Doesn't that sound highfalutin? Well, in a Westminster style Democracy, like Canada's, it's not. It is what routinely happens at the start of every new sitting of Parliament, Federally or Provincially. Today it was Ontario's turn, the 40th Session of Parliament, and the speech was delivered by the Queen's Representative (hence Throne) here in Ontario, the Lieutenant Governor.
The speech itself is written by the governing party, in this instance the McGuinty Liberals. They probably consider themselves middle-of-the-road politically. Of course in every Western Democracy, that means statist, that is, the state is the beginning, the end, and the middle of all problems and solutions. That unfortunately is the way they think and so do many of our citizens.
I take my new role as Leader of the Ontario Libertarians, seriously enough to respond to any major Ontario Government announcements, and a Throne speech sets the tone and the goals of the new Parliament, so, it is important.
Below is a heavily edited version (under 5 minutes) of the speech, written highlights can be seen here. But give a listen, then read my response underneath.
In the Throne speech delivered today, while the McGuinty Liberals are acknowledging the global financial crisis, their actions are woefully inadequate as a means of averting the same fate. As if totally disconnected from the market turmoil in all of the Western democracies, the McGuinty government’s plan pretends that Ontario is immune to such problems. In Europe and in America, governments have grown to the point where they are outspending the productive abilities of their own citizenry. The excessive deficits and accumulating debts are now jeopardizing the credit ratings of these countries while impacting the wealth and well being of their citizens.
Unfortunately for Ontario, it is following in the same path. Since McGuinty has taken power in 2003, Ontario's government has grown much faster than its economy. Government spending has doubled and so has the provincial debt, resulting in Ontario becoming a “have not” province. Those facts are intimately linked - cause and effect.
In a recent speech, Dalton McGuinty suggested that Ontario would weather the economic storm with a strong stable plan; this was repeated in the speech from the Throne today. It’s as if the government now realizes that the provincial payroll has ballooned out of their control, so they now intend to reduce the Ontario public service by five per cent by March 2012, and a further two per cent by 2014. Add to that another $200-million in workforce reductions at the 630 government agencies, and they claim this will be sufficient to attack the massive $250-billion debt. That is pathetic, and does not even begin to address the problem.
Despite the newfound appreciation for budget restraint, the government is forging ahead with the expensive and unnecessary introduction of full day kindergarten and a reduction of college and university tuition by 30 per cent for families earning less than $160,000 per year. This amounts to a subsidy and job security for the teacher’s unions. Supporting the education sector is moreover highly questionable, given the teacher’s union’s active support during this past election campaign.
In the Speech from the Throne, the government insists that it will find improved efficiencies to encourage greater productivity without ever explaining how this can be done. In fact, the government undermines any possibility of this happening by treating the government monopolies of Healthcare and Education as sacrosanct, and never to be touched by the evil practices of competition, so widely and profitably used in every other sector of our economy.
No, the McGuinty Liberals have co-opted the wealth of hard working families and transferred it to government because think they know better how to spend the money of those families. Certainly, those families may prefer to make their own decisions about how best to spend their wealth if they had a choice.
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