You either pay attention or pay through the nose. I would rather pay attention.
After all the battling over the dispensing of crack pipe kits to drug users, the Provincial government of Ontario has bypassed the Ottawa City Council by expanding the decision making process to include appointees.
The new system will have 6 councillors and 5 appointees meaning a single city councillor can side with the 5 appointees on any issue and bring crack pipe kits or safe injection clinics to a neighbourhood near you.
Ottawa taxpayers…OfficiallyScrewed again.
All I can say to my friends in California is a quote from the movie “The Fly” starring Jeff Goldblum.
“Be afraid…be very afraid.”
Kramer, who came under fire at eHealth for runaway spending by consultants and her $317,000 severance package, is executive director of a team bringing electronic health records to the UCLA Health System’s patients in four hospitals and clinics with 2,000 doctors. She is working as a consultant, and is not on staff.
Kramer is part of what the University of California at Los Angeles billed as “an exceptional team of experts” in an online publication Monday.
…
When Kramer left eHealth as chief executive in the spring of 2008, her golden parachute fuelled outrage from opposition parties and the public.
It was later revealed Kramer gave a speech that cost $25,000 to write and that eHealth gave out $16 million in contracts without competitive bidding in efforts to get electronic health records in place as quickly as possible.
Californian Tax Payers might just be … OfficiallyScrewed.
h/t to Shirley for this one.
Just like the new rules for credit cards, each electricity bill should tell us when our last payment will be on the debt.
I say this because originally we were supposed to have paid off the stranded debt by 2012. Then it got extended to 2014. Then it got pushed to 2018. And now this from the National Post.
Why is OEFC financing this capital project when OPG supposedly has the ability to raise funds from private sources and the “stranded debt” was placed in OFEC to ensure that OPG would be self-financing in the future? Why is the “debt retirement” money being paid by ratepayers into OEFC now being used to provide new financing to OPG? The historical rate of repayment of the old “stranded debt” indicates it will take another 49 years to retire! Why hasn’t the Auditor General raised some alarms on this? Why doesn’t OEFC publish quarterly reports so the public can properly follow its activities?
So should our bills not say “At current payment rates, you will make your last payment on February 29th, 2060?
If this 49 year extension is accurate, then it is safe to say that this debt has been severely mismanaged by the OEFC. The OEFC was created to hold the old debt and pay it off. And now it is being used as a bank which is funding new projects. This is clearly not good for your electricity bill because what few people pay attention to is the fact that you pay HST on top of that debt retirement charge.
If the infrastructure money for new electricity projects was simply to come from the government and not the OEFC, then you would not have to pay that charge and the HST on it directly. It would simply be rolled in to the provincial deficit/debt. But by shuffling it into the OEFC, McGuinty get’s a nice HST boost and you and get…. you guessed it…
OfficiallyScrewed!!
In what I would describe as double penetration, the Ontario Energy Board has ruled that utility companies can raise their rates to pay for $18 Million in fines that they received for….wait for it….overcharging those who paid bills late.
You got it. First they screwed the taxpayer and then they asked to screw the taxpayer for screwing the tax payer….and the Ontario Energy Board said yes.
“It’s a scam,” Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak shot at Energy Minister Brad Duguid in the Legislature’s daily question period, saying the Liberals have turned the energy board into “another McGuinty tax collection agency.”
“Why is it when Ontario families even win in the courts you still make them pay the price of illegal activity?”
Now THAT is getting OfficiallyScrewed.
On Friday, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals decided to put a moratorium on offshore wind projects. I thought a lot about this over the weekend and commented to friends that it is possibly the beginning of the coming landslide in the green energy kybosh which may be the only thing that saves the provincial liberals from a rout in the October 2011 elections.
Then I read this article in the Toronto Star.
In particular this section.
Offshore applications to date make up only a handful of the many hundreds received so far, and the government’s terse news release pointed out that none have been built. Queen’s Park is pulling the plug until “further scientific research is conducted.”
But the reality is that public opinion research, rather than scientific research, is driving the government’s agenda these days. A number of Liberal ridings are being buffeted by wind turbine troubles, notably the Scarborough seat held by Energy Minister Brad Duguid.
The premier likes to boast in his speeches about Ontario’s groundbreaking renewable energy policies and his focus on good government. He has long resisted NIMBYism, and his ministers are known to mock them as BANANAs — Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. But with an election coming, his new priority is putting out political fires — most recently by nixing the gas-fired power plant in Oakville that threatened another Liberal seat.
The opposition is profiting from the anti-wind movement, with many MPPs stirring it up in their ridings at every opportunity. Most of the huffing and puffing is directed against onshore wind farms, which face a 550-metre setback. Offshore turbines, by contrast, faced a five-kilometre setback — virtually out of sight, but by no means out of mind.
So what does this mean?
Well it means that they cancelled a tiny portion of wind, primarily on Lake Ontario, to save Brad Duguid’s Scarborough seat by cancelling wind turbine projects that have to be 5km from shore but it leaves the countless wind farms that only have to be 550 meters from a neighbour’s property. If health was truly the cause of the cancellation, then they would have cancelled the ones that are potentially closer to people. But a) this would affect the bulk of the programs and b) it would not help save Brad Duguid’s job. And since Duguid is now the face of Green Energy in Ontario, it would be a devastating loss and hit to the Green Energy Act if he was unseated.
So rural farmers who make up the bulk of the current wind farms (and their neighbours who make up the bulk of the neighbours of wind farms) get the shaft.
