This is good news. Frankly it is a bit embarrassing how we are often critical of the Ontario premier. We are therefore quite pleased to have an opportunity to express our pleasure at something she and her cabinet have done.
You might recall in the recent provincial budget that the government was going to increase the annual up-front prescription co-pay for seniors by 70 per cent and add another loonie to the co-pay on every prescription. To put it mildly, many Ontario seniors were pissed by the proposal.
Obviously more than a few seniors expressed their disapproval of the plan directly to Queen’s Park and to their Liberal Party political contacts. While we tried to restrain those who favoured lynching, it was obvious that the finance minister, the premier and, by default, the health minister were all on the seniors shit list.
We were pleased to see on Monday that they allowed Health Minister Eric Hoskins to be the guy getting the credit for backing off the idea. He announced that on reconsideration, the province would not do that.
It seems obvious that more than a few knowledgeable people pointed out that seniors might forget things occasionally but with usually monthly reminders of this insult, when they picked up their medicines, they would likely remember through to the next election.
Part of this repentance might also have had to do with recent opinion polls that showed Premier Wynne at a point lower than her competition in the esteem of Ontario voters. While we normally ignore such surveys, we were inclined to agree with that one.
But we can hardly finish this praise for Wynne and Company without adding some advice. We have noted that they seem to only respond to criticism. This former banker Ed Clark, for some reason is not doing anybody any good. He is enraging Ontario citizens over the sell-off of Hydro One. His 10 step program for liberalizing booze sales in Ontario is a sad joke. Maybe if Premier Wynne could fire him, it would help let him run for the Conservatives in the next election instead of screwing things up now.
And if we may, Ms. Wynne, we would like to suggest that you look up the word ‘liberal’ in the dictionary. You will note, Premier that in politics the term refers to progressive, reform-minded people who protect individual rights. You could put those words on a metre-long ruler to measure those actions that your government takes on behalf of Ontario citizens.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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