Kathleen Wynne Nickels and Dimes Small Businesses

Today Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals raised miniumum wage in Ontario from $10.25 to $11.00. Either she doesn’t do math or she is nickel and diming.  She announced that she would tag the rise to inflation since 2010 when it was last raised.

Yet by my math when I take the CPI inflation rate in Canada over the past 4 years and multiply the rate by the current $10.25 minimum wage I get a $10.96 minimum wage.

CPI inflation for 2010 – 2.35%

CPI inflation for 2011 – 2.30%

CPI inflation for 2012 – 0.83%

CPI inflation for 2013 – 1.24%

So $10.25 x 1.0235 x 1.0230 x 1.0083 x 1.0124 = $10.955

So she has just tagged in an added 4.45 cents.  You may think this is paltry but it is another way she is nudging Ontario small businesses over the cliff a nickel at a time.

Officially Screwed….again.

Open Letter From Santa Claus To Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson

After reading this article, Old Saint Nick sent me the letter below to share….

Dear James, (aka Mayor Jim Watson),

I was surprised that you would get jealous about Toronto getting $600M for three new transit stops. After all, I have been more than generous to you and your Liberal friends with an embarassment of riches. Jeolousy won’t get you off of my “Naughty List”. You can’t possibly be surprised to know that you are on this list. But just in case you are wondering why, I have noted a few reasons below.

For starters when you got elected to the provincial legislature in 2003, the Ontario Liberal party promised to not raise taxes and immediately imposed a massive health care premium. Lying is something Santa takes very seriously.

Then Santa did his best to give the Ontario Liberals (of which you are one) more money to spend wisely. But what did they do? They decided to drop a cool Billion dollars on eHealth, but their oversight let it all go to waste.

I then gave you and your friends another billion dollar gift and they blew it by giving blank cheques to Orange, the air ambulance company who blew it on things like two motorcycles from Orange County Choppers.

I then gave the Ontario Liberals yet another billion dollar Christmas gift but instead of building gas plants, they selfishly wasted the money to move the plants so they could win a couple of seats near Mississauga.

And guess what? I also gave you and your Liberal cronys another billion dollars of hard earned tax money and instead of sending some to you for your choo choo train, they decided to put up solar panels and windmills that will leave a legacy of debt to be paid off by Ontarian tax payers on their Hydro bills.

And now I am hearing that cronyism is running amock as your friend Kathleen Wynn is creating a bunch of advisory boards and loading them up with liberal party hacks. This is a slap in the face of Ontario taxpayers.

To get on my “Nice List” people need to share. They need to tell the truth. They need to appreciate what they have been given and not throw these gifts away for personal gain or benefit.

I urge you to think about these things. You have the ear of your fellow Liberals. How YOU choose to use your voice will determine if you get back on my “Nice List”.

Signed

Santa Claus

Terrorists Succeed In Canada

We should never negotiate with terrorists. Yet it looks like the Liberal Charest government in Quebec has done so.

Student leaders and the provincial government reached an agreement over tuition costs in principle on Saturday a day after violent protests left two men critically injured and one of them partially blind.

Tens of thousands of students have been on strike for more than 80 days since the government announced it was going to increase tuition by $1,625 or 75%.

ORNGE Boondoggle Audit Report Highlights

Last week the Ontario Auditor General released the report on ORNGE, the air ambulance agency that is deservedly under scrutiny. Here are some highlights to make you see red.

We noted in this regard that the funding Ornge received for air ambulance services increased by more than 20% between the 2006/07 fiscal year (Ornge’s first full year of operations) and the 2010/11 fiscal year. However, over the same period, the total number of patients transported by air decreased by 6%.

Nice eh? How about this one?

Ornge received $65 million to perform inter-facility land ambulance transfers, projected to number 20,000 annually. However, Ornge is currently providing only about 15% of the projected transfers.

Do the math on that one. To transport a patient, over land not air, was estimated to cost $3250 per transport. So if you were to be driven by Ornge from North York General to Sick Children’s Hospital, we were GOING to pay $3250. But instead Ornge took $65Million and only transported 3000 people. The math there is over $21500 per transport. Seriously???

Ornge management, with approval of its board, created a network of for-profit and not-for-profit subsidiaries and other companies with which Ornge has entered into complex financial arrangements to deliver air ambulance services. In fact, much of Ornge’s operation is being delivered by these other entities, which bill Ornge for those services.

And I guarantee each tier took it’s chunk of our flesh in dollars. How about the sweet deal below for some company. I would LOVE to be the landlord for ORNGE.

The building that houses Ornge’s corporate head office was purchased for $15 million using funding borrowed through a bond issue. Ornge then entered into a complex arrangement with some of the other entities it created to sell the building and lease it back to itself. An independent real-estate appraiser
we engaged estimated that, under its lease with a related Ornge company, Ornge’s rent payments are 40% higher than the fair-market rent. Over the first five years of the 25-year lease, this amounts to Ornge paying $2 million more than it would pay if the building’s cost per square foot were comparable to that of similar buildings in the area.

Can we say Chaching?? I am sure the landlord for ORNGE was saying it.

After buying 12 new helicopters for US$148 million, Ornge arranged to install seating for 12 people in two of them. As a result, these helicopters could not be used to transport patients. Ornge told us it was considering selling these two helicopters.

Sure…AFTER they got caught.

The report goes on and on. And after they take a big chunk of our tax dollars and blow it left right and centre, the top employees refuse to disclose their salaries on the Ontario government sunshine list of people who make more than $100K.

Ontario Tax Payers….Officially Screwed….again. Thank you Dalton McGuinty, George Smitherman and Deb Matthews.

