Just like Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper owes much of his political success to his finance minister.

Paul Martin, Chrétien's finance minister for 9 budgets, is often credited for steering Canada out of its dire economic situation of the mid-1990s.

In fiscal year 1994/95, our debt rating was downgraded, the deficit had reached $36.6 billion, and interest costs paid by the government on the national debt reached $44.2 billion, consuming a whopping 33.8 per cent of budget revenues.

Martin introduced a series of austere budgets cutting program spending by $10.4-billion, and slashing transfer payments to the provinces by $4.5 billion.

The measures worked, Martin was lauded both nationally and internationally, and the Chrétien government went on to win two more elections.

This decade's 'Boy Wonder' is none other than Jim Flaherty - Stephen Harper's only ever finance minister.

While countries in Europe and elsewhere continue to struggle to recover from the largest worldwide economic slowdown

Lost in the budget buzz was this comment by Liberal MP Judy Foote during Question Period on Thursday:

"[Conservative MP Garry Breitkreuz] told a classroom of Ottawa high school students — some as young as 14 — that all Canadians should carry firearms and girls in particular should be armed to protect themselves from sexual assault."

Foote, according to the Ottawa Citizen, was referring to a letter she had received from Dianna Sakisheway, a mother of teenage daughter who attends Canterbury High School in Ottawa.

According to Sakisheway, Breitkreuz gave a 'Career Day' speech to her daughter's school on March 7.

"Mr. Breitkreuz spent most of his allotted time discussing firearms and cited a Texas study that showed women who carry guns are less likely to get raped, including a specific number of women who avoided rape as they were armed," she wrote.

In a subsequent interview with the Ottawa Citizen, Sakisheway says Breitkreuz also illustrated his arguments with "what if" stories. For

Prior to Thursday's budget, many in the media opined about how this was the Harper government's first majority budget.

Analysts suggested that for the first time in seven years, we would see the 'real' Stephen Harper.

While the budget did identify a couple of things not high on the Harper government's priority list - the environment and CBC - it wasn't the right-wing, radical, Reform Party style document that some boogeyman pundits predicted.

In fact, as National Post columnist Andrew Coyne tweeted, program spending in 2012-13 will still remain higher than under any other previous government.

Moreover, the austerity measures - if you can call them that - aren't nearly as severe as the austerity budgets of Chretien and Martin in the 1990s.

Budget 2012, however, did give us a glimpse of Stephen Harper's overarching vision of Canada.

That vision, according to former Harper adviser Bruce Carson, includes less government and a new Federalism. (Yes, that's the same Bruce Carson

New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair is interviewed following the delivery of the budgetThe New Democrats did a very peculiar thing on Thursday afternoon.

Canada's official opposition party issued two English-language press releases about the Harper government's budget: one was for Canadians, and the other was for Quebecers.

The one for 'Canadians' was titled "Conservative budget slashes health care, pensions," and starts like this: "NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair today slammed Stephen Harper's Conservatives for introducing a budget that recklessly cuts the vital services that Canadians rely on—such as Old Age Security and health care."

The second one is titled "The Conservative budget: no relief for Quebecers."

"Stephen Harper promised to protect health care funding and never even mentioned his plan to cut Old Age Security. Now, he is putting Quebecers' retirement security and primary healthcare in peril with these reckless cuts," Mulcair is quoted as saying.

Both press releases, similar in tone but slightly different in context, are posted on the party's website.

Upon

Jim Flaherty's 7th budget — and first with a parliamentary majority to back it — was tabled in the House of Commons, Thursday.

CTV News reports the document proposes $5.2 billion in cuts to departmental spending and includes plans to eliminate the penny, slashes 19,000 public sector jobs and extends the age of eligibility for Old Age Security by two years after 2023.

"The choices we have made are substantial, they are responsible and, in our view, they are certainly necessary," Flaherty told reporters inside the lockup in Ottawa.

Certainly by definition, Budget 2012 is an austerity budget.  The document highlights moderate cuts and it will be painful for some, especially for those in the public sector.

But as Andrew Coyne of PostMedia News tweeted, program spending in 2012-13 still remains higher than under any previous government.

Canadians are fortunate that we don't have to endure the same types of deep cuts taking place in other countries.

And compared to the Chretien/Martin

Budget 2012 will be different than previous budgets put forward by the Harper government.

That's because this is, technically, their first budget as a majority government.  In other words, the duo of Jim Flaherty and Stephen Harper can pretty much do what they want without having to placate the opposition parties.

"They're just going to do it," NDP MP Claude Gravelle told the Sudbury Northern Life.

"No concessions. No co-operation. This is a Harper majority budget. There will be no negotiations whatsoever, and no talking to opposition members."

In the 2006 federal budget, Stephen Harper acknowledged the fiscal imbalance between Ottawa and the provinces and by doing so, secured the Bloc Quebecois' vote.

In 2007,  the Tories placated the Bloc again by boosting spending in the province of Quebec by $2.3 billion.

The 2008 federal budget included kinder, gentler ideas -- the homeless, infrastructure and auto sector packages that convinced Liberal MPs to abstain from the vote so the budget

After four decades in government, the Conservative party's reign of power could soon be over in Alberta.

Two new surveys released Wednesday, show Danielle Smith and her Wildrose Party surging in the polls, less than four weeks before the April 23 election.

A Leger Marketing study commissioned by the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal asked voters: If an election were  held today, who would you vote for?

37 per cent said the Conservatives, 34 per cent said the Wildrose Party, 12 per cent said the Liberals and 11 per cent said the NDP.

Meanwhile a Forum Research poll, the first poll conducted after the election call, claims the Wildrose Party would become Alberta's next majority government if an election was held today.

Forum pegs Wildrose's support at 41 per cent, and the PCs at 31 per cent, with the former having a significant advantage in Calgary.

In terms of seat projections, that means the Wildrose would have 58 seats in the Alberta legislature, and the Progressive Conservatives

New details are surfacing about the technical challenges that delayed voting at the NDP leadership convention last weekend.

Scytl Canada, the company who developed and operated the electronic voting system, released a statement Tuesday, claiming "delays in the final rounds of voting...were caused by a deliberate, large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that attempted to deny NDP members access to the online balloting system."

"We deeply regret the inconvenience to NDP voters caused by this malicious, massive, orchestrated attempt to thwart democracy," notes the press release.

A preliminary forensic analysis identified "well over 10,000 malevolent IP addresses" —mainly in Canada — were involved in the attack, which "generated many hundreds of thousands of false voting requests" to the system.

David Skillicorn, a computing security expert at Queen's University, told the Toronto Star it's possible that a single person pulled off the attack by renting a "botnet" — a