The Citizen, 2019-04-11, Page 5Other Views
Green bananas outlast political promises
Let our grandchildren pay the bill Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
As I sat through the most recent North
Huron Council meeting, I wondered
about the shelf life of a political
promise. Apparently, in North Huron, it’s less
than a year if many campaign promises are to
be believed.
Regular readers of this column know that
my stance regarding the Howson Dam has
been that, as a non-essential piece of
infrastructure, any restoration or replacement
of the site needs to be done on the dime of
those interested. The project could cost
between $460,000 and $10 million, once
financed.
Several council hopefuls agreed with me,
including Reeve Bernie Bailey, who plainly
stated during his campaign that ratepayers
couldn’t shoulder the cost of the project,
regardless of the path taken by council.
During North Huron’s budgetary process,
however, $15,000 was earmarked for the
Howson Dam-Bridge Committee to cover
costs, such as hiring yet another engineer to
evaluate the failing infrastructure.
The project has dragged on for years with
council consistently coming to the same
conclusion: there isn’t money in the budget to
fix the ailing structure. I’m not sure what
throwing another $15,000 at it is going to do,
except allow the soon-to-be-struck committee,
if it’s filled with supporters of the dam, to find
an engineer more in line with their beliefs.
This $15,000 is on top of the amount of
money the municipality is going to spend to
have council representatives at the meeting.
They will be paid for their attendance.
That’s an awful funny way to not spend
any tax dollars on it. In fairness, the committee
doesn’t just get the money, they have to
demonstrate a need, but why is it there at all?
At some point, council needs to take a stand
on the issue and stop letting special interest
groups dominate the discussion. The bridge is
non-essential infrastructure, full stop. If a
group wants to try and restore it, members
should do so on their own dime with council’s
blessing, rather than council’s involvement
until the final decision on the dam is made.
We’re not talking about a tried-and-true
tourist attraction here: we’re talking about a
structure that could recreate a man-made lake
that may or may not draw crowds away from
places like Goderich or Grand Bend. In my
opinion, as a life-long resident of Huron
County and family man (the kind of person
supporters hope to draw), that’s not likely.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t point out that
broken political promises are a hallmark at
pretty much all levels of politics, though I
imagine most people already know that.
While my editor Shawn has had no problem
taking our local MPP Lisa Thompson to task
over her moves as Minister of Education, I’ve
always held in the back of my mind this hope
that, as the lesser of two evils, she was just
doing what she was told.
I say the lesser of two evils because “just
following orders” has never been a good
excuse for people making questionable
decisions, but it seems less vile. You can cite
psychological studies that show that people
are more likely to follow orders than make a
ruckus, but really, everyone knows that people
in a group tend to act in similar ways.
So while I wouldn’t give Thompson a pass
on things I disagreed with, I didn’t necessarily
think they were entirely her decisions.
However, when it comes to lies I’m a less
forgiving person and, if the research is to be
believed, Thompson’s repeated statement that
no jobs would be lost as a result of her
government’s cuts is one whale of a lie.
Whether you believe Thompson, who has
amended her “no jobs lost” comment to
actually mean no firings, but rather jobs cut by
attrition, or whether you believe groups like
the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’
Federation (OSSTF), which say nearly 3,500
teaching jobs will be lost across Ontario (a 20
per cent loss).
Regardless of who is closer to the truth,
those jobs won’t be there. Those positions,
either through attrition or firing, will be gone
for people currently pursuing education as a
career. As someone who went to a school half-
full of teaching-hopefuls, I can tell you there
are already a lot of trained teachers not
working in their preferred field.
The potential numbers behind this particular
lie puts it in a very dubious category of being
monstrous, not just in its scale, but in its intent,
as well.
Any jobs lost due to education reform are
especially concerning when the government
making these reforms has continually talked
about how many jobs it wants to create.
Like I’ve consistently said, even in a
conversation with a former teacher of mine as
recently as the night before the OSSTF’s
report was unveiled, I hope that Thompson is
just the face of the changes, otherwise, she has
let her constituents down and the actions that
have led us here were hers to do differently.
Huron-Bruce’s recent MP and MPP history,
both Liberal and Conservative, has been
denoted by integrity in my opinion. This kind
and scale of lie, however, throws Thompson’s
integrity into question and it’s no longer
enough for me to hope she’s just following
orders.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 2019. PAGE 5.
Guns and ladders
In preparing this week’s “Looking Back
Through the Years” I was reminded what it
was like to have politicians with backbone,
integrity and conviction who chose to
represent their residents and not their party.
In 1995, Huron-Bruce MP Paul Steckle said
he had no regrets in voting the way he did
under Prime Minister (and leader of Steckle’s
Liberal Party) Jean Chrétien. Steckle was one
of just three MPs who voted against the party’s
Gun Control Bill. He was then removed from
the Standing Committee for Agriculture. He
suspected the move was directly connected to
the way he voted on the bill, but he insisted he
was proud of how he conducted himself,
despite then being punished professionally.
“It would seem that this is a direct result
from my voting against my party’s main
motion on the Gun Control Bill, however,
when I ran for office, I told the people of
Huron-Bruce that I would be their voice in
Ottawa,” Steckle told The Citizen in 1995.
Steckle did what was right for his
constituents (his office received over 2,000
calls asking Steckle to vote against the bill for
various reasons) over and above what was best
for his party and his career. He realized, very
early on, that his boss would always be the
Huron-Bruce voters and not his party leader.
Randy Hillier, a Progressive Conservative
MPP from the Kingston area, has been making
waves for all the same reasons Steckle was
removed from that committee nearly 25 years
ago. Hillier has also experienced a similar fate.
