

And getting thinner by the week.

The most recent evidence is found in revelations about Dion's new staff picks.
Key amongst them, it seems to me, is Marcel Massé who, according to The Globe
and Mail, will be Dion's principal secretary. Massé, a former senior cabinet
minister under Chrétien, “will serve as the senior adviser in many areas.”

This should put to rest the debate going on amongst many people as to just
what Dion's economic policies will be. But more than that, it is a disturbing
revelation about where Dion sits vis-à-vis the role of government.

I suggested, based on listening to the man as he competed for the leadership,
that Dion was a passionate believer in the role of government. But his
principal secretary (and his cabinet colleague from the Chrétien era) could
not be further from that belief unless he jumped off the scale. Massé's record
in the Chrétien government marks him as one of the most dedicated neo-liberals
and advocates of corporate globalization ever to hold a senior Canadian
cabinet post.

A long-time bureaucrat, Massé was a former Canadian director of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), and he is a hardliner on structural
adjustment. He once stated: “It isn't just the Third World that needs
structural adjustment — we all do, in one form or another. We should avoid the
temptation to let our desires for justice in the world obscure the view of
reality.” It leads me to wonder what Massé thinks of his boss's third policy
pillar: social justice.

More than any single individual, Massé was responsible for designing the
systematic gutting of the role of the federal government between 1995 and
1997, when Paul Martin's unprecedented budget cuts took place. He was chair of
the Program Review Committee, which, despite its benign name, struck fear into
the hearts of every Liberal cabinet minister and was referred to throughout
the government as the Star Chamber.

Cabinet ministers, even the most senior, were invited to the committee to
receive — not to discuss or debate — their single piece of paper revealing the
size of the cut to their departments. Paul Martin, Massé and Martin's deputy
minister David Dodge (now head of the Bank of Canada) designed and implemented
the most radical restructuring of the Canadian state in history.

Massé opposed across the board cuts — he wanted, as did Paul Martin, to
rewrite the role of government. So he saved the largest cuts of all for what
we might call nation-building departments: transportation, natural resources,
industrial and regional development, the environment, agriculture and fisheries.

Then he delivered a savage, if not fatal, blow to the guiding principal of
social program universality, killing the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP), which
had provided national guidelines for social assistance since the era of Lester
Pearson, and the long-standing (1977) Established Programs Financing, the
method by which Ottawa provided targeted, accountable funding for health and
post-secondary education to the provinces. These two programs were now to be
delivered in a single lump sum to the provinces with no strings attached.

It was massive decentralization beyond anything Brian Mulroney had ever
contemplated and greater than even Preston Manning had publicly called for.
With the stroke of a pen, the three men reversed 40 years of federal
leadership in social policy.

That Stéphane Dion has chosen this particular man to be his principal
secretary comes as no surprise to those who have followed him closely.

When he first came to Ottawa, the academic he sought out for discussion and
advice was none other than Tom Flanagan, the extreme-right Calgary School guru
who advised and wrote policy for Preston Manning during the most critical
years of the Reform Party's growth. Dion had spent a formative year at the
Brookings Institution in the U.S., a strictly free-market research and policy
institute whose public policy perspective is light years from the social
liberalism of the Lester Pearson/Pierre Trudeau era.

His hard line on economic policy is also demonstrated in his attitude towards
labour. His voting record on anti-scab legislation introduced by the Bloc and
passed by the House? Dion opposed it twice and abstained once while most of
the Liberal caucus (and even some Conservatives) voted in favour.

On his leadership candidate website, Stéphane Dion claimed: “My vision is that
of a Canada that reconciles economic development, social development,
environmental sustainability and public health better than any other country
of our world.” But he also said that he believed the vicious cuts to social
spending by Paul Martin showed “compassion.”

These two declarations are irreconcilable. So, too, are Dion's stated
intention of creating jobs through the creation of a green economy and his
hiring of Marcel Massé as his most important economic advisor. Taking an
energy-guzzling economy focussed almost exclusively on exports to the U.S. and
turning it into one based on environmental sustainability would require an
enormous interventionist role for government. That is something Mr. Massé
could never abide.

Maybe the secret is in Mr. Dion's pledge to model his first election campaign
on Mr. Chrétien's winning 1993 bid. That election was based on the Red Book of
promises. It turned out to be the Book of Lies. And even more reason not to
give the Dion Liberals a majority. 

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