The Left Hand Doesn't Know What The Right Hand Is Doing

After another long, hard week of getting mad about the Harper government ignoring the evidence, muzzling the media, and making decisions based on short term political gain, the McGuinty Liberals proceeded to ignore the evidence on handgun bans.....

Sharing the shock of his people, the newly elected Prime Minister, John Howard — just two months into his eleven-and-a-half years in power — seized the chance to overhaul Australia's gun laws, trampling all opposition to make them among the strictest in the developed world. "I hate guns," he said at the time. "One of the things I don't admire about America is their slavish love of guns ... We do not want the American disease imported into Australia." Howard argued the tougher laws would make Australia safer. But 12 years on, new research suggests the government response to Port Arthur was a waste of public money and has made no difference to the country's gun-related death rates.

Muzzle the media.......

Our reporter wanted to ask McGuinty one question at the barbecue, and that was about the security breach — Did McGuinty still feel confident that Elections Ontario could run the Kitchener-Waterloo byelection with integrity?

But the question did not get asked. The Record reporter and photographer were told to leave. The reporter was advised to use more generic comments on the topic that McGuinty had made in Guelph earlier that day. And meanwhile, hundreds of Liberals tweeted and shared photos of an event that looked celebratory, cheerful, a sun-drenched rallying of the troops.

And of course, make decisions based on short term political gain.

The Liberal campaign decided to halt construction of a power plant in Mississauga days before last fall's election when they were behind in the polls, Finance Minister Dwight Duncan admitted Thursday.

Ontario taxpayers are on the hook for $190 million for scrapping the project the Liberals had championed and supported until it looked like they might lose the Oct. 6 election.

"This was a campaign undertaking at a time when I think we were still behind in the polls, so it required a government decision which occurred after the election," Duncan told the estimates committee.

You hypocrites think you're better than us. That's what you tell yourselves.

But you're not.

Oh, and why is the Attorney General not calling for a handgun registry instead of an outright ban, guys? You were OK with the federal long-gun registry last year. What gives? Could it be that you don't, and didn't, ever really think the registry went far enough?

Going Bananas Over ORNGE

So basically, just about nobody knew what was going on at ORNGE, or had the first clue with respect to how to prevent this trainwreck from happening. Hilarious. 

At times like this, there's only one thing to do- watch Nicholas Cage lose his marbles. Repeatedly.

Warning: Profanity. Not nearly enough profanity, but profanity nonetheless.

Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right, Dwight

Dammit, Dwight, I told you before; if you want to be Liberal leader, you have to pretend everything's OK when it isn't.

Instead, you kneecap your leadership rival Chris Bentley in public and say that the cancelled power plant will cost $10M more than it did a couple of days ago. Not only that, but you said it was all the Premier's fault, too, instead of unnamed campaign officials who could be fired quietly! You're doing more damage to the Liberals than I could ever hope to do!

Now how are Liberal supporters supposed to say that Conservatives like me have no right to criticize anything McGuinty does just because I support Harper? At least I can say that Harper doesn't have to deal with ministers kicking dirt at each other all the time!

If this guy Duncan acts any more like Paul Martin, we'll have to revive the drinking game where we take a shot every time he says, "Let me be clear"!

Who's Driving This Bus?!

If unelected Liberal hacks are making the decisions that count in Dalton McGuinty's Ontario, instead of duly elected politicians, then how- I ask you- how can the Liberals trouble themselves about Harper's controlling ways?

From the article:

The plant was killed Sept. 24 in a Saturday news event deliberately kept from political journalists covering the election campaign.

That’s because the Liberal campaign hoped for less critical local media attention so close to the Oct. 6 election. Not even Liberal press aides on McGuinty’s campaign tour were advised of the move in advance.

They hoped for less critical local media attention. Now that's interesting. Why would the Liberals EXPECT less critical local media attention? The media would never be partial to Liberals, would they?

$180M Is A Statistic

Does anyone else think the Liberals will get as mad about $180M for a power plant cancellation as they did about a $16 glass of orange juice?

Anyone?

That's what I thought. So here's the thing, Tories; next time you feel the urge to get mad about the $16 glass of orange juice, think about how they would react if the shoe was on the other foot.







Screw The Best, Take The Rest

Hi there, teachers' unions. Welcome to the ever-growing group of people who've been screwed over by Dalton. I think there's some room over there, in the corner, right between the doctors and George Smitherman.

I understand that this may be a difficult time for you. After all, this new unilateral deal Dalton got with the English Catholic Schoolteachers must have been an awful shock. Who could have predicted that Dalton would take the easy way out and cut you guys off at the knees? He's never done that to anyone before! And to cut this deal with the union and leave the school boards affiliated with that union out in the cold? Why, it's almost like Dalton can't be trusted when he says he believes in local democracy!

