Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Ford's Mission


Ontario premier Doug Ford is a cauldron of contradictions. Heather Mallick writes:

People often claim to be economic conservatives and social liberals. Why? To get along with other people, to lower the intensity. But Ford is the first Ontario politician to have come out as economically liberal and socially conservative.
He spends freely, he acts as if Etobicoke were a farm in Lanark County, and he wants a premier’s van the size of a Zamboni as a personal emblem.
Ford professed to be the Conservative who would slay the Liberal deficit/debt dragon. It’s not happening. Yes, he’s hacking away at every accessible Liberal scheme, but the so-called “efficiencies” have been tiny, a few million here, a few million there.
He said goodbye to watchdogs like the Environmental Commissioner but never said how much money it saved. Cutting Toronto council was no bargain. Health Minister Christine Elliott has just announced massive changes to the Ontario health care system without offering cost details. She claims it will reduce the duplication of services but wouldn’t the dollar figure be fairly easy to calculate, at least at the beginning?

Now we're told that he needs a new van to carry him around the province. And Ford insists that, like the man himself, it needs to be big:

The giant van would have been his crowning — or is it clowning — glory. It looks more like a school bus — you say customized ride, I say pimped — at a cost of $50,696 over the purchase price. I don’t know why Ford needed a vehicle larger than what Wynne used, but he seemed to want something like an RV to carry a large entourage, a personal Das Boot.

Mr. Ford says his mission is to cut government spending.

Really?

4 comments:

zoombats said...

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutly. I guess Tweedle Dumb didn't get that far in High School to study Macbeth.

Owen Gray said...

I doubt that Ford has any familiarity with Shakespeare's masterpeice, zoombats. Otherwise, he would know what happens when Burnham Wood comes to Dunsinane.

John B. said...

So now we’re going to make our appointments with doctors “online“ and deal with even more delays and confusion. How cute! I always prefer being ignored by a computer program to being left hanging by an answering service. How many third, fourth and fifth parties will find their ways into this little one? Throw it all in there with a hundred daily emails and the rest of the spam and open up everything that isn’t nailed down to the data miners and hackers. We can’t say much more than that at this time because the guys who designed the Phoenix system haven’t yet submitted a proposal.

Actually, the Minister can’t talk about any of the cost details involved with any of her pronouncements because none of that was included in the sales pitches presented by the various hucksters that managed to get Doug’s attention. And we can hardly expect that the pitches would have been co-ordinated. As always, whenever the CRAP Party takes over their first priority is to check and see how much money there is and then figure out every little way possible to send it somewhere where nobody will be able to see what’s happening to it. There won’t be any savings but we’re sure to see lots more innovative and expensive layers of non-accountability and as many contracts and jobs-jobs-jobs for party hacks and business associates as the cash flow can bear.

Owen Gray said...

This is boilerplate stuff for these folks, John. We should have known what we were buying.