Sound familiar? Well it should. You see back on July 2nd, McGuinty also cut the rates for lucrative 10kW MicroFIT solar projects that were ground based from 80.2 cents per kWh to 64.2 pretty much making them unviable. Yet he left the rooftop installations at 80.2 cents per kWh. The reason they sited was that the ground based installations were cheaper. But they were wrong. The ground based systems need heavy ballasting, far longer trenches, potentially new hydro poles, transformers etc depending on the location. Whereas rooftop systems have all that readily available. and simply connect up to the power near your home meter.
So he slaps the rural community on July 2nd and tells them they can’t really take part in solar and now he slaps them again by telling them Scarborough resident’s health is in jeopardy when they are 5km from an installation but farmers that are potentially 550 meters from a windfarm are not at the same risk. Can we say OfficiallyScrewed?
The ONLY thing that would make this windfarm situation right is if he puts a hold on all ONSHORE windfarm projects as well.
$5M of our money to keep Eco Fee Ass Co. going.
Why is everyone celebrating? There was NO win for taxpayers yesterday when the Liberals put a 3 month moratorium on the new Eco Fee. A fee that turns out to be the biggest tax grab in our provincial history which is a pretty lofty achievement considering the previous two biggest tax grabs were just put in by our Liberals with their health levy a few years ago and the new HST.
At the same time they announced this moratorium, they committed a further $5M out of our regular taxes until an assessment of this ridiculous tax grab is made. I would go so far as to say that this is meant to appease complainers like me in hopes I will forget that in three months the moratorium will expire and the program will likely be slipped in under the radar again.
So now instead of taxing us at the till, we are being taxed from general revenues to fund a program that needs assessment. Think about that. They admit it needs assessment. Yet they still continue to fund it. Why do we always end up losing out? Why can’t they just put a halt on the program outright?
OfficiallyScrewed … again.
ADDENDUM
Lowell Green on CFRA brings up a good point. Why are we paying a further $5M while assessing this? Stewardship Ontario has a reserve fund close to $73 Million invested in GICs, Money Market and Bonds which are part of their assets. From Stewardship Ontario’s own website financials.
Below is the Balance Sheet indicating how the assets. (note the comment on Investments)
Below is their statement of variance. Note how much money they spend in a year and mostly on our Blue Box program. I always thought my municipal taxes paid for blue box programs.
And now the kicker. Where the $72+ Million in Investements are. Completely liquid assets. So instead of taking a minor hit on the interest and selling $5M of investments, the stinking Liberal McGuintyites are taking the $5M from our general tax revenue when they have completely liquid assets.
Christina Blizzard has the lowdown here.
Remember the Liberals promising to roll back insurance premiums by 10%? That worked out well, didn’t it? Have you checked your bill lately?
Two sets of numbers released last week suggest Ontario is still one of the highest priced jurisdictions in the country when it comes to auto insurance.
Kinetix, a company that provides on-line insurance quotes, reported Ontario insurance rates had increased 15.2% in the second quarter of 2010 over the same period last year.
Meanwhile, in Quebec, rates fell 8.2% in the same period.
In Alberta, auto insurance decreased 0.2%, the fourth consecutive quarter Alberta car insurance decreased.
OfficiallyScrewed by Dalton McGuinty … Again.
When I was a young man still in University I was offered my first credit card. It was a GM VISA with a $500 spending limit. Considering I didn’t have $500 to my name and summer was coming I was ecstatic that I would be able to load up my tackle box and pick up a carton or two of smokes. Although not necessities to the average person, they seemed like they were necessities to me.
So I cautiously ran up a bit of a tab on the card. Then the inevitable bill came. Sure it showed me a minimum payment which was a bit of reassurance. I wouldn’t have to pay the whole thing off at once. But little did I realize that that small monthly payment was coming right off the top of my income. Why? Because I chose to spend something I didn’t have.
Well governments around the world are doing it now. Forget extreme hyperbole such as “spending like drunken sailors”. Expressions like this make it sound like we are just exaggerating. Well the truth is they are spending like unsure, unaware teenagers with their first credit cards. They don’t realize that pulling more out of the taxpayers is like that teenager trying to find a job in a down economy. The potential to pay back that debt is there, but the economic conditions to allow that to happen are just not there. And the more we run up the debt the harder it will be to dig ourselves out.
That’s it. I don’t have any links on this. Just the anology and the request that everyone out there contact the politicians representing them at all levels of government and simply ask them to spend within their means. Do NOT extend their means to accommodate how much they want to spend.
Next Tuesday April 6th, the NDP government of Nova Scotia is likely to raise their provincial sales tax. The Politic‘s Mark Peters points this out in comments to our post on Quebec Liberals raising sales taxes.
Tie in the expectation of an American consumption tax (i.e. a federal sales tax) and we clearly have the answer from far left of the political spectrum.
Liberal “deep thinkers” in Montreal were just waxing poetic on a carbon tax and thinking “Maybe if we smother it in sausage gravy, they scheme, it will be tasty.”
It’s no wonder we all don’t just throw our hands in the air and jump on board the sausage gravy train.
This is what $7/day daycare gets you.
I am a big proponent of making sure each level of government pays for the programs it wants to see and Quebec has quite obviously been a bit left of center compared to the rest of Canada. Seeing them raise the Provincial portion of their harmonized sales tax to pay for the lifestyle they want makes me happy because hopefully it means I won’t have to pay for their lifestyle.
Brian Mulroney took one on the chin (no cheap shot intended) when he brought in the GST, but what I liked about two separate taxes was that they let us see which government was raising or lowering taxes.
So consider this post my way of shouting out to everyone in Quebec. It was a LIBERAL government that raised your taxes.
Meanwhile back in Ottawa, their federal LIBERAL cousins are working hard to keep Conservatives from CUTTING taxes.
Quebec taxpayers getting OfficiallyScrewed at the till by Liberals.