When you love your government as much as most Canadians do, when you trust it implicitly and never trouble your heads with questions about its motives, so long as it isn't headed by conservatives, or even- gasp- Mike Harris- you just don't see things like this coming. You guys are hardbitten union radicals who believe in solidarity and all that nonsense, but you are still "shocked, dismayed, disheartened, upset and, on occasions, angry" when the government is mean to you.


Well, now that you've take the step of opposing the government, don't expect people to like you anymore. People keep voting for Dalton because he keeps moving Ontario forward and he won't turn us into the 51st state. You don't do anything like that, so this is basically over before you start.


On top of that, you're being all negative about things. That's no way to be succesful! This is Ontario, greatest province in the greatest country in the world. There is no room for unhappiness here!  Perhaps you would have preferred Mike Harris, or maybe even Tim Hudak, who unveiled a white paper that supposedly targets unions this week? As opposed to Dalton, who is not targetting unions at all with this deal? Actually, don't answer that last question.


Oh, and whatever you do, don't ever compare what Dalton is doing to what Harper is doing. If Harper had bargained with a group of people this way, there'd be an uproar and people would fear for the future of their country. You would have been part of that uproar, too! But I guess since Dalton isn't as bad as Harper, you'll forgive him eventually. You always do.

The Distance

Behold the predictable shrieking backlash from the Toronto Star over Hudak's proposal to change Ontario's labour laws.

"Ontario’s economy is weak. People are hurting. McGuinty is struggling to rein in the public payroll. At times like this, regressive ideas can well take hold."

I like editorials like this because they are honest. They are an honest reflection of what those on the left believe. That any change to Ontario's labour laws is the wrong way to go. That we are not living in Ontario, but somewhere like Greece, where people with actual regressive views win 18 seats in an election. To those on the left, there is no difference between Hudak's proposals- like making unions reveal how they spend the dues of their members- and the most brutal union-busting tactics employed down south, whatever those may or may not be.

We usually aren't this lucky. When those on the left defend the unworkable status quo, they usually don't reveal themselves to be prone to the same sort of knee-jerk fear-based sentiment that they, hilariously, associate with us on the right.

The Liberals never reveal themselves to be driven by this same fear of change, though we know that they are. Instead, some sort of distancing mechanism is put into place. A few months ago, Dalton McGuinty agreed to an NDP demand to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to pass the budget. We know he wanted to raise taxes the whole time. But he couldn't give us the satisfaction of saying so. So he let the NDP speak for him. And there's no shortage of people willing to be mouthpieces for Dalton's government.

We know, for example, that the only reason that Liberals support Justin Trudeau for leader of their federal party is because his last name is Trudeau. That's it. The entire exercise is as simple as that. Trudeau I was PM, therefore Trudeau II will be PM. These same Liberals scoff at the notion that George W. Bush could have ever been President of the United States, and if you press them, they will likely say that the only reason Dubya ever held the office was because his daddy made that possible. But if you say the same thing about their beloved Justin.....well, sit back and watch the show. :P

You can read books like Brooke Jeffrey's "Divided Loyalties" and, reading between the lines, discover that the main reason why people like John Turner, Paul Martin, Stephane Dion, and, by extension, Michael Ignatieff, were such epic fails as Liberal leaders was because, whatever else they did, they were not the true heirs to the Trudeau legacy.

You can read the story of how former Liberal Party President Iona Campagnolo said, moments after John Turner had won the Liberal leadership, that Jean Chretien- who was the true heir to the Trudeau legacy- may have been "second on the ballot, but first in our hearts."

To come so very close to the truth, but to step back at the very last second. This is the essence of what it means to be Liberal. No Liberal can flat out admit that they rely on knee-jerk anti-Americanism to shut down debate over Ontario's labour laws and that they favour Justin Trudeau for Liberal leader because of his bloodline. There's always The Distance.

This ritualized, formalized act is what keeps our health care system the same, year after year. It keeps the CBC running at a loss, as Richard Stursberg lays out so bluntly in "The Tower of Babble." It keeps supply management for farmers humming along. It kept the gun registry for all those years. It keeps Canadians fearful of foreign takeovers and governments that "sell out our interests." In short, it keeps Canada the way it is and keeps it from becoming what it could be. Liberals know this, consciously or unconsciously.

The Distance must be maintained at all costs, and when it is threatened, so-called progressive Liberals transform into passionate defenders of the status quo. It has been with us since the War of 1812, and isn't going away anytime soon. And to maintain The Distance, to maintain the status quo, people will keep on voting Liberal here in Ontario.

Ah, but we return to the example of Greece we talked about earlier, and to the contagion spreading across Europe and the United States. Things cannot stay the same forever. The Liberals believe that The Distance will keep things the way they've always been. They are wrong.

And if we have to get to where Greece is now before they see that they are wrong- well, so much the worse for all of us.