It seems that the foreign-owned big breweries took a pass on purchasing tables at the Ontario Liberal Party’s major fund-raiser this year. Of course, they tell us that it is not corrupt nor payment for services rendered for those breweries to always step readily up to the bar for tickets to these events.
But now that they are displeased with the Liberal government for threatening their sales monopoly, why are they no longer such good corporate citizens? Should this not be taken as withholding payment for services not rendered? Is this a new definition of corruption?
And why are we in Ontario tolerating such corruption?
And why is Ontario’s chief elections officer trying to do something about third-party political advertising during elections? The man’s job is to get us to clean up our act and we have got to listen to him. He blew the whistle last month about the Liberal fiasco in Sudbury and we are still waiting for someone to do something about it. You can use weasel words if you like but a bribe is still a bribe.
And please do not think it is just Wynne’s Whigs who are corrupt. In our opinion, Ontario politics are corrupt. You have the example of an Ontario federal Conservative politician buying his way towards the provincial party leadership with over $400,000 worth of memberships. And if you really believe each one of those people paid their own membership, we have some muskeg near Bancroft in which you can invest.
And there is no reason to let Ontario’s New Democrats off the hook. They take their cut from the brewers’ unions to protect those unionized jobs. That makes them hypocrites in protecting the Beer Store monopoly. They should answer to their own membership for the way they are helping artificially force up the price of beer in this province.
What is even more embarrassing is that Ontario lags behind all other provinces in Canada in controlling all aspects of election expenditures. Special interest groups spent almost $9 million in the last Ontario election and most Ontario residents have no idea who the “Working Families” were who spent $2.5 million hammering Conservative Leader Timmy Hudak. The point was not whether Hudak deserved such treatment or not but the fact that it was in support of Premier Wynne in her bid for re-election.
When the Liberal Party holds a fund-raiser at a price of $15,500 per table, it has taken the event well beyond the ability of most voters to participate. That alone lays the event open to charges of corruption.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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