Tory, that idea stinks.

.

I'm a lifelong Conservative. Raised in the Reform school, I've been getting progressively more, well, progressive the older I get. I almost voted for Dalton McGuinty and his Liberals last provincial election.

Almost. His platform looked pretty good, if I could get past that icky Liberal thing. What really impressed me was the (now infamous) quote "I won't cut your taxes. But I won't raise them either."

I can't tell you how shocked I was to be impressed by such a thing. I jerked my political knee right out of its socket a long time ago repeatedly calling (screaming, whining) for lower taxes. Now here was a politician actually announcing he had no intention of cutting taxes (at all! at all!) and I'm thinking of voting for him? That's like a quintessentially straight guy suddenly contemplating a gay lover.

In the end, I voted Conservative, but not out of any great love for Ernie Eves: I was really casting my vote in favour of my MPP, Elizabeth Witmer, who had done what I considered to be a commendable job. But to this day I remember my hesitation in the voting booth.

You see, McGuinty seemed so honest...

Cue guffaws of laughter. Has there ever been a politician less honest than Dalton McGuinty? He's broken practically every promise he made in that campaign. Some of them he's broken repeatedly. Every year, the date to close Ontario's filthy coal-fired electricity plants gets shoved back eighteen months, for instance. It'd be one thing if there was a plan, any kind of plan at all, to replace that power. Then Dalton could announce "there's been some delays in the construction of the new nuclear facilities: we'll have to rely on our coal plants until they're up and runnning." But there are no new nukes. Instead, we will make up that shortfall in power by purchasing from the U.S...from coal plants considerably dirtier than our own. Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

The list of broken promises goes on and on. He was going to roll back tolls on Highway 407--they've gone up six or seven times. Highway 407 has simply got to be the most expensive toll road in North America. You can travel the entire Ohio Turnpike for less than the cost of traversing Toronto.

(High tolls may be a good thing, although gas taxes are supposed to serve that function. No matter: the promise was made.)

They promised balanced budgets, then promptly ran a deficit. They promised ministers would take a pay cut for running a deficit. Never happened. You name a promise, they shattered it. The biggie, of course, was that new health tax they brought in almost immediately, while simultaneously delisting (privatizing) several medical services--two broken promises in one!



But see, says McGuinty, that wasn't a tax, it was a "premium". I don't know, Dalton...whether you call it an anus or a rectum, it's still an asshole.



There's another provincial election FINALLY coming up in October. Ever since that first big promise turned out to be a lie, I've been counting the days until I could boot McGuinty in his metaphorical ass (rectum, anus). My wife feels even worse: she did vote for him in 2003. Between the two of us, we wish we could cast about thirty million ballots.



But what always happens to me politically is happening again. I really wish that just once, just once, I could unreservedly vote for someone, rather than having to vote against somebody every frigging election. I voted for Harper, despite some serious misgivings, because I just couldn't bring myself to reward Martin's Liberals for AdScam. (Actually, I can't believe anybody could convince themselves to trust that gang of thieves, but lo and behold many did.)

Now it's happening again. I'm not sure I like John Tory much.

Oh, he would have made a great mayor of Toronto, I think. Certain much better than his Blondness, union shill David Miller. But Premier of Ontario? I don't know.



Consider his latest: he wants to divert funds out of the public education system to fund faith-based schools.

This is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. What I find most amazing is that Tory's actually lauding this as an inclusive policy. How's that again? We already have one too many religious school systems in this province. How does further segregation bring people together?
Parents who send their children to faith-based schools think this is great news, of course. They've been arguing for years that they're subsidizing, through their taxes, an educational system they're not using, and that they shouldn't have to pay twice. Which sounds fair--until you stop and think about it for, oh, half a second.
Nobody forced these parents to enroll their kids in religious schools: it was something they freely chose to do, knowing full well the costs involved. Having moved next to an international airport, do you complain to the media about all those noisy planes? Having accepted a job that pays a certain wage, do you turn around and strike for a higher wage?
(Wait a second. Don't answer that.)

My view, for what it's worth, is that in a country which claims to support the separation of Church and State, the State has no business propagating the claims of any particular Church, particularly not to its children who are too young to understand what they're being taught.

In other words: one public system.

This has nothing to do with my (admitted) disdain for organized religion. Religious faith ought to be a private matter between a person and his/her god(dess)(es). By all means, teach children about religion--it has been, and continues to be, one of the most important influences on society. But teaching one particular religion over another denies a child the opportunity to choose for herself what to believe. It also goes a long way towards preventing interaction between children of different faiths...surely not something a multicultural society ought to encourage.

It's sort of like politics, now that I come to think of it. Would you send your kid to Republican school? Hell, even if I was an ardent Republican, I wouldn't do that.

I believe the appeal of faith-based schools is rooted in fear...fear that your child might grow up to stand for something different than you. So long as that child has come to her beliefs honestly, why should that matter? I submit it doesn't...and I certainly don't think money should be stolen out of the public education system just because some parents disagree with me.