Right In Niagara

Liberal monopoly-pusher Jim Bradley will be cutting health-care coverage

2012-01-26T04:28:00.000-05:00

Looks like Jim Bradley, Kim Craitor, and their Liberals are going to cut healthcare again.
Yeah: you've read it correctly: Jimmy'N'Kimmy's Liberals are once again (as Smitherman had previously done) poised to delist previously covered health care - this is the same recycled, deceptive old Michaeel Decter/ Bob Rae-style canard of 'we're saving health care by cutting health care".
Let's remember those clowns in Niagara who happily voted for this monopolist Liberal scumbag Bradley; hope they're satisfied with Bradley's Liberal incompetence.
I'm sure that Niagara's Liberal-friendly press barons 'Wendy Williscraft and Mike Metcalfe's are already carefully planning pre-emptive ways in which not to interview their local Liberal Jim Bradley about any of this, and to not bother examining how a deceptive Bradley for years had fear-mongered about 'harris' - yet ended up doing the exact things which he (...along with Niagara's helpful Bradley-booster press...) had sanctimoniously fear-mongered that 'harris' would do!
The St.Catharines Standard, certainly, will be spinning their stories any which way they can [...''lookit, lookit: Drummond made them do it! McGuinty and Matthews had no choice!!!'...] in order not to examine the last thirty years of Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's failing deceptive allegiance to Tommy Douglas.
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Jim Bradley's fairy-tale is actually a Liberal nightmare

2012-01-22T15:25:00.001-05:00

A Sudbury Star commentator wrote in "McGuinty's fairy-tale comes to an end":

"Dalton McGuinty got elected by promising Ontario that it could afford to spend lots more than Mike Harris. People believed him but it is becoming increasingly clear that he spun a fairy tale.

Ontario' debt is higher that all the provinces with McGuinty having doubled it since his election.

According to the Toronto Star on January 19 ("Dalton McGuinty and ministers brace for cuts"), "Premier Dalton McGuinty and his ministers are steeling themselves for a grim new era of cutbacks."

Why?

Because they overspent.

Ontario would not need cutbacks if spending had been kept under control. But McGuinty allowed spending to spiral in a frenzy of waste, pay-offs to his friends and a record provincial debt.

Now McGuinty says "one of the ways that we can turn this challenge into an opportunity is to understand that there are, in fact, ways that we can spend the dollars more efficiently.”

Duh. He discovers this now?

Suddenly it's important to spend taxpayer dollars "more efficiently."

Note to Dalton: it is always important to spend taxpayer dollars efficiently. McGuinty's own words are a clear admission that he has been wasting our money all along.

It is becoming clearer than ever that Dalton McGuinty has provided us with one of the worst governments in our history.

He promised Ontario could afford more but now he plans to give us less. He now wants to give us the exact opposite of what he promised during last Fall's election campaign.

This failed government needs to go. The only question now is whether the NDP will vote in the Legislature to prop it up."
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This is also St.Catharines Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's fairy tale coming to an ignoble, hypocritical, disastrous, painful end.
Bradley and his two-faced Liberal liars were the ones who floated to power by smearing 'harris'.
Here, right in Niagara, Liberal MPP's Bradley and Kim Craitor also 'got elected by promising Ontario that it could afford to spend lots more than Mike Harris'.
People believed Jimmy'N'Kimmy, but now we see what a long-con-scam their slimy Liberal fairy tale had been, all along... more like a Liberal nightmare...
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Liberals take a piss on Ontario taxpayers

2012-01-22T14:44:00.001-05:00

There was a grrreeat editorial cartoon in Wendy Metcalfe's wrong-righting, Kinsella-defying St.Catharines Standard on Jan.21, 2012. This Dolighan cartoon - a real classic, it's on page A6: you oughta see it - showed Liberal MPP Jim Bradley, wearing his comfy red ermine-trimmed robe, with "MPP" monogrammed on the back, standing at a urinal, taking a piss on Ontario's tax payers.
It was a real good choice for a cartoon by Wendy's right-wrongers!
They even showed a roll of toilet paper hanging out of Jimmy's ass, listing all the $$ billions $$ which Bradley's Liberals have wasted in Ontario, from their ORNGE fiasco, to their Samsungian GreenFear enviro-bolshevism, to their eHealth incompetence, to their OLG scammery... on and on it went.
The cartoon even showed Liberal MPP Jim Bradley laughing with derision as he's pissing on Ontario's taxpayers, while, you see, he and McGuinty are pissing away our tax dollars!
What an incisive and timely cartoon, from Wendy's proud gang at the Standard!
We are sure, now that we have this grrrreeat cartoon of Jim Bradley giving taxpayers his Liberal golden shower, that Wendy's wrong-righters will soon be following up with indepth stories about the size of Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's own "Gold Member Pension"!!
Why, we're sure that Wendy Metcalfe is already working on letting readers know how Liberal MPP Jim Bradley got his unlocked golden pension, when other Ontarians were locked out, and how many salary increases Liberal Jimmy got, when others didn't.
For sure, that's what the Standard is busily working on... right....? hahaha
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Smitherman's Overpowering Stench of Liberal Incompetence

