I may have iterated this story before but a few years ago my son was asking what the difference between the political parties really is. Knowing that at his age a long drawn out response would simply bore him to death and turn his interest level way down, I gave him the following explanation which I believe still stands today.
Everyone pays taxes and those taxes go to wards paying for some of the things it makes sense to pay for together. All parties agree that some money is needed to do these things.
But let’s say you make $10 an hour at your job.
The Conservative Party would take $3 of that money and let you decide how you want to spend the remaining $7.
The Liberal Party would take $4 and let you decide on how to spend the other $6.
And the NDP would take $6 of that money and leave you with only $4 to spend the way you want.
In my opinion, this is a valuable math lesson for all of us.
So we here at OfficiallyScrewed.com are going to give it to them.
Today, Liberal critic Gerard Kennedy had a few choice words for John Baird regarding stimulus spending.
Liberal infrastructure critic Gerard Kennedy said the minister was ducking from his responsibilities.
“It is politically convenient for him to say he doesn’t know why projects aren’t happening, when, in fact, the government has been responsible for all the delays until now,” Kennedy said.
So far, the federal government says $2.8 billion of the $4-billion infrastructure stimulus fund has been spent and more than 1,700 projects have been approved.
Meanwhile just tonight on Hannity, Karl Rove gave us some details on how the U.S. stimulus spending is going. The Americans have spent a mere $67.4 Billion out of a $787 Billion stimulus package.
So Canada has spent 70% of our stimulus while the Americans have spent 8.6% of theirs.
Gerard Kennedy should hang his head in shame for even suggesting that our Federal government is holding up spending.
On July 1st, 2008, a BC Carbon Tax took effect. Lefties say it won’t affect gas prices. The chart below begs to differ. The average gas price in BC was $1.40 for a consistent length of time and then July 1st it spiked over 2 cents. Coincidence?? I think not.
I hope Canadians are paying more attention to this than Stephane Dion is!!
You can view various gas price statistics by visiting this link.
Just another example of Canadian Taxpayers getting OfficiallyScrewed.
I just finished watching Marketplace on CBC this Sunday afternoon. That’s what happens when CTV cancels this weeks edition of Question Period.
The last 10 minutes of Marketplace was dedicated to seeing if consumers were really seeing the GST cut that the Tories have brought in.
They start off with a Tim Horton’s coffee and confirm that Tim’s is, indeed, passing on the GST cut by cutting the cost of coffee. I can confirm this because the price of an XL coffee used to be $1.59 and after the 2 point cut it is now $1.56. Yay Timmy’s!!!
But every other price they looked at was for a set price item. i.e. prices that have traditionally been rounded to a dollar (or half dollar).
They start off with a Saturday Toronto Star. $2.00 before and $2.00 after. Since a large portion of newspaper sales are via the box on the street corner, this one is a given as an item that would not change in price. Who the heck is going to want to put $1.98 into a newspaper box slot?
They then proceeded with Parking machines, parking meters, Live Theatre tickets, taxi cab fares and movie tickets. All of which have stayed the same with the base rate of the product going up meaning no cost savings to the consumer.
I don’t know about you, but I have noticed the tax saving on restaurant food, where the tax is added in AFTER the cost of the meal. I have noticed the tax savings in my grocery bill which far outweighs any money I put into movies, cabs, or parking. I have also noticed it anywhere the price of the item is set with the tax being added after the fact. Store owners did NOT go around the store bumping that $3.99 box of cereal to $4.03.
This was simply a poor reporting job by the CBC. The sad part about something like this is that most of the items they looked at were items that lower income Canadians do not typically use.
Lower income earners ride the bus over taking a taxi or paying for parking. The Conservatives put in a tax credit for the bus riders. Lower income earners might go to the movies occasionally, but more often than not they do not go see a $120 show at the Royal Alex in Toronto as the Marketplace segment showed. In fact, video rentals add tax AFTER the fact so that $3.99 rental that cost $4.59 after tax is now only $4.51. Thank you for my 8 cents!!!
Chalk this one up to that left wing bias our publicly funded network is known for.
It’s been a week since the Honourable Jim Flaherty gave us all a big gift in the Fall Economic Statement and I just have to point something out.
Jack Layton and every NDP pundit and MP have been prattling on and on about how we have missed a great opportunity and how the statement is giving big business a huge tax break.
Well let’s get some of the math straight. The total cuts in the statement are a whopping $60 Billion over 5 years and approximately $15 Billion of that was targeted at businesses. This means approximately $45 Billion was targeted at Canadians.
Considering over half of the about a quarter of the income taxes collected by our government are paid by corporations, they are actually getting the disproportionately low portion of the tax cut.
I think it is quite disingenuous of Mr. Layton to say that the government is giving big tax cuts to the banks and oil companies when the truth is obviously clear that the average Canadian is the one coming out ahead.
And taking into account the high value of the Canadian dollar, our businesses can use, and deserve, a break.
Yellow Bellied McShifty, by his party’s own admission, says that the per capita cost to funding the current public school system is $9,526 per child.
The statistics show that there are approximately 55,000 children in faith based schools that are not receiving funding.
I must point out here that schools get their funding based on a per “butt on the seat” aspect. i.e. if a child is not in a school seat the school does NOT get funding. This is VERY important for people to understand.
What it means is that while everyone in the province pays taxes, funding a faith based school would NOT take money out of the current system. In fact, it would inject money INTO our education system because people who have already made the decision to have their children go to a faith based school would now get funding. How much?
Well the math is easy. $9,526 x 55,000 children is approximatley $524 Million.
What does McShifty do with this money at this point in time? He keeps it to spend on other things. Like what you ask?
