CON-firmative Action – When rookie Party Leaders show their inner ugly – Editorial by Jamie Gilcig – September 13, 2011

Cornwall ON –  Tim Hudak was politically spanked this week, and it may in the end cost him the election; although I don’t think he really had much of a chance to win to start?

Hudak and his Tea Party Progressive Conservatives pounced like a hyena on a three legged sow with piglets at the McGuinty proposal to offer up to $10,000 tax credits to help expedite newcomers into the tax chain.

It was ugly.   It was brutal, base, and banal politics aimed right at the deepest and ugliest part of the core of certain types of voters.   Those that fear and dislike newcomers.   It’s not new.  It’s not original and that for me is the biggest sin as someone who’s a 4th generation Canadian.

It also backfired as the early poll strength, and something that helped Mr. Harper, was the immigrant belt near Toronto where Mr. Hudak’s Federal cousins pandered and chased the immigrant vote successfully.

It still to a minor degree is helping in Eastern Ontario which in some pockets is in a time zone, (we have three candidates in our riding whose names start with “Mc” if that gives you a clue about the make up of our area.)  but on October 6th I have a hunch that this body blow may be the one that leads to the knock out punch.

The politics of hate never have legs.  They never are there as the bell rings for the last round.   Yes, sometimes they get you an early knock out, but in this case other than a few missed jabs Mr. Hudak is standing in the ring with his team fuddling and looking to him for leadership…something Frat Boy Tim, a Boston Bruin’s fan in Maple Leaf country, sorely can’t provide.

As Canada prepares to take the brunt of the financial clouds wafting over from Europe and the US of A it is leadership after all that we’re voting on.  It reminds me a bit of John Diefenbaker…another leader that people grumbled about, but kept voting in because at the end of the day; when you face adversity; leadership is what gets you through those darkest hours.

Jamie Gilcig – Editor – The Cornwall Free News

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Best Western

34 Comments

  1. It’s what I’ve been saying. Stability is key. Which leader projects stability? To me the answer is obvious.

  2. Jamie, never mix your Mc’s and Mac’s, especially in Glengarry County. Someone will toss a caber at you.

  3. Yup. Fratboy completely blew the first week of the campaign (and their lead) by dumping on new Canadians. The lingering stink of Mike Harris is sticking to Hudak like shit to a blanket. He’s gonna have to come up with some sort of attractive platform soon, but time is going by fast.
    Jamie, I’d love it if you could do an interview with Hudak standing in front of the Long Sault Parkway sign, and finding out what he’s prepared to do about the creeping French takeover of Ontario.

  4. Projections still show that Ottawa and East is more inclined to vote Conservative! Also, the Liberals popularity has nose dived since 2001! Why? They are heavy spenders that force any new government with any sort of fiscal responisibility to make drastic cuts!

    The Liberals spending is out of control and we will be in the same position as the U.S. if we don’t restructure NOW! We can’t cut spending to Health Care and Education since it seems to be the only consistent job creator today!

    However, our youth unemployment rate is at 15% in Ontario and is forcing our youth to return to school or work for the rip-off employment agencies! The lack of security is also forcing not only our youth but our society to sit on record levels of uninvested money!

    All in all, in’t isn’t our lack of skilled workers (AKA the $10,000 Immigration Iniciative) halting our society from progressing other than a lack of jobs – plain and simple!

    Facts are Facts! I don’t believe that the government is solely responsible for creating jobs the responisbility should be split 50 / 50 amongst the private and public sector!

  5. Author

    Hi Mike, which “rip off” employment agencies are you talking about?

  6. Mike, you say we can’t cut spending to education and health care but those are two areas that have long been casualties of conservative governments.

  7. Everything should be on the table. The 65,000 person Ontario government payroll, 630 agencies and 30 ministries and1,800 government locations.

    Levels of adminstration need checking as well. We currently, through municipal property tax, pay local school boards. Does that money get counted and go to the school board or Province to get counted again?

