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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Degrees of Freedom?

From time to time, one will see reports that purportedly rank the relative freedom of this globe’s countries (see, for example, the annual “Economic Freedom of the World” report published by Canada’s Fraser Institute; c.f. Peter Jaworski’s “Canada is Free, the U.S is Mostly Free“). However, efforts to generate such reports are founded upon the same flawed understanding of freedom that founds the Rahn Curve (i.e., the idea that, by taxing and spending by just the right percentage of Gross Domestic Product, a country can somehow maximize freedom). Read more

International Free Press Society Sounds Alarm About Suppression of Freedom Party's Anti-Racism Ads

Last Tuesday, January 25, 2011, Freedom Party of Ontario released its latest plank for the October 6, 2011 Ontario provincial general election. Titled “Close Ontario’s Race-based Public Schools“, the plank promises that a Freedom government would close schools like the “Africentric Alternative School” that the Toronto District School Board voted, in 2008, to open…with neither Ontario’s governing Liberals nor the Progressive Conservative opposition doing anything to prevent the school from being opened.

Freedom Party also released three pre-election video ads January 25, 2011 to promote the plank. That evening, I was interviewed by Ryan Doyle and Tarek Fatah on their popular Friendly Fire radio show (CFRB 1010 AM, Toronto, nightly at 7:00 PM). Clearly, the ads, and the plank, were provocative and popular. Within hours, CTV Globemedia Inc. suppressed distribution of the Freedom Party pre-election ads by alleging to YouTube that the ads infringed their copyright. CTV has provided no indication of what they believe constitutes an infringement. However, it is noteworthy that thousands of CTV news clips are available on YouTube channels, including on channels belonging to politicians in the larger parties (e.g., Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae have CTV content on their channels)…yet CTV claims that it will not licence its news content to any political party…and numerous of its clips have been up on other politicians’ YouTube channels for years.

Suppressing the video on YouTube denied Freedom Party significant ability to have the video distribute virally, and to bring attention to the party. Many who had seen the video before CTV had it yanked are outraged. And, in fact, one of the world’s most noteworthy and influential free speech organizations – the International Free Press Society – has just released an official statement expressing concern over CTV’s suppression of Freedom Party’s ad. It is certainly worth a read.

Stay tuned. Freedom Party is currently preparing its own response to CTV’s suppressive action. In the meantime, you can see what CTV was suppressing by viewing Freedom Party’s Close Ontario’s Race-based Public Schools plank, and scrolling to near the bottom of the page, where Freedom Party of Ontario has made it available for your consideration.

Randy Hillier: his heart's in the Right place, but is he?

Over at the National Post’s blog, Progressive Conservative MPP Randy Hillier writes about his proposal to make a legislator’s pay increases contingent on increases in “the standard of living”. I agree with Hillier’s sentiment – that legislators should be more personally accountable for the harm they cause – but I disagree with his strategy (see a copy my critique of it – which I originally posted to the comments section of Hillier’s post – below). Such, it seems, is often the case: Hillier’s heart seems to be in the right place, but I disagree with his strategy.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this is Hillier’s strategy to bring into the Legislature MPPs who seek less government intervention in the economy. And so, for the first time, I will disclose an until-now never disclosed history of Hillier’s strategy. Read more

Reality Check: Ontario's Liberals and Progressive Conservatives on Global Warming and Climate Change

Many in Ontario believe – or want you to believe – that the provincial Liberals believe climate change to be the result of anthropogenic global warming, and that the Progressive Conservatives deny both anthropogenic global warming and climate change. They believe – or want you to believe – that Ontario’s Liberals want to reduce CO2 emissions in an effort to fight global warming, but that Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives oppose restrictions on CO2 emissions. As the official record quoted in this article will demonstrate, both beliefs are false, but one other official party in Ontario provides hope to voters who have not been drinking from Al Gore’s Kool-Aid pitcher. Read more

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