Total Wasted: $2.4M on the first case and an unknown amount fighting both NDP MPP Shelley Martel and the Privacy Commissioner.
The list could go on and on.
Here’s some more math. The Health tax that McShifty brought down shortly after promising not to raise taxes brought the province of Ontario approximately $2.6 BILLION a year in revenue.
If you have gone in for a blood test only to turn around after checking in to see 30 or 40 chairs all taken and a half dozen people standing…
If you know someone who has been waiting for 5 years for a hip or knee replacement while hobbling around on crutches or in a wheelchair at a reasonably young age only to get a new hip or knee after they have lost the physical strength to use it due to attrition…
If you are angry that your tax dollars are being spent on providing drug users with 500 million free needles while diabetics have to pay for each and every insulin injection…
Then it’s time to get a new government in Ontario.
Watch this.
When I listened to the woman in the above video, it made me angry to be a resident in one of the richest parts of the free world. How a 35 yr old can be shuffled through our health care system for four years to the point where she is now suffering from stage 4 cancer.
I asked a very close confidant in the medical equipment industry about the ratio of PET scans in Quebec compared to Ontario and for any info she had on PET scans. Her CT product manager gave her the following background:
Positron Emission Tomography – PET Scan
A radioactive substance is injected into the body with “tracer”. There are different types of “tracers” depending on which part of the body you want to scan.
The person having the scan goes through two types of scans. The first is a Gamma Camera – Nuclear medicine. Then they go through a Computed Tomography (CT) Scan, (sometimes known as a CAT-scan).
The image from the nuclear scan and the image from the CT scan are then put together and you get a very good image of what’s happening in the body at the point where the tracer injection is.
PET Scans are especially well known for Cancer because of the image quality. Sometimes a CT scan alone won’t find a problem if it’s cancer in the earliest stages.
He also said that PETS aren’t readily available yet anywhere. He said he thinks there’s one at Sick Kids in Toronto, but isn’t sure where there are others.
Another contact said that the difference in numbers between Quebec and Ontario are very accurate. Apparently, though, the Quebec government found that too many PET scans were being done indiscriminately and they don’t fund the purchase of PET scanners to hospitals. What’s happening is that Radiologists are getting the money together and opening clinics NEXT to the hospitals and doing the PET scans at their clinics. PET scans are not covered by RAMQ (Quebec’s version of OHIP).
Getting a PET scan in Quebec costs about $2500.
So, the answer is yes, they are doing the scans in Quebec, but people are paying for the scan themselves.
So let’s do some math.
Dalton McShifty and the Liberals Health Premium – $800 per year
Average age of marriage to retirement – 30 to 65 or 35 years
Total Health Care Premium paid by an average family – $28,000
Cost of a PET scan – $2500
Number of PET Scans the average family could pay for on their own – 11.2
Now let’s look at some other numbers
Amount of money the Ontario cricket club asked for – $150,000
Amount of money the Ontario Liberals gave them without any authorization – $1,000,000
Overfunding? – $850,000
The number of health care premiums the overfunding would have paid for – 1062
Thats 1062 families worth of health care premiums Dalton McShifty just tossed out the window after telling you he needed it to pay for health care.
How many more lies are we going to give him the chance to tell? How much more hard earned tax dollars are we going to let him squander?
In the past 7 to 14 days, the airwaves in Ottawa have been filled with talk about how the newly elected Mayor, Larry O’Brien, and the city councilors are at odds over how to operate the city.
But herein lies the problem. Every sitting councilor who ran again, won their seat. Yet there was a change at the top in the Mayor’s seat.
What does this mean? Well not much, unless you take two points into consideration.
a) Ottawa had a record number of voters turn out in the last election to bring in a new Mayor because citizens want change.
and
b) Many citizens who do not typically vote municipally will more often than not vote in the incumbent because they do not pay enough attention to know anyone else’s name or position.
What kind of record numbers you ask? Click the image below for a larger version.
With Ottawa forming two new ridings, it is not easy to map every Ward to a new version, but many do map pretty clearly. To account for increased elector numbers, the figures below are based on voter percentage increases.
Ward 1 Orleans has ~76% increase in voter turnout
Ward 2 Innes has ~39% increase in voter turnout
Wards 3, 6 and 21 (now broken into Wards 3, 6, 21, and 22) had ~54% increase in voter turnout
Ward 4 Kanata (now broken into Wards 4 and 23) had ~52% increase in voter turnout
Ward 5 West Carleton has ~38% increase in voter turnout
Ward 7 Bay has ~50% increase in voter turnout
Ward 8 Baseline (now College) has ~84% increase in voter turnout
Ward 9 Knoxdale-Merivale has ~69% increase in voter turnout
Ward 10 Gloucester-Southgate has ~63% increase in voter turnout
Ward 11 Beacon Hill-Cyrville has ~60% increase in voter turnout
Ward 12 Rideau-Vanier has ~66% increase in voter turnout
Ward 13 Rideau-Rockcliffe has ~75% increase in voter turnout
Ward 14 Somerset has a whopping 101% increase in voter turnout
Ward 15 Kitchissippi has ~46% increase in voter turnout
Ward 16 River has ~73% increase in voter turnout
Ward 17 Capital has a whopping 94% increase in voter turnout
Ward 18 Alta Vista has ~80% increase in voter turnout
Ward 19 Cumberland has ~74% increase in voter turnout
Ward 20 Osgoode has a whopping 87% increase in voter turnout
And as a whole the city had an astounding 62% increase as the voter turnout went from 185107 voters in 2003 to 300129 in 2006.
When this many more people turnout to vote, it is clearly a sign that the city wants change and that they expect their councilors to stand behind O’Brien and make the changes necessary to hold the line on taxes (or perhaps even cut them).
