Politicana

Normally I don’t follow local news closely, but as a former resident of London, Ontario I feel obliged to comment.  Today the ownership of Green Lane landfill, located just outside of London, was officially transferred to Toronto.

Toronto currently has a contract that says they can dump their garbage in Michigan, but that contract is up in 2010 and is unlikely to be renewed for any sort of reasonable price.  Toronto’s solution was to search for someone on this side of the border who could start carrying the load, and London seems to be the unlucky recipient.

Municipal politicians in London have been fighting the purchase of Green Lane ever since they’ve known about it, and the Mayor of Toronto has pushed the purchase anyway. It would be nice if Toronto could look to their own backyard to dump their garbage instead of targeting their neighbours.

Somehow it seems a strange and perverted system that would allow any group of people the power to vote on whether or not they get a raise. Never the less, that’s exactly what just happened in Ontario’s Provincial Parliament and guess what…? The raise was a whopper. MPPs gave themselves a big pat on the back and a 25 percent raise. In case you’re wondering that’s $22 000, which bumps their total pay up to $110 000 without the bonus pay received for extra responsibilities, which most of them have. But they didn’t forget about the little guy. They also raised the minimum wage. Not by 25 percent, but by 25 cents. Literally small change.

There is however some justification for the pay raise. Ontario has the highest cost of living in Canada, giving some credibility to the MPP’s claim that they should be higher paid than their counterparts in other provinces. There also needs to be some financial incentive to prevent a brain drain to the private sector. Not that salaries in the public sector could ever compare to those given out by private companies, but a reasonable standard of living needs to be provided to have any hope of holding on to bright and talented minds. The real political issue isn’t that MPPs are receiving a six figure income, but that they received such a substantial raise all at one time.

This brings us back to folly of letting MPPs vote on their own income. Giving them control over how much they earn makes their pay raises not so much about what they deserve, but what they can get away with. Pay raises to MPPs are generally put off for as long as possible to avoid the appearance of greediness in the Parliament. So when a political window for a pay raise does open, there is a ‘get it while we can’ mentality. If we ever want MPPs pay to be based on deservedness as opposed to political factors, we are going to need to take the power out of the hands of those getting paid.

www.cambridgetimes.ca - MPPs feed on greed with raise

Dalton McGuinty has recently announced the opening of two new nuclear power plants in Ontario. He’s facing criticism for the decision, and this isn’t the first time the Premier is facing heat over Ontario’s energy demands. He’s had problems regarding Ontario hydro dating back to the blackout in the summer of 2003. Most recently they manifested themselves when he admitted he would have to break and election promise by keeping Ontario coal plants open longer than originally intended. Now he is again suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous environmentalists, who all claim that nuclear power is not a green alternative (I suppose fluorescent glowing green doesn’t count.)

It would be easy to say that Dalton is sleeping in a bed of his own making. After all he did make promises he couldn’t live up to. But putting aside my indignation at the broken promises of the Premier – something we all invariably have to do within a couple of years of every election – I can recognize that he had no other viable choice. Ontario has been running an energy deficit year after year, and to make up for it we purchase top dollar electricity from the coal powered plants in Michigan. This is not an environmentally or economically sound practice, but we accept it because there seem to be no other immediate options. Wind, solar and hydro-electrical power don’t have the potential to produce the wattage that Ontario needs to pick up the slack. The only two sources that can produce the amount of power we need in the time frame we need it in are coal, which would obviously be a step backwards, and its glowing green alternative.

NationalPost - Nuclear power a risk for the PM