Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Dalton McGuinty's Best Friends

Dalton has ruled out letting corner stores in Ontario sell beer as they do in Quebec, on the grounds that someone running their own private small business is less likely to be honest when it comes to selling alcohol to minors than a unionized LCBO employee.

Interestingly, he still doesn't go far enough for the union barons of OPSEU, who issued this press release a while ago calling for the abolition of the LCBO Agency Stores program, set up to provide access to alcoholic beverages in small and rural communities that previously had no such access.

Reading the press release with its anachronistic tone reminded me of the trade union excesses of 1980s Britain:



And the more I watch provincial politics and provincial public services, the more clear it becomes that the real problem facing all of them, health, education or anything else, is that the unions are running them and McGuinty is their best friend. There can be no real improvement in public services when the unions are in the position of deciding what can change and what can't. McGuinty prizes peace and mythical 'consensus' above all else; he lets native thugs run Caledonia and he lets his friends at workingfamilies.ca run Ontario in return for their generous support of the Liberal Party. As McGuinty runs Ontario's public institutions, they are no longer there to serve the people who need them, but to serve the people who work in them.

To overcome this will take far more than a provincial election; it's a massive shift in mindset that will need to take root in the population at large, and it likely won't happen until the unions overreach themselves. But McGuinty might want to take a look at the former 'old' Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, to see what happens when those cosy union buddies start squeezing more out of government than the economy can bear. With another four years of McGuinty tax and spend we might well get to that point.

In the meantime, to those thinking of voting other than PC over the faith based schools issue, I say this: I understand that issue being a big concern for people. But is it really, truly worth another four years of McGuinty? Is it?