Columnists
Fill the trough
Moody’s, Schmoody’s. Moody’s Analytics is the corporation that creates credit ratings for big businesses and governments, all around the globe. Ontario’s credit rating has recently been downgraded a smidgeon by this organization. And as my friend indicated (in a round about way), if the Province’s credit rating is downgraded it costs all of us in the long run. The thing that really bothers me about the economic picture of Ontario is someone seems to think most of us are ill-prepared and uneducated with regard to the economic business of being a Provincial government. Maybe most of us don’t have a degree in economics, but many of us know when they smell a rat. Perhaps some of us are a bit annoyed to learn our Premier is spending big bucks on advertising and marketing to convince the ignorant masses (that’s us) it’s okay to let the corporate polluters off the hook for their hand in environmental terrorism. I’ve been led to believe this government is taking “timid steps” by slashing education, health, library and environmental budgets just to hand money over to big businesses. “Timid steps”, my arse. Great, big, noisy, missteps is more like it. I’m not suggesting this government is wrong to suggest something needs to be done about the enormous debt Ontario has amassed, especially in the last decade. I am going to suggest the budgetary shortcomings shouldn’t be recovered on the backs of our children’s future, our sick, our poor and our environment. Am I being hysterical? I don’t think so. Finding efficiencies is one thing, but cutting off our collective noses to spite our face is quite another.
All y’all know Moodys doesn’t care about who the Province of Ontario is. I imagine they do care about being in business and making money. The thing is the ordinary, everyday, find-a-job, have-a-job, feed-afamily, pay my taxes, buy the groceries, roof-over-my-head people of Ontario can’t really give a rat’s nipple about what Moody’s thinks of Ontario’s current economic situation. Go ahead and ask us to “start this discussion again,” but it’s hard to reboot when the victims—yes “victims”— are the youth, the sick and just anyone who wants to breathe fresh air and not worry about losing their family home to a natural disaster. Whether this current economic dip was created by this government or a previous government or a government which was spawned in the early days of Ontario’s province-hood, the real people in Ontario care about what’s happening to the Really, they do. Even if those people don’t have children in the provincial education system or don’t have health issues or don’t know anything about conservation, they do care about programs and services being cut because, ultimately, that affects everyone as much as a dip in the credit rating does. Sure some of those programs and services are being administered by third-parties because that was a cost-savings decision made by a Conservative government many, many years ago. Are we being told the Conservatives made a huge mistake when they farmed out services to third-party organizations? Giving the children of Ontario an opportunity to be treated fairly in a classroom is beyond important. Offering the best quality education to children who have alternative learning skills and approaches to life is not a frill or an option. Ensuring that people who cannot work are allowed to live with dignity is not a frill or an option. Moody’s cares about being paid for their asset and liability management, data forecasting and wondrous things like credit risk modelling. They don’t care if your pain threshold is ten (being the highest) or that you use a foodbank to make it to the end of the week. They don’t care if your kid is high-risk for failure and needs more attention but is in a classroom of 35 or 40 students with only one person to attend to all of their needs.
No, I said it before and I’m saying it again, I’m not impressed with our current provincial government. We should be howling at the proposed spending cuts. Most of us agree, our Premier is ham-fisted, but he and his cronies are the people benefiting from this budget. He has forgotten the real business of the Province of Ontario is the people who live here. We are the Province of Ontario. As much as anyone, we want prosperity, but we don’t need a licence plate to make that commitment.
Many of us believe it’s wrong to be told to tighten our belts while Ford invites his close family friends and business pals, like Rueben Devlin, to belly up to the trough. We all deserve to be properly fed.
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