Patrick Brown, eat your heart out. As leader of Ontario’s Conservative Party, it is no fun having all your good potential tax moves made by conservatives in liberal clothing. The Ontario budget read so dutifully by Finance Minister Charles Sousa the other day made a mockery of liberalism and usurped traditional Conservative space.
Imagine if you are a senior in Ontario and eking out your remaining existence on about $3000. a month in pensions and federal government largess. You have just been slammed with a 70 per cent increase in annual drug benefit fees and another dollar per prescription of co-payment. These are supposed to be your golden years if the God damn provincial government would leave you some of the gold you have left.
Maybe somebody told Premier Wynne that seniors never change their life-time voting patterns. Just try us Ms. Wynne.
When Babel-on-the-Bay wrote that tongue in cheek commentary about university students turning to prostitution to pay the exorbitant fees for a higher education, we obviously had no idea that the budget would wade into the subject (higher costs not prostitution).
But how can the Ontario government be so stupid as to make a mess of funding higher education? This is just as bad as their silly incremental approach to booze distribution. They do nothing but half measures and make a mess of just doing that little. Do they have any idea of the size of the bureaucracy that will be needed to sort out all the claims and counter claims of such an ignorant method of funding higher education?
First of all, it has to be marks that entitle our young people to enter college or university level programs. Whether their parents have or have not got the money is irrelevant. The government can neither award nor penalize students for the wealth of their parents. And stop charging us outrageously for parking on campuses that belong to all.
It seems the government wants kudos for scrapping the fees for Drive Clean emission testing. That was always an annoying tax. The only problem now is that the government is giving the “testers’ a greater incentive to find something they can “fix.” This is another fine example of corporate care over consumer care.
And another thing: you can stuff the projections on a balanced budget wherever you like but it is nothing but silly guesswork. The budget will balance whenever revenues rise to meet expenditures. Any householder knows that.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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