    There is no revenue problem, how it is spent is the big concern.

  8. Jamie: I am not going to single out any company but anyone in Cornwall can name a few! Just use the term as I described it “rip-off employment agency” and I am sure a few companies come to mind even for you. Any company paying out just a little over minimum wage but collecting more and sending the profits out of town is bad for local economic growth and prosperity.

    Standup: You watch too much TV. More precisely the newest Liberal / McGuinty AD! Remember it is the current Liberal Government, as usual, creating massive amounts of debt for the next party to clean up! The Liberals buy votes this way until people wake up and realize it doesn’t work and then elect a new party (generally the conservatives) to clean up or until McGuinty realizes how much it costs and then raises taxes or creates new ones to pay for them!

    Ontario families can thank McGuinty for the extremely high raise in Electricity costs due to the Green Energy Act and despite health claims by people living close to industrial wind turbines the Liberals still ignore facts and claim safety without a single study! Also, you can thank McGuinty for the $310 raise in Hydro over the next 5 years due to the Green Energy Act alone! So, $310 is a minimum….again ignorance is bliss and McGuinty is defenitely ignorant!

    Getting back to Health Care, it was the NDP and Conservatives who mainly implemented our current health care system! Also, wait times have increased under the Liberal reign despite millions of additional expenditures! Also, creating the LHIN’s costs us millions of dollars that again proves the idealogy that the Liberals only know how to buy votes with our own money! The scary part is they won’t stop because they know someone else will clean up the mess and then they can blame the Conservatives for cutting spending! And then the wheel keeps going round and round!

  9. Oil haters?? Are you saying environmentalists or people who don’t like the price of gas?

    Economic growth is economic growth and like it or not, the Liberals in Ontario can lay claim to it.

  10. Some economic growth, when we’ve wasted over $2 Billion on things that never happened with Dalton and his Gang. Didn’t someone get fired over that?

  11. Stan, are we talking about the G-8 summit again? Opps sorry, that was the federal con-cons.

  12. In the meantime, we’re still waiting for Hudak to tell us why we should hand him the reigns of power. A cute face and a smirk just isn’t cutting it. The “foreign workers” bashing kind of backfired, as has his plan to have prisoner chain-gangs working in our neighbourhoods. What should he try next? Eliminate bilingual signs? Free beer on Fridays? Time is running out for Fratboy. He better start thinking quickly about how to win over the voters.

  13. Economic growth, some of which is because our taxes now pay for 180,000 more workers in publically funded agencies and 4,000 more direct goverment jobs now than 2003.

  14. Actually one quarter of growth after three straight quarters of losses still makes for a bad year; NOT A GOOD YEAR! Again, Ontario’s growth is aided by the federal government as well which is Conservative!

    I am confident we will see a Conservative Victory due to the fact that people don’t trust McGuinty…….that’s why people will NOT vote for McGuinty! And NO Liberal can even argue that he hasn’t lied because he did it publicly and without care!

  15. Author

    You mean like Stephen Harper Mr. Bedard? 🙂

  16. Hey Mike,
    I counter that YOU watch too much tv. Namely, the Hudak propaganda machine. Maybe you are too young to remember the state of education or the minister of education claiming that they needed to create a crisis in education. Fine. You hate taxes. You hate Mguinty. I get that. But it wasn’t just on tv that I saw millions of dollars cut from education, I saw it in the schools. I do remember the conservatives voting themselves a raise while telling everyone else to make do with less but then I guess every politician does that. Taxes are bad, but then where are we going to cut? Are we going to go after kids? Nurses? Water purification plants and policies? No thanks. Been there and done that.

  17. It’s amazing what you’ll find by googling “Deb Hutton” hydro. She was making about $225,000/yr plus expenses and a nice pension. One of the expenses she charged to Hydro One was a cozy little $620 lunch with Mike Harris!
    Talk about hogs at the trough! No wonder Fratboy said he wants his wife “left out” of this election.

