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COMMENTARY
October 6, 2007
Ontario votes
My opportunities for writing sympathetically about the NDP are so few and far between, I don't like to miss one. So bless Howard Hampton, leading our soft-socialist party into next week's provincial election, for giving me one of those moments. He expressed my sentiments exactly, when he explained to the media on Thursday how fed up he was with them, and with the two major parties, for their unwavering focus on the Conservative's ill-starred “faith-based schools” funding proposal -- which concerns, he says, at most 53,000 students. “I'm frustrated, because there are many problems, many questions in Ontario, but when I look at the media, there's only one question.” He sure sounded like a frustrated man.Frequent readers of this space will guess I usually vote Conservative. The more attentive will recall that I bear something approaching ill-will towards the sitting Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty, the apostate Catholic whose government has never done anything that did not annoy me. It began with their big fat lie, promising not to raise taxes before the last election, then raising them substantially the moment after they came to power, and trying to pass it off as an administrative technicality. This is a government whose principal legacy will be its refusal to enforce the Police Services Act, and direct court orders, at the Caledonia native land claim stand-off, effectively withdrawing police protection from Caledonia residents being intimidated by politically-motivated thugs. There is no more fundamental abrogation of a government's responsibility than refusing to uphold the law; and this failure, now continuing into its 20th month, has created a frightening precedent for selective enforcement of the law, in future, right across Canada. But every day and in every way this government delivers itself of smug, posturing, politically-correct, profoundly cynical, minor affronts to tradition and public order. And in typical Liberal-machine fashion, they launched into their re-election campaign by tossing a big red herring on the table, making the central issue John Tory's proposal to provide government funding for certain private religious schools, with lockstep support from the liberal media. An easy distraction from any serious discussion of the government's appalling record. Yet Mr Tory's proposal was itself a cynical gambit, to capture a conservative, rural constituency that he does not understand. He is a typical “technocrat” candidate for premier, with his senior executive background in a heavily-regulated industry, who swims with the tide when he can find it. I have no confidence that he has any principles beyond his own desire for visible personal success, and am hardly alone in doubting that he believes in anything he says. On the issue of our schools, Mr McGuinty has said, "It's about the kind of Ontario you want. If you want the kind of Ontario where we invite the children of different faiths to leave the publicly-funded system and become sequestered in their own private schools, then vote for Mr Tory." A friend in Wisconsin sketched the alternative nicely: "If you want your children immersed in a public school system which teaches the religion of atheism and secular humanism, depreciates Western Civilization as based on Judaeo-Christian culture and reasoning, and objects to maintaining that there are values of right and wrong," you should vote for Mr McGuinty. I live in one of those decaying urban ridings where voting for Tory Tories is anyway a waste of pencil lead. I will thus probably vote for my local NDP candidate, who struck me in passing on the street as quite possibly mentally and emotionally unstable, but a character all the same. At least she is not part of the Liberal machine. Should I wake up Wednesday morning, and find, the way we all did in 1990, that we've elected an NDP government by mistake, I will deeply regret my irresponsibility. But we have Mr Hampton's reasonable assurance (judging by his tone so late in the campaign) that this is not going to happen. I advise others to vote for whichever candidate is likeliest to defeat the Liberal. Meanwhile I advise my reader to vote “early and often” against the noxious “MMP” referendum proposal, about which I wrote last Sunday. Killing “proportional representation” as dead as possible is, I think, the closest we can get in this election, to exercising real civic responsibility. Our available options first-past-the-post are ugly enough, without letting the political parties stack safe party lists with candidates even uglier. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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