You either pay attention or pay through the nose. I would rather pay attention.
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.
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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%.
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.
This cartoon is EXACTLY why this site is named what it is.
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.
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.
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….
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.
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.
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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!!