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PC Leader Tim Hudak Makes Abortion an Ontario Election Issue

July 17, 2011 by · 5 Comments 

In the last few days, the blogosphere and twitter have uncovered statements by Ontario Progressive Conservative MPP Tim Hudak concerning abortion and the role of the government with respect to abortion. The uncharacteristically unequivocal admissions about his convictions on the abortion issue now make one thing shockingly clear: the fact that Hudak is leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives makes abortion an Ontario election issue. Ontario voters would be well advised to read on. Read more

Ontario Drivers Would Pay Almost $2.50 per litre Under Horwath's NDP?

June 24, 2011 by · Leave a Comment 

{NOTE: There is an important update to this post, which follows the post, below.}

For those still reeling from, and disgusted by, PC leader Tim Hudak’s attempt to offer up an election platform promising to maintain the status quo on the very taxes and measures for which he is simultaneously condemning Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty (e.g., HST, health tax, out of control health and education spending, etc.), the release today of a gasoline plank by the Ontario NDP of Andrea Horwath is sure to make one wonder if we are living not in Ontario, but in Orwell’s Oceania. Fifteen days ago, the Ontario New Democratic Party of Andrea Horwath announced that an Ontario NDP government, if elected, would regulate gasoline prices at the pump. Today, Horwath promised a phased-in elimination of the HST: 1% per annum over the next four years, leaving Ontario drivers paying a 4% HST on fuel by the election of 2015. Horwath reportedly said that the HST cut would be in the amount of $500M, but that that lost revenue would be made up by taxing businesses (she did not say exactly how).

I submit that, just as Hudak is falsely implying that he is opposed to the taxes for which he condemns McGuinty, Horwath is trying to appear car-and-driver friendly while, in reality, preparing to conduct an all-out-war on the automobile, sufficient to force us all onto Soviet-style, creaky old “red rocket” style mass transit over the next four years. Here’s the deal. Horwath has already made it clear that an NDP government would impose other changes to ensure that her 1% per annum HST cut on gasoline will be revenue neutral. Given the NDP’s openly socialist nature, we can certainly expect an NDP government to be hostile to individual transportation, and to introduce measures to force Ontarians out of their cars and into tax-funded/subsidized mass transit. Read more

Tim Hudak's FaithBook: A Secret Second Attempt at Taxpayer Funding for Faith-based Schools

June 3, 2011 by · 3 Comments 

Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservative party suffered a crushing defeat in the Ontario provincial election of 2007 due primarily to a promise to extend taxpayer funding to privately owned and operated religious schools. Yet, for the October 6, 2011 election, the PCs have again put faith – a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence – at the foundation of their entire election platform, titled ChangeBook. Though down-played in the express wording of ChangeBook, faith-based budgeting, faith-based climate-fighting, and – though neither the Liberals nor the mainstream media have yet noticed it – even taxpayer funding for faith-based schools form the substantive core of Tim Hudak’s platform, which – especially given ChangeBook’s obvious reference to FaceBook – would more appropriately be titled FaithBook. Read more

Hudak's PCs Propose Get-out-of-Jail Program: Taxpayers Would Pay Extra $3k per Inmate

May 27, 2011 by · Leave a Comment 

You’ve been worried about not making ends meet; perhaps even worried about losing your job or your business. Gasoline prices are cripplingly high. The McGuinty government seems bound and determined to empty your wallet and make just about everything increasingly inconvenient and time consuming. Thanks to the McGuinty Liberals’ ban on Health Canada approved pesticides, you are now dealing with a season of sneezing and a host of critters that are destroying lawns and gardens all over your neighbourhood. You have decided, firmly, that you want McGuinty’s Liberals gone, and you’re looking for a better party to fill those vacant Liberal seats at Queens Park after the October 6, 2011 provincial election. However, today, you heard that the focus of Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario is…wait for it…making you and other Ontario taxpayers pay an extra $20M, every year, so that violent criminals and convicted sex offenders can be let out of prison to get some sun and pick up some litter in your neighbourhood. Huh?

