Self proclaimed "watered down" Liberal budget (as tabled by the Conservatives)

The Liberals have called this Conservative budget a "watered-down" Liberal budget. Of course this merely confirms the allegations of every New Democrat that they are one and the same party. Cliché's aside there are some startling and sobering points that can't be side-stepped with respect to the Liberals' track record. I'm attempting to draw as much attention to two aspects of the budget which seem to get drowned out in the media:

Environmental issues: have been effectively, and unacceptibly wiped off the political map, with nothing left but crumbs for research in Universities (none of which is tied to environmental research). What's even more offensive is that the limited amount of money dedicated to CO2 emissions reductions (if you could call it that) is dedicated to the Tar Sands and East Coast Oil patch research and development of carbon sequestration. This process is of course last on the "to do" list of any self-respecting environmentalist (down on the list near corn based ethynol and biofuels).

Secondly, the introduction of P3 financing of federal transfers for municipalities. I didn't quite see this coming and I certainly didn't think Canada's infrastructure debt and starving of municipalities could get much worse. Federal transfers under the Liberals have more or less dried up to the point of being considered a pittence, and this suprizingly makes a publicly funded pittence look heroic.

The legacy of P3s financing on Hospitals in Ontario has been a tail of overblown budgets for new hospitals, with taxpayers footing the bill for competitive waste, on top of comprimised service and poor accountibility. Under a new Crowned Corporation (Jim "cap in hand" Flaherty calls it an "independant" corporation), private investors can now buy in to profits to be generated at the expense of municipalities and service users.

Perhaps this hasn't dawned on people yet, but this means that we could end up paying increases in our already pricey transit tickets to finance the profit margin and cost overruns of the most well off corporations in Canada or indeed the world. I'm not letting this one drop.

I'm beyond stating that Dion has no spine. It took some backbone to flip the bird to 63.73% of the Canadian public... that is everyone who thought they voted for a minority parliament.