For Your Consideration

Okay I confess to being a bit obsessed about certain things:

H/t Moudakis

Meanwhile, Star readers weigh in:

An outrageous, insulting and self-centred waste of our tax dollars

Four ways to mock Doug Ford for trying to buy our fleeting love, Oct. 21

I could feel Heather Mallick’s frustration as I read her article and I agree with everything she said. We taxpayers mustn’t overlook where Ford’s $200 generosity is coming from. It is not coming out of his personal pocket. It is coming out of our tax dollars. So, in effect, he is giving us back our own money. This is an outrageous, insulting and self-centred waste of our tax dollars. We need and deserve to have our taxes spent on necessary services that are designed to help every person in Ontario.

Patricia Steward, East York

We’re donating our pre-election cheques to help the homeless

Doug Ford poised to send out pre-election cheques to 16 million Ontarians, Oct. 16

Premier Doug Ford’s blatant bribe for votes is disgusting, shameless and a very typical of his Progressive Conservative government. Our two-person household will be signing over our two cheques to the Ontario Alliance to End Homelessness. We feel the money will be of more use to those homeless folks Ford tells to “get off your a-s-s and start working like everyone else.” One wonders if homeless folks will even get a cheque, since they don’t have an address. Well done, premier. More than $3 billion spent on bribery, when that money could and should go to health care, education and ending homelessness [emphasis mine]. Priorities, folks!

Nancy Van Kessel, Mississauga

What Is Your Vote Worth?

How does $200 sound? That is the price, to put it crassly, that Premier Doug Ford has estimated will buy your vote - $200 to make you complicit in his malfeasance, his corruption. his backroom deals, only some of which have come to light, (with more revelations pending, if Marit Stiles has her way).

Some voters might be insulted by Ford's low opinion of their worth; others will simply take the money and ask no questions, content with his explanation that it is to "stimulate the economy. Thie Star's Martin Regg Cohn is not among the latter group. He writes:

Ford’s PCs want an early election, no matter the cost. Never mind the unnecessary $155-million election expense — that’s the least of it.

If they settle on the $200 figure for every adult and child in Ontario, that works out to as much as $1,000 for a family of five — and perhaps $3.2 billion out of the treasury in total. That money is badly needed to shore up our schools, our hospitals and our homeless, but the premier believes he needs it more desperately to soften up voters.

That is a pretty high tab to be putting blinders on people's eyes, but blinders are what Ford needs, given his' situation'.

The headlines have faded, but few have forgotten the $8.28-billion imbroglio over protected land made available to private developers on the premier’s watch (until he reversed course under pressure). That police probe could be released sometime next year, delivering potentially bad news and a political death sentence.

Rather than wait for the police to rain on their re-election parade — scheduled for June 2026 under Ontario’s fixed election law — the plan is to move the campaign up by more than a year to early 2025. 

Regg Cohn calls it for what it is:

It’s an elegant, if expensive, election plan: a kickback for voters, gifted by a government accused of kickbacks from developers (despite those opposition allegations in the legislature, no criminality has been proven and the police aren’t talking).

But lest we forget, Ford is an old hand at pandering to the public.

Ahead of the 2022 election, Ford’s Tories cut cheques to rebate motorists for licence plate fees that the government cancelled, at a cost of more than $1 billion to the treasury. During the COVID pandemic, parents received as much as $250 per child. And the previous PC government of Mike Harris issued $200 “dividend” cheques.

How to justify such shameless pre-election (early election) vote-buying?

The unspoken reason is to satisfy the premier’s lust for power. The official rationale is to support people’s purchasing power.

Regg Cohn ends his piece with this query: ... does he have voters figured out?

Only you can answer that question.