It would seem that Ontario’s conservative leader Doug Ford has never missed a dinner. He is the proverbial ‘fat cat.’ He is a salesman without scruples. He uses people. He tells them what he thinks they want to hear. He is not even a conservative. It would strain his brain to explain what conservatism stands for.
And the election period is over tomorrow. It is the farce that played in Ontario this spring. It was a campaign of many promises and little progress. It was a campaign for the future and little hope. The current election campaign in Ontario should go down as the worst campaign in the province’s history. It has been a campaign of nickel-and-dime offers and comes down to a highway that is not needed.
It was an election that avoided the elephant in the intensive care units. It avoided the casual destruction by the conservatives of Ontario’s Medicare system. Somehow, we find that COVID-19 is blamed for the cuts the conservatives made in our hospital funding. Nurses across Ontario have been betrayed. And yet, some of us are actually convinced that the pandemic is over. And people are still dying of COVID every day.
And does anyone care that our children have lost most of two years of schooling because of erratic and badly planned lockdowns. Did anyone in government care about our teachers? Does the minister of education know that computer-learning alone fails the needs of our children?
Other than our hard-pressed medical people, there are no heroes of the pandemic, only survivors.
The best kept secret of this campaign was that the billions Doug Ford wants to spend on an unnecessary highway is needed to electrify Ontario’s commuter trains—making the system faster and more efficient. And some highways will always be needed to move the bounty of our farmlands, the goods and products of our labour and people into the remote corners of our vast province.
And what is it that Doug Ford and the conservatives are promising seniors? In an era of hyper-inflation, the people at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder and the seniors on fixed incomes are being hurt the worst. Neither Ontario’s poor nor seniors are Ford and the conservative’s concern.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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