Money, money, money....

If you ask ten Canadians what the most important issue facing the country today is, fourteen of them will say "health care".
If you ask ten university students what the bane of their existence is, fifteen of them will say "high tuition".
And if you ask ten members of any city council what the most pressing need in their ward is, well, you'll get about seventy different answers, but all of them will boil down to....MONEY.
There are some deeply ingrained beliefs in Canadian culture that defy logical explanation. In Toronto, city council spends well over $200 million trying to address rampant homelessness, creating--to no one's surprise but their own--more rampant homelessness. The health care budget eats up untold billions each and every year, and yet our health care system stutters along on life support, and the prognosis is bleak. Consider just a few of the symptoms:

• Again in Toronto, it is not uncommon for paramedics to wait seven or eight hours to drop their patiesnts at emergency wards.
• There are an estimated two million Ontarians without access to a family doctor.
• It can take over a year to see a specialist in some disciplines.
• Even routine procedures such as MRIs and CT-scans can take weeks.

I have no doubt that our health care system could swallow the whole of every Canadian's paycheque without anyone noticing an improvement.

As far as education goes, I find it completely incomprehensible that students (especially in Arts programs) pay such ridiculously high tuition fees. It's not as if the use of multi-million dollar equipment is necessary to get a degree in Political Science. But universities, like hospitals, are crying poor. I'd guess the University of Waterloo brings in well over a hundred million dollars a year just from tution. That's not enough? Show me why.

My property tax bill is going up over six percent this year--triple the rate of inflation. Council says they're going to use the extra funds to (a) match the library budget to the library budgets of other comparable cities; (b) top up "reserve" funds; (c) continue paying off the RIM Park fiasco.

(A) I would be all for spending more money on the library, because our library is, quite frankly, a disgrace. But, as I've written before, there's a perfectly good library system in our city already, inexplicably separate from the one our council is fretting over. It shouldn't cost any extra money to amalgate the library systems of Kitchener and Waterloo. In fact, done properly, it should save money...

(B)...that could go to top up these "reserve" funds.

(C) RIM Park is a huge sportsplex on the north end of town. The city crossed its i's and didn't dot its t's when it came to financing this white elephant, and it got stuck with a huge debt it wasn't anticipating. So rather than refinance the thing over a longer period, the city is sticking all us ratepayers with the additional costs. Gee, thanks.

Now I hear the federal government is going to create a national child care program. If it turns out anything like the gun registry (and it probably will), you might as well withdraw the contents of your bank account and forward it to Revenue Canada.

Welcome to Canada. This is a stick-up.