How Canada Became Socialist: A Warning To Americans

William Gairdner:

So Trudeau and his "gang of five" of the time (Trudeau, Marchand, Lalonde, Chretien, and Begin), had to figure out, in Maoist style, how to get around the "keep your hands off local government" rules in the constitution.

They did so with a specific and very simple strategy. They said: 1) Let's not touch the constitution. that's too tough, and would take a lot of persuading. 2) Instead, let's write up socialist national standards for everything we can think of, and then raise taxes like crazy on individual citizens. 3) Then, instead of dictating or forcing any lower jurisdiction to subscribe to the plan, let's bribe them to take part, with their own money! We'll just offer a lot of that new tax money to any province that agrees to become socialized in the way we wish to see. All we have to do to socialize a federation is "stuff their mouths with gold" (a phrase used by Health Minister Aneurin Bevan, when he introduced socialized medicine to Britain).

In other words, Trudeau and Company conceived a plan to financially bribe the provinces into surrendering their control over formerly and solely and strictly provincial matters. Presto: new regulations to socialize all of Canada were introduced funded by so-called "shared-cost" programs, and they were soon willingly accepted by every province (except gutsy Alberta, which fought this program, but eventually caved in) in exchange for billions of dollars sent back to them in "transfer payments" - that is, in exchange for gobs of money that had first been extracted from them in taxes.

That is exactly what I suspect Obama is going to try in the USA to break down what he sees as excessive "states rights" in America, in order to universalize his social programs, suppress states rights further where he can, and draw all under his new socialist policy umbrella.