Politics-Provincial – Page 5 – OfficiallyScrewed.com

I Found The Silver Lining

October 20, 2007Mulder

I’ve been mulling over the recent Ontario provincial election and wondering if the dark cloud is truly as dark as I thought it was on October 11th.

Well it isn’t. I believe I have found the silver lining.

As per the recent Throne Speech, the federal Conservatives will be doing three things in the coming session of Parliament that when taken together are greater than the sum of the parts.

1) They will be working to move the Federal government out of programs that are Provincial jurisdiction and

2) They will be cutting the GST another point to 5%, and

3) They will be making broad based tax cuts.

When you mix these three with the previous promise to correct the Fiscal Imbalance the sum is greater than the parts. The Feds will fix the Fiscal Imbalance by letting the provinces take more control of their own spending and programs, which costs the Feds less and the provinces more.

Well there is a rumour floating out there that if the GST is cut a point, Quebec plans to raise the provincial tax by that same point to compensate for these downloaded services.

Well if Quebec does it, you can be sure several other provinces will too. And that probably includes Ontario.

When you think about it, if the provincial Tories won the election and then had to raise taxes, they would never have been able to live it down or criticize Dalton McShifty again.

But if services are downloaded to the provincial Liberal government and Yellow Bellied McShifty is required to raise taxes to compensate, you can be sure that tax payers will not treat the Liberal brand in Ontario well.

When Dalton first said he would not raise taxes and did, we were upset but we swallowed it. In the last election he also promised that he would not raise taxes. But if PST goes up to 9% when the GST drops to 5% then you can be sure that the Liberal name will be as good as dirt for one, two and maybe even three elections.

So there is the silver lining for you Ontario Tories out there.

Smackdown – Senator Terry Stratton Lays Into Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams

October 13, 2007Mulder

In my honest opinion, Danny Williams needs to shake Newfoundland up and not shake the Federal government down.

Terry Stratton seems to agree that Williams is focussing his energy in the wrong place.

Click the above video ONCE to view. If it does not start playing, you can click the link below to view the video in another browser window.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKnxM3Pzc4Y

Yellow Bellied McShifty Breaks Another Promise – Class Sizes Won't Reach 20

October 10, 2007Mulder

Geoff Matthews points this out in today’s Sun newspaper. Not that class sizes need to reach 20, but what the heck was Dalton doing making this promise in the first place?

Now comes word that the provincial government hasn’t a chance of meeting its self-imposed target of cutting classroom sizes for primary grades to no more than 20 students by this September — a promise that was made during, you guessed it, the 2003 election campaign.

The question isn’t whether the goal can be met. It’s why did the premier make the promise in the first place?

Is there some magical reason why a class with 20 students can be managed, while a class with, say, 23, will spiral out of control?

Couldn’t a class of 30 kids work perfectly well in some instances, while in others anything more than a dozen would be a challenge?

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old geezer, let me point out that when I was in school, we had classes of well over 30 students, and we never seemed to lack for a bit of personal attention from the teacher when it was required.

You got it right on the money Geoff. When I was in public school, there were well over 30 kids in my class just about every year. The only time there were less was if a grade only had 25 or so kids or if there were 50 or 55 in the grade and two classes were split.

The issue isn’t class size. It’s how the teachers control that class. And this day and age, they just don’t have the skill or desire to do it. They blame things like ADD or ADHD for their inadequacies in controlling children. They push them along year after year just happy to get the troubled ones out of their class, watering down the value of a high school diploma.

The above article was originally posted on March 8th, 2007, but I thought it was generic enough to repost today. Choose well today at the voting booth.

One Man's Opinion That I Share

September 24, 2007Mulder

Today an old friend emailed me the following health care opinion and asked if it was accurate. All I could answer was yes. This is what happens when unions get a hold of health care. It also means that left leaning pro union parties are obligated to support the public system despite it’s obvious cost overruns and wait times.

(p.s. I changed the names to protect the innocent.)

I saw on the news up here in Canada where Hillary Clinton introduced her new health care plan. Something similar to what we have in Canada. I also heard that Michael Moore was raving about the health care up here in Canada in his latest movie. As your friend and someone who lives with the Canada health care plan I thought I would give you some facts about this great medical plan that we have in Canada.

First of all

1) The health care plan in Canada is not free. We pay a premium every month of $96. for [Jane] and I to be covered. Sounds great eh. What they don’t tell you is how much we pay in taxes to keep the health care system afloat. I am personally in the 55% tax bracket. Yes 55% of my earnings go to taxes. A large portion of that and I am not sure of the exact amount goes directly to health care our #1 expense.

