Christine Elliott says she doesn’t know what Canada’s Finance Minister is doing for Canada?

If this Canadian Press article is any indication, it would appear as if Christine Elliott is going to crash and burn within the first few hours of announcing her leadership bid for the Conservative Party of Ontario. One of her biggest claims to fame is that she is the spouse of Jim Flaherty. This may also be her biggest liability, since Christine is quoted as saying:

"I can't really speak to what the minister of finance is doing for Canada," she replied.”

How convenient. How bizarre. I guess she is in the very same boat that we are all in, as none of us know what the minister of finance is doing for Canada either.

The likely explanation for his dearth of knowledge on the part of Christine about what Jim may be up to is the fact that she is trying to obscure the pivotal role that Jim played in making the highly contentious HST possible.

Playing dumb about that isn’t going to work for Christine in a campaign scheduled to run for months on end.

You see this answer of hers was in response to the question of:

“Did her husband make a mistake in signing a $4.3-billion accord with Ontario to merge the provincial sales tax with the federal GST, [to create the HST] ?

The reason for her “I know nothing” response is that a major part of her campaign will be..... railing against the HST.....only made possible by Jim.

Meanwhile the other major aspect of her candidacy is that Jim is her spouse. It would appear that insofar as Christine’s campaign is concerned, her greatest asset is also her greatest liability.

So is this cognitive dissonance, inherent in Christine’s campaign, going to lead to another situation where Christine campaigns on a party position, as she did with John Tory’s ill-fated policy of faith based funding for schools, only to deny any association with that policy when it becomes more liability and less asset to have done so?

Flip flopping must run in the family, because it was Flaherty who also campaigned on a promise to “never tax income trusts”. Remember that.....it was about 35 billion dollars ago.....in retirement savings and years of hard work? But who is concerned about their retirement savings these days. Certainly not these two, gold plated government pensioners, especially given Jim’s pension income splitting.