Once when introducing former premier Bill Davis at a function, I put on a little too much emphasis when I said “And on my far right is Premier Bill Davis.”
He immediately quipped back: “It’s the only place to be Peter.” Even many of the foreign visitors in our audience understood what he meant. I will admit that I thought of Bill as a friend. We appeared at a number of events together in those years and if my wife was attending, he would go into a routine of pleading with her to be a conservative candidate in the next provincial election. The only person who might not have thought it funny was our neighbour, the conservative MPP for our riding.
What people did not understand about Bill Davis was that not only was he a very decent guy but he was a Progressive Conservative. I first met him when he was education minister for Ontario and I can tell you that he did more for education in Ontario than many of his counterparts over the years. That private school kid who poses as education minister today has done nothing to foster education in this province and has betrayed the teachers, the students and their parents.
And this is the problem. This bunch who are running things at Queen’s Park are not even conservatives, let alone anything progressive. They think their job is to pander to the rich and to business and to free-wheeling developers. Real conservatives are supposed to respect what is good in our society. They are supposed to preserve and protect.
Conservative philosophy is rooted in the upper classes and British nobility. I somehow doubt that a good ole’ boy such as Doug Ford has ever read anything by philosopher Edmund Burke. (He didn’t exactly invent conservatism but he at least defined it.) Why would Ford waste his time when he can use bombast and lies to better effect. He treats the public as gullible and the more people buy into his B.S., the more convinced he is that he is on track to wealth and a decent mausoleum as a final resting place, if not a monument.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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