2) I would not classify what we have as health care plan, it is more like a health diagnosis system. You can get into to see a doctor quick enough so he can tell you “yes indeed you are sick or you need an operation” but now the challenge becomes getting treated or operated on. We have waiting lists out the ying yang some as much as 2 years down the road.

3) Rather than fix what is wrong with you the usual tactic in Canada is to prescribe drugs. Have a pain here is a drug to take- not what is causing the pain and why. No time for checking you out because it is more important to move as many patients thru as possible each hour for Government re-imbursement

4) Many Canadians do not have a family Doctor.

5) Don’t require emergency treatment as you may wait for hours in the emergency room waiting for treatment.

6) [Jane’s] dad cut his hand on a power saw a few weeks back and it required that his hand be put in a splint – to our surprise we had to pay $125. for a splint because it is not covered under health care plus we have to pay $60. for each visit for him to check it out each week.

7) Shirley’s cousin was diagnosed with a heart blockage. Put on a waiting list . Died before he could get treatment.

8) Government allots so many operations per year. When that is done no more operations, unless you go to your local newspaper and plead your case and embarrass the government then money suddenly appears.

9)The Government takes great pride in telling us how much more they are increasing the funding for health care but waiting lists never get shorter. Government just keeps throwing money at the problem but it never goes away. But they are good at finding new ways to tax us, but they don’t call it a tax anymore it is now a user fee.

10) A friend needs an operation for a blockage in her leg but because she is a smoker they will not do it. Despite paying into the health care system all these years. My friend is 65 years old. Now there is talk that maybe we should not treat fat and obese people either because they are a drain on the health care system. Let me see now, what we want in Canada is a health care system for healthy people only. That should reduce our health care costs.

11) Forget getting a second opinion, what you see is what you get.

12) I can spend what money I have left after taxes on booze, cigarettes, junk food and anything else that could kill me but I am not allowed by law to spend my money on getting an operation I need because that would be jumping the queue. I must wait my turn except if I am a hockey player or athlete [or the Minister for Health Promotion getting a Cancerous skin lesion removed] then I can get looked at right away. Go figger [sic]. Where else in the world can you spend money to kill yourself but not allowed to spend money to get healthy.

13) Oh did I mention that immigrants are covered automatically at tax payer expense having never contributed a dollar to the system and pay no premiums.

14) Oh yeh we now give free needles to drug users to try and keep them healthy. Wouldn’t want a sickly druggie breaking into your house and stealing your things. But people with diabetes who pay into the health care system have to pay for their needles because it is not covered but the health care system.

I send this out not looking for sympathy but as the election looms in the states you will be hearing more and more about universal health care down there and the advocates will be pointing to Canada. I just want to make sure that you hear the truth about health care up here and have some food for thought and informed questions to ask when broached with this subject.

Step wisely and don’t make the same mistakes we have.

I would like to add a bit more.

15) The loonie left in Canada will fight to keep you from having heart surgery, a PET scan or an MRI at a private clinic, but they will be the first to defend abortions that are only performed in private clinics.

16) (to expand on 14 above). We used to have needle exchange programs, but now they are Needle Distribution Programs (ironically acronymed NDP, the same as our left leaning political party). So the city of Ottawa pays someone $50,000 to pick up dirty needles. If we had maintained the needle exchange, at least the druggies would have been helping us keep our children safe from finding these things on the street.

17) God help the person who has no family to help them go through any major operation in the hospitals. The blame is not on the nurses who do an amazing job with what they are given to work with. But in this day and age, someone having an operation almost HAS to have family members around to help care for them and make sure they are getting what they need, when they need it because the logistics and planning in hospitals just does not allow for smooth timely operation. My mother had heart surgery last November and the ice chip machine on the Critical Care Unit floor at Sunnybrook hospital was broken so we would go to different floors to bring her ice chips.

Ontario residents need to send Premier Yellow Bellied McShifty a clear message this October 10th.

Dalton McGuinty Misleads Us Yet Again In Latest Commercial

September 23, 2007Mulder

Last night I saw a new Liberal commercial featuring your favourite liar and mine, Yellow Bellied McShifty, the leader of the Ontario provincial Liberal party.

Well in this commercial (and in one other) Dalton says, and I quote:

I believe that taking half a billion much needed dollars from [public] schools to give to private religious schools is a mistake.

Dalton assumes that to fund faith based schools, one must take money out of the current public school system. This is clearly inaccurate and McShifty knows it.

Even the Ontario Public School Board Association noted on page 4 of a 2005 report on the status of school funding that one of their four priorities was:

all allocations are on a per pupil basis while some allocations per “school” would be more appropriate.

This is in line with what my last post alluded to. The schools are currently funded on a “per butt in the seat” basis and funding faith based schools, (of which the majority are Christian but non-Catholic) would only inject money into the current system and not take a penny out of the current system.

