It used to be "Canada's New Government." Now the Conservatives are re-branding the government, and tactfully removing themselves from the brand. They're also trying to prove that they saw the recession coming long, long ago. And they're meeting the challenge of the recession by dropping that wasteful punctuation mark, the apostrophe.

Today the Conservatives launched a new website, Canada's Economic Action Plan, to show the country that everything is under control.

On one key page, the term "the Harper Government" appears seven times.

The page tells us that Harper saw the recession coming in 2007, and brought in tax cuts to strengthen us against it.

We now have punctuation cuts as well. On that one page, we have "the Harper governments decision" plus six uses of Canada as a possessive minus apostrophes:

Canadas economy

Canadas business conditions

Canadas debt-to-GDP ratio

Canadas financial system

Canadas regulatory environment

Canadas real-estate sector

Other pages on the site (and the site title itself) do use apostrophes, indicating that the Harper Government is keeping its options open. Or cutting costs by firing the Harper Government web editor.

Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.