Ontario:
Yours To Discover!
May 20 2004
Counterbias.com
Cory M. Marshall
F O C U S O N
C A N A D A 
It must be that after a particularly conservative era a country,
or a province, finds itself in ominous financial shape, and the
transition to some presumably more humanistic regime tends to yield
precisely just how ominous that shape is. In Ontario, the
previous government managed to leave the 6.1 billion dollar deficit for the McGuinty government to first
discover, then try to deal with. In any case, we are facing a severe penny pinching crisis yet, at the same time, the
premier has
committed to retaining the integrity and quality of public services.
Public
service; it was a noble undertaking at one time. Now, it smells
like the handmaiden of corporatism. Consider that our road to
fiscal calamity is not lessened by overpaid bureaucrats. Of
course, the argument goes that remuneration should be significant
enough to attract the best and the brightest but I do not find this
compelling. Rather, government, if not democracy, itself, is the
arbiter of mediocrity. The best and the brightest are concepts
that are anathema to government. Government is merely the
bastion of adequacy which sometimes cannot even meet that standard.
It's
disgusting to me that civil servants can end up making in excess of
$300,000.00 per annum. One instance of this that was prominent a
few years ago happened in the Harris regime. A spokesman for the
Ministry of Health was making in excess of that sum. It seemed
to outrage a lot of people at the time and I found myself at a loss, especially
when a
different ministry spokesman emerged to address the issue! I
suspect it would boggle the mind to actually see the payroll for the
government of Ontario. (I'm absolutely certain, Mr. McGuinty,
that I could find some extra money).
It
strikes me that were we to pay civil servants something more
reasonable and had a cap on just how much one individual could wrest
from the public teat, whole cities would not have to rage against
usurious parking rates at hospitals. While I have no objection
to someone striving for a more decadent existence, the place for such ambitions is the
beloved 'free' market and not the public trough.
And now, Mr. McGuinty's
budget --produced by someone whose bona fides regarding fiduciary
sensibilities have already come into question and have not been
proven-- seeks to squeeze every errant Loonie from the pockets of Ontarians whether or not those funds had been earmarked for
some
necessity, or parking meter. It's a budget that seems almost
dictated by corporations who joyously abet Mr. McGuinty as he trounces
just about every promise he'd made on the road to provincial glory.
The Irish have a word for a person like Mr. McGuinty is showing
himself to be, and that word is tauridhe --part insurgent, part
thief-- whence comes the epithet of Tory.
What
else can be made of one who so gleefully offers up a prized asset of
enormous cultural significance, like the liquor stores? It would
be to the detriment of Ontarians and the revenue stream that the
aforesaid institution pours into government coffers, and would benefit
only the few connected cronies into whose hands these things
inevitably pass when they do. I find this particularly egregious
given the harshness of some of the budget measures (like raising the
sin taxes, and inaugurating a health premium -which perfidy was not even attempted by the lamentable Harris Revolution) and the
likelihood
of their turning us stressed-out peons to drink.
Now,
people won't be able to get sick and miss work for fear of not being
able to pay the health premium. Where will it end, with user
fees that fly in the face of our right to universal health care?
The premium is to be taken from payroll to the tune of three
hundred to nine hundred dollars a year, irrespective of whether or not
one goes to the doctor once a year or less, it is presumed.
The
insanity does not stop with this budget, however. It may very
well have its nexus in the desire to make a perfect Ontario that does
not have any coal fired hydroelectric generating plants. Yes,
our air will be cleaner for the next twenty five years, perhaps, but
we might just find the cost of using natural gas utterly prohibitive.
You see, there is a problem on the horizon and it relates to
fossil fuels.
I
would have liked to shrug it off as hysteria but too many reputable
sources have made mention of it. 'Peak Oil' has been written
about in Jane's, The Financial Times, BBC and CNN.
Alright, so the world will run out of fossil fuels, but not yet.
No, not yet, however the global demand from burgeoning Asian
economies will put further stress on this dwindling resource that the
McGuinty government is pinning our future energy supply on. How much
will it cost when the several billion Asian consumers are
competing for it? I wonder how sensible it is to shackle our
future to something so finite, so that around the year 2030 we will
have to retool our energy program and replace the gossamer
infrastructure Mr. McGuinty's perverse idealism seeks to impose.
I'm
not impressed, and I doubt much of Ontario is either. These
people are starting to make the Marijuana Party seem like a perfectly
viable option. But let's not get me started on throwing good
money away on bad law.