Though Premier Doug Ford has connected
removing Hillier from caucus to comments he
is alleged to have made to protestors (the
“yada yada yada” incident), Hillier in turn
alleges that his removal is a direct result of his
butting heads with Ford’s top advisors and his
refusal to be one of the Premier’s clapping
seals, both at Queen’s Park and on Twitter.
Hillier alleges that he had been scolded for
not applauding with enough vigor in caucus
and not championing the government’s absurd
Ontario News Now propaganda posts. Despite
his expulsion, Hillier says he has no plans on
halting his work, which he sees as representing
his riding (which continues to support him).
Under a party leader obsessed controlling
the message (and his MPPs), Hillier has shown
integrity in saying he’ll applaud for what he
supports and won’t be told what to Tweet.
While the level of he said/she said is even
higher at the federal level, a number of MPs
have made a point to stand up for what they
believe in, no matter the effect on their careers.
MPs Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane
Philpott have both resigned from the cabinet
due to fundamental differences with Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau. Whitby MP Celina
Caesar-Chavannes now sits as an independent
after losing confidence in her party.
Before the SNC-Lavalin scandal broke, one
could hardly imagine a safer spot than in the
bosom of Trudeau, so it took real guts for these
women to stick with their convictions and do
what they felt was right, knowing they would
take a fall professionally as a result.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s inner circle
is full of those who’ve sold their souls, keen to
plumb the depths of depravity as long as the
paycheques keep coming. One needs to only
indulge in Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee
Sanders’ ongoing fictional narrative for proof.
Some residents are lucky to have politicians
who represent their best interests, no matter
the effect it takes on their career. Others have
become pawns, forced to stand by, watching
their representative climb the ladder, leaving
them on the ground, helplessly looking up.
Political parties may differ in the items
they think are important but one shared
philosophy seems to be that we should
party on today and have our grandchildren pick
up the tab.
On the one side, you have our current
federal government, which, in the 2015
election, campaigned on a platform to run a
small deficit but to balance the books by this
year’s election. Instead it ran up a deficit twice
as large as promised and, in 2019, is still as big
as ever.
On the other side, we have Conservatives
who are rightly concerned about spending
money on programs today that our
grandchildren will have to pay for through
interest on the debt we’re run up. With their
campaign against the carbon tax, however, they
seem to be arguing that Canadians shouldn’t be
spending a relatively few dollars today to
hopefully make things better for future
generations.
Currently, Ontario’s Progressive
Conservative government is dealing with the
harsh reality of reining in the spending of the
former Liberal government that left the
province deeply in debt. It’s not that the
Liberals were necessarily wasting money.
Listening to the screams of pain when cuts are
announced to various programs shows that the
money was needed, it’s just that some good
things can’t be afforded on the government’s
current income. Of course Premier Doug
Ford’s government has made the task harder by
reducing its income through things like a cut in
gas taxes.
There’s no doubt that part of the deficit the
federal Liberal government has announced for
2019 is due to this being an election year.
Several programs, such as financial help for
first-time home buyers, are designed to court
voters from different important demographics.
Still, a good deal of money has been invested
in areas of need. It’s just that we’re
borrowing money that future taxpayers will
have to pay back for programs that benefit
people today.
Fiscal deficits are easy for us to understand
because they’re just a bigger version of the
financial dilemmas we’ve all had to face
ourselves. We’ve had to postpone renovating
the bathroom because we couldn’t afford to. Or
we’ve watched friends or relatives living from
paycheque to paycheque, their credit cards
always maxed out and fearing that just one
unfortunate incident stands between them and
financial disaster.
The climate deficit is harder to relate to. We
have no set of books that says you’ve spent so
much and you have so much left. Despite that,
climate change poses a bigger danger to the
future of humanity. Those who deny it are
endangering the very lives of their
grandchildren.
While people like Conservative Party leader
Andrew Scheer, Premier Ford and other
Conservative premiers don’t exactly deny the
existence of climate change anymore, their
united battle against the federal carbon tax
shows they continue to flirt with the idea.
The day before the carbon tax took effect in
those provinces that haven’t taken action to put
a price on carbon, Scheer, Ford and other
Conservative politicians made big show of
filling up their cars’ gas tanks to save the tax
that became part of the price April 1. They have
worked hard to portray the carbon tax as a
Liberal tax grab that will punish already-
burdened taxpayers while not really having any
real effect on climate change.
They have ignored the fact the federal
government is giving rebates to residents to
offset the cost of the carbon tax to individuals.
I signed off on my income tax return on
Saturday and thanks to my rebate, I’ll be
getting money back instead of having to send
the government a cheque.
What’s more, the Conservative politicians
are short on alternative solutions. Scheer keeps
promising a comprehensive plan for dealing
with climate change but so far hasn’t even
hinted at what he’ll do to reduce greenhouse
gases. Premier Ford claims Ontario has already
done so much, but that was due to the Liberals’
closure of coal-fired electrical plants and
encouragement of hated green-energy projects
like wind turbines.
Scheer, Ford and the rest are essentially
inviting us to party on, living as if there is no
climate change even as the evidence mounts
that there is – including more damaging storms
and floods, ice melting in the polar regions and
forest fires (British Columbia has already
reported two wildfires this spring).
There’s going to be a price to be paid for
both our debt-enabled good life through
government programs and our insistence that
we can’t afford to face up to climate change.
We can either start paying our bills to make up
for a lifestyle we’ve enjoyed or we can pass the
cost along to future generations, People who
want to live responsibly don’t want to continue
to party at our grandchildren’s expense.
Keith
Roulston
From the
cluttered desk