For the People

June 28, 2018 · 0 Comments

EDITORIAL

By the end of the week, we will have a new Premier sitting in the big chair in the second-floor office at Queen’s Park—which, quite frankly, has been too long in coming.

At least one term too many.

No one government, no one party, should be in power for 15 years until they are magical or that no one in opposition has what it takes the lead.

For the next four years, the solid majority given to Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives by Ontarians gives them carte blanche to do whatever they want.

The Wynne Liberals, which were preceded by the McGuinty Liberals, had the same opportunity but, instead of working for the betterment of hard-working Ontario families, they drove them into the ground.

We should have known better when Dalton McGuinty broke his main election promise on his road to becoming premier—not to raise taxes.

He duped us, and we forgave him, fearing a return of the cost-cutting of another pack of hardnosed Tories trained by the most hardnosed premier of them all, Mike Harris.

So, instead of being a supporter of middle-class Ontario families and lessening their tax load, the Liberals saddled them with one billion-dollar boondoggle after another, drove the province into massive debt and deficit, and forced too many of us to choose between feeding their families or paying a financially-crippling Hydro One bill.

To paraphrase Charles Dickens, they were not the best of times.

Even before being sworn in Friday, making him the 26th premier of our province, Ford was making bold moves that indicate his campaign motto of “For the People” was not a contrivance meant to con us out of our vote.

He immediately put a freeze on all public service hiring except for frontline workers like cops and nurses, killed the $377-million Green Ontario giveaway, saved 3,500 jobs at the Pickering nuclear power station by vowing to keep it operational until at least 2024, vowed to pull Ontario out of the cap-and-trade carbon cash grab as well as knock 10-cents a litre off the price of gasoline at the pumps.

He has put senior public-service bureaucrats on notice that he will not take kindly to being played.

If they do so, it’s at their peril.

Obviously, we want Doug Ford to succeed. We want the end of hallway medicine, largely created by the growth of the health bureaucracy under the Liberals.

We want the unions, and their often-extraordinary demands, out of the pockets of taxpayers and no longer cozying up as insiders like they did with the Liberals.

Most of all, we want, and need, a new start.

Think positively.

It’s been too long since we could.