There's a certain breed of Westerner who, going against the grain as Westerners do, comes to our great province looking for a political challenge. Cowboy hat firmly in place, they talk about bringing Western campaign smarts to the table.
I ran into one of these gunslingers at a conference in Markham the PC Party held this weekend. He talked about campaigning all over the Prairies with no small amount of success, stirring up cattle stampedes wherever he tied his horse.
I informed the new sheriff in town that here in Ontario, the big reason why we don't have HST uprisings like they do in B.C. is because, as William Grenville Davis once put it, "Bland Works".
And that's when it hit me. Dalton's lack of success lately has a lot to do with forgetting that very simple truth, as this Sun article makes plain. The Premier is stirring the pot needlessly with issues like mixed-martial arts, Internet gambling, the eco-fee screwup, and trying to embarass the Ombudsman. It isn't so much what Dalton's doing. It's the needlessly divisive way he's doing it. (Ooooh, getting to call a Liberal "needlessly divisive". Feels good. :P)
A good joke, much like good governance, is all in the delivery.
Bland doesn't work and it still doesn't.
ReplyDeleteBill Davis wasn't bland. He was disruptive and he was radical. He royally screwed up the education system in Ontario by instituting the Hall-Dennis report on education which was and has been proven to be corrosive and false. He does deserve praise for the new system of non university colleges. Since then the Teacher's Unions have been our defacto unelected minister of education. Our children lost decades of effective teaching to our provinces detriment.
Bill Davis listened to socialist community engineers and cancelled a totally necessary expressway into the downtown core. The current mayor's debates have resurrected that issue finally. Bill Davis was the father of Toronto's death as a livable city. Mayor Miller is just the latest in a chain of elitists who think that they are God's gift to cyclists. The idiot MSM still think that Etobicoke and Scarborough are suburbs. They have not been suburbs in over 2 generations.
Now I shall be trite.
Bill Davis ruined education in the province and ruined mobility in the Toronto area.he is also responsible for the mouthful of words called "The Regional Municipality of wherever". There was nothing wrong with the ancient U.K. term "COUNTY". If you want to change the borders then do it but don't change our traditional word with such a mouthful. If a particular county needs special administrative oversight then give that particular county that perview without changing the name. Try being a genealogist.
I could go on and on why I stopped being a Conservatice for so long.
I forgot about rent control legislation. Another corrosive policy. It doesn't help anybody in the rental market but provide faulty apartments.
ReplyDeletePerhaps he was redeeming himself by working to unite the right. I worked for that union. If Harper stops spending I will continue to work for that party.
Good jokes are not necessarily true or right, but they strike a chord with the audience. Sometimes, we tell the same jokes so many times we forget why we laughed at them in the first place, but we still laugh.
ReplyDeleteSuch is the case with Davis. We in Ontario like our Premiers bland and not to stir up too much dust, otherwise they make people like you angry. :P Even if Davis himself was not bland, people prefer to remember him as such.
It's interesting, the types of tricks people play on themselves......