It is common knowledge, among conservative strategists, that there is a small block of voters who never believe that prisoners – ever – are truly paying for their crimes. That block will always approve of just about any additional punishment that any politician proposes. Yesterday, Hudak and his Progressive Conservatives thought they’d try to buy-off those voters by promising that a Hudak government would make convicts in provincial detention centres do up to 40 hours of work each week. On the surface, it sounds like a get-tough-on-prisoners program. Scratch the surface though, and you will quickly discover that it is just the opposite. It is an easy-on-serious-criminals program that will raid the taxpayer’s wallet yet again, and endanger children and others in communities across Ontario. Read more

Proof: Tim Hudak's PCs Would Continue to Run Massive Deficits

May 25, 2011 by · 1 Comment 

If your intelligence is not yet insulted by Ontario Progressive Conservative (“PC”) party leader Tim Hudak’s claims that he will fight the deficit by finding “waste in the system”, it should be by the time you finish reading this article. As the October 6, 2011 Ontario provincial election approaches – and as Hudak does his damnedest to pretend that he would be fiscally responsible were his party to form the next government – the voter would be well served to arm him or her self with the key budget numbers and with a proper understanding of the political implications of those numbers. To that end, I trust the following will prove empowering. Read more

On Tim Hudak: The Reins of Power and the Reign of Terror

May 20, 2011 by · 1 Comment 

With a poll a few months ago suggesting the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario (“PC”) was ahead of the provincial Liberals, PC leader Tim Hudak has avoided putting out any plank that could stir any voter’s passions in a negative way. However, the media have (rightly) complained that Hudak owes the Ontario voter an election platform. With the release today of a plank on electricity bills, a disturbing pattern is emerging. If the pattern holds, Ontario had better hope to hell that Hudak’s PCs are not the ones chosen to replace Dalton McGuinty’s faltering Liberals in the October 6, 2011 provincial election.

Though the media has not noticed it – or, at least, they have not mentioned it – Hudak’s pattern has been to eke out a musing or a plank only as a means of diverting the media away from reporting stories that would harm his party’s standing in the polls. In chronological order, here’s a brief account of the three main Hudak diversions to date: Read more

Twittergasm: The Ontario Liberal Government's Attempt to Fake Grassroots Excitement

May 6, 2011 by · 1 Comment 

I admit it. Though I have usually been an early adopter of such things as YouTube and Facebook, I only recently took an interest in Twitter . Having observed, for weeks, the sort of nonsense that is posted with the most popular Ontario provincial political hashtag, #onpoli, I regret to inform you, dear reader, that Twitter’s influence on Ontario provincial politics must arguably be so tiny as to be unmeasurable. There are several “tweets” about such things as Liberal government announcements. However, as I am about to demonstrate, they amount to the equivalent of false orgasms of a verbal variety, deliberately uttered in an attempt to create the equally false impression that the non-partisan public is excited by the Liberal government’s plans. Read more

Atlas Toked: Why Prohibition is Dead in Canada

April 24, 2011 by · 5 Comments 

In Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged”, the United States’ taxed and over-regulated inventors and problem solvers go on strike. Having shrugged off the burden of carrying others – the burden of thinking for them and making possible the production of goods and services that make civilization possible – the rest of society falls into hunger, darkness, and violence. In the interim, the government attempts to prevent the strike with force of law and guns but it ultimately discovers that the human mind is sovereign; that no amount of law or physical might can force a person to think and work if he simply chooses not to do so. A recent decision in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice has now demonstrated that the same metaphysical fact faces the proponents of cannabis prohibition in Canada, which now appears destined to share the fate of Rand’s Atlas-forsaken United States. Read more

Review: SUN TV News' "The Source" with Ezra Levant

April 19, 2011 by · 7 Comments 

Technically, SUN TV News launched today at 4:30 PM (EST) with a profile of its various shows, but it truly took off at 5:00 PM with the first episode of “The Source”, featuring host Ezra Levant. I have to admit it: my expectations for Levant’s show were pessimistic.

In 2008, I wrote a column for The Western Standard’s blog – Levant had sold The Western Standard by that time – titled “Freedom Requires a Better Defence“. The central argument was that Levant’s arguments in favour of freedom were so poor as to leave the undecided thinking that freedom is not defensible. Imagine my horror upon hearing Levant explain, during SUN TV’s 4:30 PM programming profile, that “The Source” would be all “about freedom”. It was a horror that compelled me to watch episode 1 of “The Source”, if only to gauge how badly Levant’s show would undermine the cause of individual freedom. Read more

An Opponent of the Green Party Speaks: Include Elizabeth May in Canada's Leader's Debates

March 31, 2011 by · 1 Comment 

My readers will know that I am currently leader of the Freedom Party of Ontario. As such, I disagree with almost everything Canada’s Green Party – and its leader, Elizabeth May – have to say about how Canada should be governed. I would never vote for a Green candidate, and I honestly believe that, were the Greens ever to form the government of this country, only bad could come of it.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let me get to my point: it is morally wrong, anti-democratic, and a corruption of Canada’s electoral process, for it to be legal for a “Consortium” of privately-owned networks having a state-granted television oligopoly, to exclude Ms May from the coming leader’s debates. And I say that as the person who, arguably, is Canada’s most absolute and outspoken defender of property rights (go ahead, try to prove me wrong…you’ll lose). Read more

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