Trade Offs. I Will Take Tory's Faith Based Funding Over The Liberal's Lawyer and Crony Based Funding Anyday

September 22, 2007Mulder

Let’s look at some numbers (again).

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?

Those taxes collected from the parents of children in faith based schools gets spent on scandals like the $1 Million that went to a cricket club when they only asked for $150,000. Tie in the other end of year budget shopping sprees and we get…

Total Wasted: $32 Million

It also get’s spent on provincial advertising campaigns for Caledonia that line the pockets of Liberal supporters and their families.

Total Wasted: $50,000

It goes to fund the pockets of Liberals and Liberal cronies such as Jane Stewart and David Peterson for negotiating with criminals like the natives in Caledonia.

It goes to buy land so that the OPP doesn’t have to do their job and clean out criminal land squatters in Caledonia who resort to violence.

Total Wasted: $55 Million

It goes to pay lawyers to fight against funding for autistic kids and, even more so, it goes to paying lawyers to fight to hide the cost of that fight!!! How OfficiallyScrewed is that???

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.

Wake up Ontario. It’s Tory Time.

McShifty Playing A Shell Game With Healthcare and Gambling With Lives

September 20, 2007Mulder

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?

Mixed Member Proportional Strikes Out With Me

September 19, 2007Mulder

Italy uses a Mixed Member Proportional system and from what I can see, they have one of the most Officially Screwed electoral system in the world.

They have over 40 political parties (Strike 1) of which the majority are tied in to two coalitions.

But because the Italian system incorporates a 4% minimum in order to garner some of the assigned proportionality seats, the coalition with the most votes is not the party forming the government because they have more parties with less than 4% of the vote in their coalition. (Strike 2)

Strike 3 is attributed to the fact that an MMP system will let every small interest group form a party in an effort to garner 4% of the vote and get a representative in the assembly. The proposed system for Ontario would only require 3% making it that much more fringe party friendly. Here is a brief list of some of the party names.

Daisy-Democracy is Freedom Party
Rose in the Fist Party
Italian Radicals
Party of Italian Communists
S.O.S. Italy Party

In reading a few of the other names, I would imagine that it wouldn’t be long before we had political parties dedicated to core unions such as:

“The Teachers Union Party”

“The United Auto Workers Party”. (I would give you one guess at who would lead this one.)

Then we have New Zealand. This country had a two party system from 1909 to 1996 when they moved to a proportional system. What would Ontario have to look forward to with an MMP system?

New Zealand has a strong party system in place. The first political party was founded in 1891, and its main rival was founded in 1909 — from that point until a change of electoral system in 1996, New Zealand had a two-party system in place. Today, New Zealand has a genuinely multi-party system, with eight parties currently represented in Parliament. Neither of the two largest parties have been able to govern without support from other groups since 1996, meaning that coalition government is required.

The two largest, and oldest, parties are the Labour Party (centre-left progressive) and the National Party (centre-right conservative). Other parties currently represented in Parliament are New Zealand First (populist, nationalist), ACT (free market), the Greens (left-wing, environmentalist), United Future (family values), the Progressives (leftist), and the Māori Party (ethnic).

I think that MMP will create more headaches in trying to form coalitions than allowing the government of the day to lead the people and the province. Stick to “First Past The Post”. The current system may not always get your favourite party in power, but whomever is in power will be able to run the show without having to make a bunch of back room deals for support.

First Past The Post has my vote on Election Day.

Reprint: "Liberal" … "Advertising" … Is Your Spidey Sense Tingling Now Too?

September 17, 2007Mulder

Below is a reprint of a post I put up on July 7th, 2006. I think this is important so that Ontarians realize what kind of government they are dealing with. The term “sponsorship scandal” does not only apply to federal Liberals.

Liberal … Advertising … Is Your Spidey sense Tingling Now Too?

Well it should be.

Steve Janke has done it again. In an incredible excercise of digging up the dirt, he may have just caught that Yellow Bellied McShifty with his pants down.

It is no secret that businesses in Caledonia are suffering because of the land dispute. The provincial government, run by the Liberals under Premier Dalton McGuinty, has offered to help.

In true Liberal fashion, they are offering to help with advertising.

…

An advertising agency that works in the Hamilton area called Play Advertising was awarded the contract.

The head of the firm is Brian Torsney. His sister is Paddy Torsney, a former Member of Parliament for Burlington for the federal Liberals. Burlington is near Hamilton. From 1985 to 1989, she was a special assistant to David Peterson, at the time the Liberal premier of Ontario.

The same David Peterson who was assigned the task of negotiating on behalf of the province in the Caledonia dispute.

Interesting.

Interesting indeed. I highly urge you all to go read this.

I think we are, once again, getting Officially Screwed by a Liberal and their ad agency friends.