2012-01-21T17:07:00.003-05:00

Adam Radwanski wrote in "DIFFERENT STANDARDS: Deb Matthews unlikely to be given a pink slip over Ornge controversy", (Globe and Mail, Jan.20, 2012):

Little more than two years ago, Dalton McGuinty set an ostensibly high standard for ministerial accountability.
It didn’t matter that David Caplan bore less responsibility for the mess at eHealth Ontario than his predecessor, George Smitherman. Mr. Caplan was the Health Minister when the scandal over contracts and expenditures broke, and was judged not to have done enough to prevent it. So he was dumped from cabinet, never to return.
Based on that precedent, the woman who replaced Mr. Caplan should be feeling pretty nervous about now. The controversy at Ornge, the province’s air-ambulance service, bears a striking similarity to eHealth in the way it has unfolded – an ambitious system reform implemented in some haste under Mr. Smitherman that has blown up in a successor’s face. In some ways it might actually be worse, since the current controversy goes beyond business practices to life-and-death questions about the quality of emergency services.
But the early signs are that, while she’s in for an unpleasant few weeks or months, Health Minister Deb Matthews will keep her job. And Mr. McGuinty will be left trying to talk his way around a cruel reality of politics – that different ministers are subject to different standards.
Mr. Caplan, although well-liked by many of his colleagues, was considered dispensable by the Premier. Despite his senior posting, he was never quite in the top rung of cabinet, and he wasn’t central to the government’s plans. Although he had files that he tried to move forward – notably, and admirably, mental health – he was something of a placeholder.
Ms. Matthews is a different story. In fact, with the exception of Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, she’s the one front-bencher Mr. McGuinty can’t afford to lose.
Ms. Matthews has been tasked with flattening health-care spending increases at about 3 per cent annually – a monumental challenge that’s central to the government’s hopes of eliminating its $16-billion deficit. Largely based on trouncing the province’s pharmacists in a fight over prescription drug costs, the Premier’s office is convinced she’s the minister best suited to winning necessary battles with vested interests.
Even beyond her own portfolio, Ms. Matthews plays a pivotal role in her party. Along with Municipal Affairs Minister Kathleen Wynne, she carries tremendous sway with the Liberals’ centre-left. And Mr. McGuinty is counting on her to help get buy-in, including from many of her cabinet and caucus colleagues, for the government’s austerity agenda.
But, of course, Mr. McGuinty won’t just come out and say any of this. And that’s going to place him in a very difficult position if, for instance, ongoing investigations show any conflict between the air-ambulance agency’s non-profit, public operations and its private ones – not to mention if other investigations show deficiencies in emergency responses. Amid allegations that Ms. Matthews was warned about problems with Ornge and didn’t take sufficient action, how will the Liberals explain why Ms. Matthews gets to keep her job, when Mr. Caplan didn’t?
In part, it appears, they will do so by trying to direct blame toward Mr. Smitherman – something they stayed away from during the furor over eHealth, when he was preparing to run for mayor of Toronto.
Mr. Smitherman didn’t win any friends earlier this month when he wrote to the Toronto Star accusing his successors of failing to oversee or even understand Ornge’s operations. And while Mr. McGuinty hasn’t publicly criticized his former minister, other Liberals have been increasingly willing to take potshots.
The Liberals will also try to draw a distinction between eHealth and Ornge, by noting that the latter functions far more independently than the former, and thus lends itself less to ministerial oversight.
And to some extent, they'll just wait until we start talking about something else.
Among the reasons Ornge has got so much attention lately is that the government hasn’t been making much other news. That will change within the next few weeks, when the release of economist Don Drummond’s public-service report kickstarts a tumultuous budget process. Next to the spending decisions to come, controversy over an agency that receives $150-million annually may seem like small potatoes.
Still, it’s highly unlikely that opposition politicians will be able to resist calling for Ms. Matthews’ head when the Legislature returns next month. And since Mr. McGuinty gave them their pound of flesh last time, it will be hard to blame them.
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Of course, Deb Matthews must be fired for what has transpired under her watch: McGuinty MUST take accountability for the Liberal-approved piles of policy SH!T which Smitherman left stinking, hidden throughout Ontario.

