Whodat? Surely the MP speaking in Calgary on a YouTube video that is now making the rounds does not belong to a government now running massive deficits that will soon equal those run-up from both World Wars combined.

Whodat? None-other than Maxime Bernier. Bernier gave a speech that as Andrew Coyne noted should not be remarkable, except that as things currently stand, any politician willing to openly challenge the new Ottawa-consensus of deficit spending, corporate welfare, bailouts and interventionism must clearly be out of his or her mind.

Or the only one in it.

Bernier made the case for a concept that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) has been calling for in terms that should send shivers down the spins of the bureaucratic Mecca that is Ottawa, Zero Growth in Government. Spending since 2003 has grown by 60% under both Liberal and Conservative governments, well beyond even the combined rates of inflation and population growth (2.5% annually during this period), which in itself is massive.

A politician arguing that spending be frozen without any increase at its current level, forcing government to live within it's means and decide within actual bounds how to re-allocate finite resources sounds nothing short of radical in today's Ottawa.  That should say more about today's Ottawa than it does about Maxime Bernier.

But it still does say a lot about Bernier who in this speech has made a gutsy move to say something independent and dare I say...conservative?  Recognizing that he may be on more than an extended leave from cabinet (symbolic perhaps of all fiscal conservatives?) lets hope that Bernier is preparing to become the lone voice in Parliament calling for sanity in our public finances.