If there is one thing Ontario voters can agree on is that Ontario premier Doug Ford is not the brightest star in the sky over Queen’s Park. When he thinks he has an idea that might appeal to voters, he will ride the idea into the ground.
Take his recent sticker idea. He knows that the actual sticker that shows you have paid for your vehicle license this year is worth a fraction of a cent. He is going to give back the money you paid. It should come with a note reminding you to vote conservative in the coming election.
All it did was remind people of the stickers he had made to add confusion on the province’s gas pumps. It was finally a judge who got rid of that nonsense.
But how about his latest promise. If you vote conservative on June 2, he will roll back five cents of the Ontario gasoline tax—just for the rest of the year. You have got to figure that this guy doesn’t often get to fill up his limousine.
How did you like his preening for the television cameras at General Motors the other day? Here is the guy who killed the provincial grants for people buying electric cars four years ago taking the credit for General Motors being bribed to built pickups in Oshawa, Ontario and—eventually—some electric vehicles in Ingersoll, Ontario. What do you want to bet that the deal was engineered by the federal people in Ottawa?
Doug thinks he should get the credit. What he fails to understand is that with accepting the credit for something, you also have to take responsibility for the down sides. It is like the current situation with COVID-19. If the conservatives want the credit for declaring that the pandemic is over in Ontario, then we should not be hearing about more people in hospital and in the ICUs and dying. Which is what we are hearing.
On the positive side, it time for the Ontario government to proceed with the Bradford Bypass. There is no reason though to proceed with Highway 413. It is not needed by anyone other than Doug Ford’s developer friends.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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