  18. omg, I think I just had an epiphany. Furtz, is “Deb Hutton” whodat’s wife? wait, she is… lol… no wonder, and I learned something new today… I guess the apple didn’t fall too far from the pigtrough tree!

  19. Yes, Grimmie, the Cons at the trough are a pretty incestuous bunch. They are in a class of their own. Totally removed from us peons.

  20. Sorry to blather on about Cons at the trough, but this will really make most people toss their cookies. Google “Eleanor Clitheroe” and find out where a chunk of your hydro bill is going. It’s hard to imagine that a good Christian woman would be submerged this deeply in the trough, but a friend of Mike’s is a friend of ours.
    I urge everyone to read this..
    http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/connie_woodcock/2010/06/11/14359881.html
    And watch this.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVk967ocyqA
    It’s beyond belief.

  21. Again ignorance is bliss! Taxes are a must but accountability and responsible spending seems to be a virtue!

    I am amazed at how blind so many people are to the fact that we annually operated in the red! THERE IS A LIMIT PEOPLE! A limit to the amount of taxes the tax payer can burden and a limit to the amount of spending we should be expensing!

    We have overspent and are not planning to return to the black quickly enough!

    P.S. – Why don’t any of you want to talk about why McGuinty flat out lies! ……Ignorance is Bliss!

  22. Reg, the $2 Billion spent was on eHealth and that was Dalton’s bunch. The guy responsible was let go with an obscene golden handshake.

  23. If you want to talk about golden handshakes shall we talk about the wannabe premier’s wife and Ontario Hydro?

  24. It is quite something that so far, the Libs and Dippers haven’t mentioned Hutton even though she was Harris’ main squeeze (politically) throughout his reign of terror. As far as I’m concerned, it would be fair game.

  25. What no one wants to talk about McGuinty’s lies….WOW what a surprise that the Liberals want to deflect the negative attention towards somwthing totally unrelated to the topic!

  26. Gee, hudak comes to town and suddenly some want to share a bed with him. Mike, no one trusts whodat as much as they don’t trust mcguinty. Only thing is, at least people know what mcguinty is like. whodat is so wishy washy on his policies, maybe buck a beer, lets put GPS units on a chunk of ontario, lets say we’ll do something but no promises, and can’t even begin to properly hold his party together but rather sticks the knife into his longtime supporters… I mean sheesh… And about your hydro, you need look no further than eleanor and deb to wonder what happened there..

    I may not vote liberal, but I definitely won’t vote whodat either… That doesn’t make me a liberal, that just means I plainly don’t like the calibre of whodat to the point that I can bring myself to vote for him.. And at this point, after watching the way whodat handled things up to now, I’d still vote lib…

  27. @ Stan. I understand that the e-health fiasco was a Mike Harris instigated program, and that the first $800,000,000 was blown under his watch. True, the Libs should have gotten the scam under control sooner, but it was your hero who set it up, and made a pile of his friends extremely wealthy.

  28. Furtz you live in a dream world!

  29. Enlighten us, Stan.

  30. Wake up Furtz: “eHealth Ontario was created in September 2008 out of a merger between the Ontario Ministry of Health’s electronic health program and the Smart Systems for Health Agency (SSHA), with a mandate to create electronic health records for all patients in the province by 2015. It has been plagued by delays and its CEO was fired over a multimillion-dollar contracts scandal in 2009.” Even a child can see that Mike Harris had nothing to do with eHealth….it was created in 2008 while the province of Ontario was being ruled by Dalton McFibber and the Fiberals.

  31. Stan. You are correct. I had bad info.

  32. Hey, at least there is some hope with some of the “lefties” can admit they’re wrong with grace. The “tea partiers, uhh righties of today” wouldn’t care or admit to any mistakes or anything…

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