Smitherman was McGuinty's hand-picked glorious golden boy; McGuinty gave Smitherman free reign to destroy health care throughout Ontario. Smitherman's actions are a direct reflection of McGuinty's poor judgement.

If Caplan got his ass kicked out for essentially what Smitherman did, then the same should apply to Matthews. ORNGE is McGuinty's fiasco as well as Smitherman's: let's not forget, Smitherman WAS ALSO McGUINTY'S hand-picked Deputy Premier of Ontario!! These stinking piles of Liberal crap which still fester in Ontario were not perpetrated by some low level Liberal hack, these policy fiascos came right from the top, from the highest positions in a Liberal majority, untouchable government!! This goes right to the heart of McGuinty's faulty "trust" in Smitherman, which has now been revealed in spades, and McGuinty must act to recognize the utter fiasco which Smitherman created.

AdRad writes that McGuinty tasked Matthews with "flattening health care spending increases"! Sounds like a polite euphemism for health care cuts, y'know, the "cuts" which Good Ole Liberal MPP Jim Bradley often enjoyed sanctimoniously chortling about, when he smear-mongered 'harris'.

AdRad doesn't quite get to the rest of the frightening Liberal ideology which is at play here: these cuts -ooops: 'flattened increases' - are occurring to a populace trapped within a state-controlled monopolist setting.
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Reactionary non-innovator McGuinty wants 'innovation' cash!

2012-01-20T00:45:00.000-05:00

Further related to this previous post and this previous post...

There were two more interesting letters in the National Post, Jan.19, 2012:

"Note to premiers: Federal $ won’t buy innovation

Jeff Spooner wrote:
Re: Premiers Ask: Should PM Be At Health Talks?, Jan. 16.
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s proposed health-care innovation fund — financed by the federal government and now backed by Ontario’s Premier Dalton McGuinty — is an insult to all Canadians. What Messrs. Wall and McGuinty are saying, is that it has never dawned on them up to now to be innovative, and since they didn’t have money in an envelope marked “innovation,” it wasn’t going to happen.
Even a street con-man would laugh at what these two Premiers are trying to sell the federal government, and by extension the citizens of Canada. If this is what passes for the braintrust that will solve our health care problems, we are in trouble.

Dr. Charles Steele wrote:
“Innovation,” as proposed by Canada’s premiers, is nothing more than “more of the same” on how to extend a failing Roy Romanow system. When Dr. Brian Day was head of the Canadian Medical Association, he suggested that the premiers should buy tickets to Europe to study their successful health-care systems — a mix of public and private care. Canadians deserve better; now is the time to act."
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The same monopolist, lying, statist-status-quo enforcing Ontario Liberals, who failed to "innovate" in health care for 8 years (...unless you count new health taxes and corresponding cuts to previously-covered-care as innovative...) now want more federal tax cash to... um... "innovate"?!

What a joke.

One "innovation" which Ontario's hypocritical Liberal hacks McGuinty, Jim Bradley, and Kim Craitor could try, is to desist from spreading their toxic, failing Liberal health care duplicity.

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Liberal Jim Bradley: public enemy of health-care reform

2012-01-20T00:15:00.000-05:00

John Brackenbury wrote in "Canadians want to talk about private health care" (National Post, Jan17, 2012):

"It is in the national interest for Canadians to identify the enemies of health-care reform and crystallize their motives in our minds. For consideration I wish to put forward the health-care unions, which enjoy the current monopoly on health-care delivery.
Supported by forced contributions from their members, they warn against, "American-style blah blah blah" every time the subject of reform comes up.
On Saturday's Letters page, five university professors..." [see here] "...assert that Stephen Harper is out of touch on health-care reform and "the vast majority of Canadians strongly support" the status quo.
Help me, Post readers, to understand what their motivation would be for such vehement opposition to any kind of reform. Do they just hate their grandchildren, or what? We really really need to have this discussion now."
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Well: two of the "enemies of health care reform" in Niagara are certainly Ontario Liberal MPP's Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor - along with the rest of Dalton McGuinty's gang of single-payer-pushing monopolists at Queen's Park. ['American-health-care bashing' was Jim Bradley's rhetorical touchstone!]

Many more enemies are in the Liberal-friendly press, protecting Liberals such as Jim 'I hate doctors' Bradley from any discussions, whether on his failed Liberal health-care monopolism or his failed Liberal GreenFear-mongering kyodiotry.

