Did you miss the announcement last week that Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has solved the problem with Ontario’s harness racing industry? You can just see her coming out of her Queen’s Park office at the end of the day, dusting off her hands and saying: “another problem solved.”
The truth be told: the solution bombed. The announcement was another example of Ms. Wynne’s lack of political acumen. She is a babe in the woods. She not only has absolutely no political instincts but she listens to bad advice. It hardly needs Opposition Leader Timmy Hudak to tell us that the money for the harness racing people is too little, too late and mismanaged in the telling.
Politically the time to strike on the harness tracks issue was the same day as she fired Ontario Lottery and Gaming Chair Paul Godfrey. It had to be a one-two punch. It would have given her a reason for firing Godfrey without saying it. It would have prevented the resentment about the tracks being transferred to her and allowed to fester.
With her government already suffering from too many festering sores, Wynne is starting to lose the ability to act. Last week’s job statistics brought nothing from her office. What the statistics showed was that Ontario was not only behind the curve in job creation with the rest of the country but we are losing unemployed not to jobs but to giving up. Young people are out of options.
It is in reading those figures last week that you could see how the Harper government has skewed and screwed the economic balance of this country. The battered manufacturing sector of Ontario and Quebec has fallen behind the resource based Western economy.
The Ontario government’s job is to rebuild the economic base of this province. Wynne and friends obviously have no idea how to do this and the combined ignorance of the opposition parties makes the situation desperate. The voters are caught in the middle.
Ontario has to put its faith in the development of high technology industry such as we have based in Kanata, Toronto and Waterloo. We have to woo it, support it and keep it working for us. At the same time, we can hardly ignore the riches of this province in agriculture and mineral resources. These we must also continue to build on. Frankly, we could hardly find a better province. We just need better politicians.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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