titanic

Thursday July 12, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday July 12, 2012

McGuinty buying Liberal seats with gas plant move

It’s called the Liberal seat saver program.

In the midst of last October’s election, the Liberals were under the gun.

With a minority government looming, they cancelled a controversial gas-fired power plant in Mississauga, saying they would “move” it.

In a stunning admission to the Legislature’s estimates committee Wednesday, Energy Minister Chris Bentley said the decision to scrap the plant came from the Liberal Party – not from the government.

You thought robocalls were bad? How about a party that, mid-election, takes $180 million of your hard-earned tax dollars – and piddles it down the toilet just so they’ll get re-elected?

At least we know now what a seat in the Legislature costs.

Assuming the $180 million cancellation cost ensured the re-election of Liberal stalwarts Charles Sousa (Mississauga South), Laurel Broten (Etobicoke Lakeshore) and Donna Cansfield (Etobicoke Centre), we can assume a seat is worth $60 million each.

Throw in Bob Delaney (Mississauga-Streetsville) and Amrit Mangat (Mississauga-Brampton South) and you bring the per-seat price down to a more affordable $36 million.

Any way you look at it, taxpayers got hosed, voters got bamboozled – and a vast amount of money that could have been used for healthcare got wasted.

NDP energy critic Peter Tabuns wasn’t over the top Tuesday, he was simply stating facts, when he called it scandalous. (Source: Canoe.ca)

 

Wednesday April 18, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Wednesday April 18, 2012

Canada’s last great step forward

There was no sunshine in Ottawa when they signed the Constitution Act on April 17, 1982. While the gunmetal grey skies above Parliament Hill opened with a deluge, demonstrators in Quebec City wore black armbands, waved the fleur-de-lis, and denounced their brethren as “vendus.”

No matter. In the shadow of the Peace Tower, the federal government had arranged a spray of flags, a fusillade of cannon, a flock of birds and a flight of fighter jets. Thirty thousand spectators cheered.

The Queen, seated on a canopied stage, gave the new Constitution legitimacy. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, in a morning suit and a top hat, gave it eloquence. Both gave it their signatures, and a sense of occasion, too.

To reporters who had spent some two years covering parliamentary debates, intergovernmental conferences, committee hearings and court challenges, all played out in the shrillest of tones, the ceremony on April 17 marked the end of a political season for the ages.

Surely, we thought, this was the last of the wasting battles over rights and powers between the federal government and the provinces, which had flared episodically since the mid-1960s.

Surely, we thought, this was the war to end all of Canada’s Constitutional Wars, “The Last Act,” as Ron Graham, the mellifluous chronicler, called his account of the feverish events that unfolded in November 1981.

Before Canada’s Thirty Years War did come to end, there would still be disastrous agreements at Meech Lake and Charlottetown, both intended to fix a Constitution that needed no fixing.(Source: Ottawa Citizen)