McGuinty’s New Bait for Ontario Fish
June 17th, 2009The purpose of legislation and its policy initiatives is generally to fulfill some public need, or to address a glaring problem. You would think that there were no shortage of such needs and problems in today’s Ontario. However, Dalton McGuinty’s policy initiatives, since he was elected, follow a predictable pattern, which sidesteps obvious glaring problems such as the loss of 300,000 manufacturing jobs. Nor have they fulfilled any public needs, such as the real improvement of health-care delivery. All of McGuinty’s policy fronts have had no substantive edifice behind the false front. Their objectives have been threefold: (1) the appeasement, through legislation, of some noisy social activist segment; (2) the creation of makework to service the legislation; (3) the resultant (from the first two) creation of new bodies of people who depend on the Liberal party, either for the furtherance of their causes, or for their livelyhood.
Do the math yourself and see if any of his new policies, such as cigarette bans, or pesticide bans, etc. etc., do not fulfill these objectives, while completely overlooking the province’s real problems. Now look at his latest initiative in these terms, and it begins to make more sense. That is the proposal for full day kindergarten.
First let me say that such a proposal is a Godsend to many parents. My wife and I paid substantial sums to get the same service effect, when our pockets were the only alternative. To people like us, who might ask, "How did we manage up untill now?" Or to people who no longer have the preoccupation of seeking good daily care for their children, and ask, "Why am I paying for this?" The answer is, "Too bad." It will be a very difficult issue to oppose. And, that too is part of the McGuinty strategy. How can anyone oppose the restriction of cigarette smoking, for example? All his policies fit this defense.
So what is wrong with this proposal, is that it comes at a time when no one was paying any attention to it. The house was on fire economically, and everyone was busy hauling buckets, and along comes McGuinty, apparently oblivious to the activity around him, and proposes a new, billion dollar expenditure which no one will be able to resist. All of a sudden, many voters are distracted from the fire, the childcare lobby is appeased, the need for many new and Liberally grateful teachers is created out of nothing, and, not the least, thousands of new, lifetime Liberal voters are created, just when things were looking bleak.
On top of this, there is an additional layer of icing. Just when the miniscule Ontario attention span was starting to gel around the real effects of the new Dalton sales tax gouge, presto, it is about to gain a compelling reason for being. I can hear his words now: "A small, noisy segment of Ontario citizens, oppose the job-creating , and simplified nature of our new Harmonized Sales Levy. To them, we all ask, what do you have against the expansion of early education and child care upon which hundreds of thousands of Ontario families depend?"
Hook baited, set, …reel in.