November 17, 2003
The recent elections of Dalton McGuinty as Premier of Ontario and David Miller as Mayor of Toronto, combined with the coronation of Paul Martin as de facto Prime Minister of Canada holds ominous promises for all of us. If I know my liberal politicians, and by now I know them only too well, I’d say that we are in for a major round of tax increases at all levels, as well as being force-fed a bevy of new social initiatives designed to forever change the face of our society.
Let’s start with Dalton McGuinty. How many of his 231 election promises will he break in his first year in office? I’m putting what little money I have left after paying all my taxes on a bet that he’ll break most of them within the first year of his reign. He used the phony $5.6 billion deficit figure as an excuse to begin breaking promises with the deftness of a black belt in karate breaking bricks. Limit classroom sizes? Sorry, no can do. We don’t have the money. Balance the budget? Hey don’t blame us; blame that evil Ernie Eves’s deficit. Keep taxes down? Well, we wanted to, but we just can’t afford it.
Watch for all user fees to increase as Dalton attempts to devise methods of staying in power by bribing us with our own money. Drivers’ licenses, vehicle registrations, copies of birth certificates, hunting licenses, the Outdoor Card, permit fees, you name it. I predict they will all rise at alarming rates as the Liberal spendaholics begin to binge out.
I also predict that the Government of Ontario will increase in size, as the Daltonistas dream up reams of new regulations and laws to regulate and govern our every moment. The end result will be that the Government of Ontario will soon resemble a bloated corpse afloat in a sea of debt.
David Miller’s election as Mayor of Toronto is one of the biggest scams since Robert Redford and Paul Newman planned a poker game in The Sting. Miller’s use of the fictional expansion of the Toronto Island Airport as Toronto’s most pressing issue is a disingenuous ruse to divert attention from what’s really wrong with the city. Will someone please tell me what a bridge to the island has to do with expansion of the island airport? If he is successful in canceling the fixed link between the City and the Islands, then Toronto will face legal action that will cost it millions, if not hundreds of millions in the long run. In addition, if people experiencing a medical emergency on the Islands die as a result of not being able to get help due to the ferry schedule, then Toronto could face major legal action by their survivors. That’s because both the police and Toronto’s Department of Emergency Services have pointed out that a fixed link to the island is a necessity in dealing with crises.
Miller’s entire focus in the week following the election has been to rally support to kill the bridge. What about the city’s $2.5 billion debt which is costing Toronto taxpayers in excess of $800,000 per day? What about homelessness, which is currently gobbling up $180 million annually and appears to be on the increase? What about businesses fleeing to the ‘905’ area because of Toronto’s ridiculously high taxes?
But then, Miller, like his toadies at Queen’s Park and in Ottawa, doesn’t really care about anything to do with finances. That’s why he is so vehemently opposed to outsourcing city services. In the long run the city might save money, but the municipal unions who supported Miller during the election wouldn’t like it. Besides, when the money is all gone, he can always go back to the well for more.
Finally, there’s Paul Martin, the man who during his long run for the leadership of the Liberal Party, refused to share his platform with his fellow citizens. Is it because his ideas make sense, or is it because if we found out about them in advance a significant percentage of the population would emigrate to Zimbabwe? My guess is that it’s the latter, as yet another wealthy lawyer from Quebec takes a turn at piloting the ship of state.
While Martin has positioned himself as an "outsider", you can rest assured that he is anything but. For those Canadians who have memory problems (and to judge by the last few elections, it seems most do) it is important to remember that Paul Martin was Chretien’s Finance Minister. To his credit, his policies helped eliminate the deficit. To his shame, he was also instrumental in hoarding a burgeoning Employment Insurance surplus and in creating the arms-length foundations that currently control over $7 billion of taxpayers’ money outside the scrutiny of parliament. This is the kind of economic contortionism one would expect of third world kleptocracies. Not from a country like Canada.
So where have we gone wrong? The country’s largest city and the country’s most populous province, as well as the country’s federal government are all under the control of leftist wackos. The reasons for this really aren’t that difficult to divine when we look at voter turnout for elections. Four years ago, 27 percent of the electorate voted in the Liberals. Last week less than 20 percent of voters elected David Miller as Mayor of Toronto. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s municipal, provincial or federal, in each and every election less than half the electorate bother going to the polls. And the numbers seem to be on a downward trend, rather than upward.
The people of Canada appear to have lost all hope. Governments and their bureaucracies are a force unto themselves and any attempt to initiate change in the way they do things is met with stolid resistance. Consequently, most voters are looking for ways to work around and outside of their governments. The logical conclusion to this trend is that someday we won’t need to hold elections because they won’t make a difference anyway. In the meantime, we’ll keep drifting to the left.