by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
January 26, 2004
Poor Dalton - he’s gone and done it again. after breaking a slew of election promises the new premier hinted that his government will bring back photo radar, something that he never mentioned during last fall’s campaign. Since any similarity between what McGuinty said on the hustings and what he is doing now is strictly coincidental, this should not come as a surprise. What is a tad on the surprising side, is that McGuinty has absolutely no shame in grabbing more hard earned money from the province’s taxpayers.
"It’s a revenue generator, absolutely", cried the wimpish premier. His arrogance knows no bounds. To say what he said is like former Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, saying that the function of the Human Resources Department was to provide handouts to his Liberal friends in Shawinigan. Of course Chrétien, unlike McGuinty, had enough political smarts not to say anything like that even though it was probably true.
McGuinty didn’t even attempt to argue that the reintroduction of photo radar would make the roads in Ontario safer. Property damage, injury and death played no part in his thinking — only money. as everyone knows, the safety features of photo radar are highly debatable.
Photo radar penalizes the owner of the vehicle and not the driver. While personal responsibility for one’s actions is not on the radar screen
(pardon the pun) of this government, if speeding is considered to be a problem that requires intervention by the state, it should be the offender that faces the consequences of speeding and not the vehicle’s owner.
For what it’s worth, which is undoubtedly not very much, McGuinty has promised to lower insurance rates in this province. There is no guarantee that an individual’s rates will not increase as a result of what someone else does when they drive their car. and photo radar cannot provide one thing that police officers can provide — the exercise of discretion. We all know that the speed limit on the 400 series of highways where photo radar will be used if implemented again is low. When the road conditions and the weather are good, traffic can proceed at 110 or 120 km per hour without any appreciable increase in accidents (or to use the more politically correct term, "collisions"). Police that patrol these highways can use their discretion to ignore those speeders who are merely keeping up with the traffic flow and concentrate on the drivers who are weaving in and out of lanes, following to closely or otherwise driving in an unsafe manner.
as a deterrent factor, people who speed are much more likely to be deterred, at least in the short term, by being stopped by a police officer instead of receiving something in the mail at a future time. The fact that a person receives a fine in the mail for an action that they have probably long forgotten, only serves to highlight that photo radar is nothing more than a money grab.
It is doubtful that when McGuinty campaigned last September that he had planned to break the number of promises that he did; or to implement programs such as photo radar that were never mentioned in his party’s election platform. Like a deer caught in the headlights, McGuinty simply panicked when he "learned" that the provincial deficit was in the vicinity of $5.6 billion. and being a man of virtually no vision he took the easy way out by concentrating on increasing revenues rather than looking at unnecessary spending.
Dalton McGuinty doesn’t appear to be arrogant. But he is. He has complete disdain for the voters; the ones who voted for him to stop construction on the Oak Ridges Moraine, or to provide the city of Toronto with a portion of the gas tax, or to keep hydro rates frozen at 4.3 cents per kilowatt hour. In his view, promises are not important. Like a true Grit, only he knows what is right at a certain time and previous promises be damned. It took Jean Chrétien over 30 years and many major cabinet portfolios to reach the level of arrogance that McGuinty has reached in the first three months of his premiership.
Dalton McGuinty is just another arrogant Liberal. and when you get your picture taken while driving north on the 404, beside all those lovely new homes on the Oak Ridges Moraine, remember — he’ll never be up to the job.