Who's Maxime Bernier? From Separatist And Scandal To Tory Leadership Front-Runner (Part 1)

Maxime Bernier is unloading his baggage.

“I was separatist, I must have voted yes. Write I voted ‘yes,’ I have no problems with that,” he tells HuffPost Canada.

He supported sovereigntists during the 1995 Quebec referendum on independence. Now, he wants to lead a national party and be Canada’s next prime minister.

Admitting that he may have voted to split the country apart is perhaps Bernier’s latest display that he is the candid leader that some Canadians crave.

Canada Survived the Downturn By Ignoring Keynes

Since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2007, Keynesianism came back into fashion. One of John Maynard Keynes's central ideas is that when you find yourself in a crisis or a recession, the best solution is to increase government spending. Government spending will sustain overall demand, put everyone back to work, and kick-start the economy. The New Democrats and the Liberals are strong proponents of this theory.

Even if you already have a high level of accumulated debt, it doesn't matter. The solution to too much spending is more spending. The solution to high levels of debt is more debt.

There is something fundamentally wrong with that.

The key question you have to ask is this: Where does the money that governments spend come from? It has to come from somewhere. A government cannot inject resources into the economy unless it has first extracted them from the private sector through taxes; or put us further into debt by borrowing the money.