On Monday morning as sections of Ontario had just gone back into full lockdown I did something I try to avoid. I read Twitter. It was the typical political grandstanding common with the Twitter machine. One thing the woke crowd, the Twitter pundits agree, is conservatives bad, socialists good. It all reads like monosyllabic Neanderthal speak, pounding chest, “me good, me fund hospital, you bad, you support business.”
When I was a little boy I remember going to the lunch counter on Kingsville’s Main Street to get a pop with my older brother. We likely spent too much of our money on hockey cards so we didn’t have enough left over for food or drink. However, we got Pop Shoppe sodas – cream soda is still my favourite – and they cost 20 cents with deposit or 15 cents if we drank them in the store and left the bottles behind. You see Pop Shoppe had this ingenious thing called manufacturer responsible recycling. You’d pay for the deposit and if you didn’t return the bottle you lost your money, so there was an incentive to recycle.
The number of known COVID-19 cases in Canada has grown to greater numbers than in the spring proving what we all feared – the second wave is in fact worse than the first. I say known COVID-19 cases because parliament in Ottawa took the summer off instead of ensuring rapid testing is available for all Canadians before schools came back.
Every four years Canadians – and many others around the world I suspect – wonder out loud how much quicker U.S. elections would go if those doing the count were allowed to remove their shoes and socks. This way you see, in most cases they could count up to 20.
When Justin Trudeau was elected Prime Minister in 2015 he vowed to do politics differently. This week he fulfilled that vow by attaching a confidence vote to a committee motion, something never done before in the history of Canada. The reason you ask? Well simple, he didn’t like the result of the last election because Canadians put a check on his power-mad, entitled government.
During the 2018 provincial election, one of the strongest voices for Ontario’s long-term care homes was provincial New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath. It’s true; the NDP platform had several recommendations to improve – in their mind at least – the province’s failing long-term care system. The focus was, and still is, to make them all public.
When the final book is written on the North American wide response to the COVID-19 pandemic a major contributing factor to why so many mistakes have been made will be partisanship. This writer has said as early as February, there is no worse time for a pandemic to hit the United States than during an election year. No matter what the science says, no matter what kind of response is needed, the reaction will be based on politics.
One of the criticisms I often heard about Erin O’Toole’s run for Conservative Leadership was he doesn’t have the charisma of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Mr. O’Toole doesn’t come from an ultra-rich super-white privileged family. He didn’t attend private dinners with Fidel Castro, Jimmy Carter or the Aga Khan.
If debt servicing were a ministry of government in Ontario it would be the third largest after health care and education in terms of overall cost. The reason is Ontario has the largest sub-sovereign debt in the world. Like a household with runaway credit card bills, a massive portion of Ontario’s revenue is dedicated to service interest payments.
The politician most invoked by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the 2019 election was not his chief competitor, then-Conservative boss Andrew Scheer, it was Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Attacking the leader of a lower level of government during an election is an incredibly distasteful act as premiers are the prime minister’s partners in governing Canada. It is the kind of thing you would expect from a leader like US president Donald Trump – then again I believe the two men are incredibly similar in there “do as I say, not as I do” attitudes, so it shouldn’t be surprising.