Budget Headaches and Hypocrisies To Come

It looks like we have a day before Don Drummond makes his report about the slash job he wants the Ontario government to do to deal with its deficit.

What makes this galling that a job that important has been delegated to one man who did this behind closed doors like a one man fiscal star chamber. For a task this significant, it should have been in a government committee where all the parties could have been able to weigh in on this matter.  Now that the Liberals are in a  minority position, that fact should have been a no-brainer, but instead McGuinty and company are imitating Harper's repellent methods instead.

Even worse, tax increases for the rich are apparently off the table in Drummond's report and the poor, disadvantaged and the voiceless will be bearing more of the burden.  That is simply neither fair nor just by any rational stretch of the moral imagination, even if a freeze on corporate tax cuts is also in the apparent offing as well.

Part of the moves proposed that is especially galling to remove the provincially supported employment areas from public libraries in favour of stand alone centers.  The logic of this is unfathomable as this would inhibit job seekers from using the logical municipal public resource that is intended for all the public and is placed appropriately to facilitate that. Now the provincial government are going to kill jobs from the libraries by removing this essential service and make it that much more difficult for the jobless to use it elsewhere.

Combine that with Harper's own slashing budget to come and London City Council's unconscionable obsession with a tax freeze they would loot the affordable housing fund and scapegoat the vital London-Middlesex Health Unit, this is going to be a bitter year for the livability of Canada on all levels.

Just seeing how much more Sandy White has betrayed her former ideals supporting this vandalism and then being so petty to try to get a blogger in trouble with his employer for speaking his mind is beyond the pale.  The fact that I was a sucker to work on her campaign in her first successful election is galling enough is terrible to contemplate.