Category: Provincial Politics

When life deals you lemons, you are sometimes awash in lemonade. Even with the legislature shuttered for the summer, premier Ford hangs heavy over Ontario. He is that slow, overweight kid from down the street, who is always it in an imaginary game of hide and seek. And, you can’t change the role he plays, because he likes it. It makes him feel important.

As premier of Ontario, Doug Ford revels in the perception of himself as a populist. Yet the only voter he really pleases is himself. This is a guy who has no compunction but to mess with Ontario’s Greenbelt. He also messes with our highways. Both of these activities are not to please the public but to please his developer friends. These were the only people who were nice to him when he was on Toronto council.

But Doug Ford, in his ignorance, kills people. He muses about the highly invasive Ontario Works program that supplies a limited amount of support to people in search of work. He complains that these people are sitting at home just taking your hard-earned dollars. The fact is those hard-earned dollars are about half what is considered the poverty line in Ontario. What he is really doing is creating thievery. He is encouraging people to break and enter, pick your pocket, steal packages from your porch or your car or just shoplift. He thinks it is an incentive to work to watch your family starve. He thinks Les Miserable by Victor Hugo is just a frothy Broadway musical.

He swears he supports the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) but it is also so far below the poverty line to be ludicrous. It is plain and simple murder. He is causing people to die on our streets and he cannot deny it.

In Toronto, they chase the homeless out of the parks so that the gentry can enjoy them. The parks provide places for their dogs to poop.

What is really stupid about the Ford regime at Queen’s Park is its constantly telling us they are spending our money wisely. When there are serious complaints about needs, they assure us that they are throwing money at the problem. It hardly helps when we find they are really squirelling the money away. And you thought it is only ideological conservatives who are supposed to be reluctant to spend money.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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It is classic conservative strategy. The Ontario government has been caught banking $20 billion that they claim is a reserve fund. What they are really doing is telling the public that they are going to spend the money on problems brought to their attention. And then they just put the money in the bank. When they do it, they are killing people who are desperate for assistance.

Almost a million people are recipients of the pathetic charity of the Ford government under programs such as the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and Ontario Works. Do you think, as a single person, you could live on less than $1200 per month? Those are the people that some of that $20 billion could help. They just are not conservative supporters.

And what makes this discrimination of the needy worse is that today it permeates the government funded services. I have watched as Ontario hospitals discriminate against those who cannot fight back. They will treat the homeless for example and quickly throw them back out on the street. Our hospitals have patient advocates who take all their instructions from hospital management. I actually talked to one of these patient advocates who laughingly told me he never talked to the patients. I had the experience of a hospital functionary with whom I raced to see who could get me out of that damn place, with its inadequate, overworked staff and awful food, faster.

I was very pleased to note that finally arbitration has allocated a decent increase for hospital workers (the patient facing people). For Ford and his Quislings to try to keep these workers at a one per cent wage increase each year was not only unrealistic but it was sure driving a lot of hospital workers into other lines of work.

What worries me though is that the federal conservative leader Poilievre is cheerfully telling people that he would do even more than Ford. Ford’s problem is that he is just a follow-along conservative. Poilievre is a hide-bound western libertarian who does not give a damn about what Canadians need or want. He wants to put them on a hard-times, libertarian diet—where everyone fends for themself.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]

We won’t have Ontario premier Doug Ford to kick around much this summer. He will be up polluting the air in Muskoka on his gas-guzzling water craft. Before he fled the legislature, he left us with a few ‘bons mots’ about how successful his government has been for the province.

Interestingly, those few ‘good words’ were mostly about how much of our money he has spent on the more serious shortcomings of his administration. He started out though by saying how many Ontario taxpayers are back to work after the pandemic.  Out of a population of 15 million in Ontario, he tells us that 670,000 people joined the workforce in an undefined period. That is good news as these people are all taxpayers and it means the government is getting more tax money. I really wasn’t aware that Mr. Ford’s government did all that much to end the pandemic. I think of the pandemic as more than a couple rotten years of general confusion in Ontario.

In fact, Mr. Ford went on to tell the legislature that his government had thrown some money at some of the after-effects of the pandemic. Since Ontario is the largest province in Canada, it is expected to spend more on health care than any other province. While he neglected to say what was really needed, he bragged that Ontario had spent $81 billion.

But he did not say how much more was needed and why hospital emergency clinics were closing because of the lack of staff. It might be because of the for-profit clinics that the Ford government is enabling to operate in Ontario. They can hire staff away from our hospitals by just offering them a decent wage.

I really don’t think Mr. Ford should take any pride that the government has to pay $34 billion on education this year. That is just a bit more than the Ford government has committed to spending on the Ontario Line subway project in Toronto. And if it goes like the Eglinton Crosstown, it will be way over budget, years late in completion and continue to disrupt small business in Toronto.

And if Mr. Ford’s education minister was not a private school kid, he would have more empathy for our school teachers in the public system. Should premier Ford be hurrying home to show Mrs. Ford his report card for the year, she would likely refuse to have those words on her refrigerator.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]

We should all be sick and tired of the so-called liberals who claim they are financially conservative.  That is not liberal. With liberals like that, conservative leader Pierre Poilievre might as well say he is liberal.

The conservative ideology is built on a “screw the lower classes” framework. It came from the aristocracies of Europe. We heard how “Unionism must be stamped on!” Or, we need the poor for the lower class, ill-paid work. They belong ‘below the stairs.’ If we cannot have slavery, we can make the underclass beholden to us for our benevolence and charity. We can never pay them much but a mean existence is better than wandering the streets of our towns and cities stealing or begging for the occasional gratuitous coin.

It was the skilled workman who created the middle class. It was the added cachet of sending their progeny to university that extended the process. How many times have we heard the proud statement in middle class homes about my son the lawyer, my daughter the doctor.

Our society extends itself in greed. Yet it puts no markers on the lower or upper limits of this middle class. We make little accommodation for the homeless. We waste little thought or concern for them. In a country of raw winters, we leave them to sleep on grates with escaping steam that heat the offices of the rich. We leave the mentally challenged to wander hopelessly and alone. Our hospitals treat the obvious and dismiss. Our food banks close for the holidays. Our hypocrisy knows few bounds.

Sometimes you wonder if liberals are just dishonest conservatives.

But there are also the new democrats in this political mix. It is amusing to note that the died-in-the-wool conservative will go to the NDP before voting liberal. And it is the vice-versa for the NDPer. These are people who see the liberal as the enemy. And besides, unions can often be described as greedy. The needy need not apply.

When one of my brothers made his first couple million dollars, he confessed to me that he was embarrassed by how little the government required from him by way of taxes. He might have been embarrassed but he still voted conservative.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]