How Dalton McGuinty is Raping and Pillaging Ontario Residents

Here are two simple ways Yellow Bellied McShifty is hitting me in the wallet.

My Enbridge bill showed up. This is for a low month where I used very little natural gas.

My HST on this bill was $25.27.

My Hydro bill showed up. This was for a two month period.

My HST on the electricity was $44.20
My HST on the Delivery, regulatory charges, etc. was $28.18
My Debt Retirement Charge was $30.00
Divide these by two (for a one month average) and you get $51.19

The total of my monthly HST and debt retirement charge is $76.46. The debt retirement charge was supposed to be all paid off in 2012. But McGuinty has extended it for SIX YEARS to 2018 as I have told you all before. He is RAPING our wallets.

Extrapolate to a 12 month year and the money that I will save if Hudak knocks that lying McGuinty out of office is $917.52. Tim Hudak and the PC Party has said they will eliminate the HST on electricity and natural gas bills as well as eliminate the debt retirement charge.

What could YOU do with an additional $900 in your wallet every year?

On October 6th, vote for Tim Hudak.

Tim Hudak Starts Barking Up The Right Tree

Today the Ontario PC Party finally announced a game changer. They will be eliminating the HST off Hydro Bills.

As we have announced here at OfficiallyScrewed.com before, the debt retirement charge that never gets repaid is subject to HST and we have argued that never paying off the debt (a la Dalton McGuinty) is a way the province will keep collecting tax dollars as the debt retirement is subject to HST.

Well Hudak has come through for Ontarians with this announcement.

An Ontario PC government will provide Ontario families with real, permanent household relief by:
Removing the HST from residential hydro bills. The HST has made life unaffordable for many families. Combine that with expensive energy experiments and hydro bills are soaring.
Removing the HST from residential home heating bills (natural gas and other fuels). We live in Canada where heating our homes isn’t a luxury. Increasing the cost with a tax increase is unfair.
Removing the Debt Retirement Charge from residential hydro bills. We will remove the so-called “Debt Retirement Charge” from your hydro bills. The full amount had been collected as of 2010 – yet the McGuinty government extended it to 2018.
Taken together, these three steps will give a typical Ontario household $275 in immediate relief from rising energy bills.

Thank you Mr. Hudak. We needed something to hit the masses with and this is a the perfect shot in the arm to stimulate interest in putting the PC party in charge of Ontario.

Tim Hudak Vows to Cancel Samsung Deal…But Won’t

Fact: Samsung is not GETTING $7B. They are INVESTING $7B in Ontario in exchange for tax breaks. (some believe to be in the neighbourhood of $500M).

Fact: Tim Hudak has said he will cancel the contract.

Prediction: Tim Hudak’s first speech as Premiere about the Samsung deal will go like this:

“After throughly analyzing the contract that the previous Liberal government signed with Samsung, we have discovered that the contract is so far along that to cancel it now would be an undue burden on the tax payers and would not be prudent. We sincerely believe to sign the contract was a travesty but at this point there is not much we can do but to honour it in the best interest of Ontarians.”

I’m just sayin….

Caledonia Comes To Ottawa

Tonight I had the privilege of attending the Free Thinking Film Society‘s event “Caledonia: No More Nightmares” at the Library and Archives Canada. I knew it was going to be interesting when, for the first time, the FTFS had protesters. There were perhaps a dozen or so people standing in front of the doors handing out flyers.

I was being handed one but asked what it was first. The gentleman said it was some information about Gary McHale and his videos and how they are racist. I told him that this had nothing to do with racism, but equality of justice and walked inside without taking his literature.

Inside I paid for my ticket, bought my autographed copy of Christie Blatchford’s book “Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us.” , a can of diet coke and went in and sat down in a seat.

The speeches and slideshow/videos started and as Mark Vanderhaas was speaking, two of the protesters who were in the theatre started heckling and commenting out loud about what was being said. They were shouted down by most of the audience with yells of “questions at the end” or “be quiet and you might learn something”.

After the third or fourth incident, Fred Litwin the host of the event warned them that if they disturbed the presentation again that they would be removed. And sure enough, when the subject of Dudley George came up, they could not keep silent and started the troublemaking again. Within a minute, Fred showed up with perhaps 4 to 6 officers who promptly escorted the two gentlemen out.

The biggest round of applause came when Mark Vanderhaas pointed to the police and said “Ladies and Gentleman, THAT is what a real police force looks like.”

For those of you who are not aware or who have not paid attention, Caledonia is the town where native Indians basically took over a suburban housing development as it was being built and despite calls for help from the OPP, the residents and owners of the land received no help. Property values plummeted, road barricades made people drive enormous miles out of their way to get to school, work etc. And when the locals tried to go put a Canadian flag up in the neighbourhood, they got arrested.

Indians squat, beat up residents, (one into a brain damaged coma), drive over police officers, drag citizens form their cars, disrupt so much…no arrests. Residents try to raise a Canadian flag ….arrested.

To me this was the primary question during the Ontario Provincial leadership campaign and still is. Why is there two tier justice in Canada? We are nation where we are all supposed to be treated equal. Where it doesn’t matter if you are black, white, yellow, brown, gay, straight, Christian, Muslim, Jew, man, woman or tranny. The law needs to treat us all the same so that we know what to expect and as part of the process of keeping our society civil.

As Christie Blatchford’s title states, at Caledonia the OPP did not just fail the residents of Caledonia. They failed us all.

ADDENDUM: After the presentations, I had a chance to get Gary McHale and the Mayor of Haldimand County, Marie Trainer to autograph the book. I’d call it a little slice of history.