See if they care

With the Ontario government hurling public money hither and yon "picking winners", the Ottawa Citizen reports complaints that the program is... not sufficiently geographcially balanced. The money is going to southwest Ontario including the dreaded Toronto and not to Ottawa. How can we be spending our time on such issues? I may have to give up reading Premier Dalton McGuinty's words to avoid grinding my teeth to nubbins. He responded to this criticism with an absolutely predictable burst of oleaginous blather, at once ingratiating, insubstantial and utterly useless: "I have great faith in our ability in Ottawa — as you know, it’s my hometown — for us to recover from a very difficult period which is affecting every Ontario community. The Nortel loss, in particular, was a heavy blow. I don’t think anybody would argue with that. But I’m convinced given our talent base there — you know, we’ve got two universities, colleges — that we have the foundation for new growth.”

Apart from its other disagreeable qualities, this response takes no account whatsoever of a new poll also reported in Saturday's Citizen showing that Canadians do not trust the federal government to meet its budget projections and that 88 per cent of respondents want governments to cut spending rather than raise taxes to meet such targets. Maybe he knows there's no longer any effective way for us to make our wishes felt in official circles. But in that case couldn't he just limit himself to smirking and spare us this ghastly rhetoric?