It's 'all settled' to them, therefore, no "discussions" are needed...

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Romanow's one-note chorus sings the same old tune

2012-01-19T23:59:00.001-05:00

Further to my previous Romanow-related post...

Two interesting letters appeared in the National Post, Jan.14, 2012:

"Why Romanow is wrong on health care

Re: Roy Romanow’s One-Note Tune, editorial, Jan. 10.
Your editorial fails to appreciate Roy Romanow’s personal reasons for promoting federal control over provincial health care. While you correctly state that federal interference in the provincial domain of health-care delivery is unconstitutional, there is a valid explanation for Mr. Romanow’s position.
When he was NDP premier of Saskatchewan, he presided over the worst-performing provincial health system in Canadian history. Many hospitals were closed, waiting lists grew massively and patients suffered. It is reasonable therefore for him to believe that the federal government could do better.
In a CBC interview, I asked Mr. Romanow a direct question: “In a free and democratic society, in which citizens can legally spend their money on tobacco, alcohol, gambling and even pornography, what is wrong with the freedom to spend ones own after tax dollars on the health care of our self or our loved ones?” He fudged, obfuscated and mumbled, then changed the subject and refused to answer.
It is often stated that Canada shares with North Korea and Cuba the existence and enforcement of laws that restrict our right to choice in health care. This statement is false — we are the only country on Earth that has such laws. Our health system is therefore, as supporters of the status quo point out, a truly distinct and defining feature of our Canadian identity. We are indebted to Mr. Romanow, and indeed to politicians and governments across the country, for this unique status.
Dr. Brian Day, Vancouver.

… or is he?

The Supreme Court of Canada has clearly affirmed the constitutionality of the Canada Health Act. The suggestion that the Canadian constitution gives the federal government no role in health policy is wrong as a matter of law. The vast majority of Canadians strongly support the national, publicly funded, health-care system Roy Romanow has worked hard to defend. It is Prime Minister Harper, not Roy Romanow, who is out of touch on the issue of health-care reform.
Prof. Martha Jackman, University of Ottawa; Prof. Timothy Caulfield, University of Alberta; Prof. Colleen Flood, University of Toronto; Prof. Constance MacIntosh, Dalhousie University; Prof. Emeritus Sanda Rodgers, University of Ottawa".
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That's the usual one-note monopolist line from Jackman.
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Badawey recycles his 'Niagara South mini-monopoly' bandwagon

2012-01-19T23:40:00.002-05:00

Further to my earlier post...

As reported in the Jan.19, 2012 Standard, it's interesting to see failed McGuinty-Liberal candidate Vance Badawey now jumping on his own recycled bandwagon, to create another health fiefdom, an NHS-South, citing the reasons for the failure of health care in Niagara being that the NHS is currently too big - which doesn't quite explain why Ontario's Liberal-run monopoly health care is systemically failing everywhere else. But no matter; anything to spin the blame on the NHS, and not on 8 years of failed McGuintyist Liberal monopolism.

Yes, that's right: the new smoke-and-mirrors "solution" is to create a new bureaucracy out of the old failing bureaucracy - this is exactly the statist's preferred way of perpetuating the same old status-quo by shifting the problem, not by acknowledging it (or even recognizing it!); it's just the perfect answer for getting sanctimonious well-meaning Liberals to busily "fix" problems which other sanctimonious well-meaning Liberals had busily created in the first place - a perpetual make-work project for busy well-meaning sanctimonious Liberals.

Will we see a new McGuinty-stacked LHIN overseeing Badawey's new 'Southern Son Of The NHS' health-nirvana, as well, or will the same old Liberal-appointed LHIN hacks be administering this fledgling monopolist fiefdom on the Lake Erie shore - y'know, the same Liberal LHIN which CREATED THE CURRENT NHS HIP IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?!?!?

What spin from these politicians; their hypocritical cry is not acknowledging that their Liberal monopolist ideology has failed; it is that they don't have enough monopolist bureaucracy yet!!
This old idea of breaking up the NHS also has Liberal MPP Kim Craitor's stink all over it, seeing as Craitor had advocated the same thing in the pre-HIP days; upon which Smitherman laughed and rewarded Craitor's efforts by forcing the NHS to create the HIP.

Niagara's lefties seem to overlook all that: y'know, while blaming 'harris' and 'sevenpifer'!

Liberals Kim Craitor, along with Smitherman, are the dead-beat co-fathers of the Liberal-LHIN-created HIP in Niagara, which Badawey doesn't seem to acknowledge as he pushes for his new Mini-Me-NHS bureaucracy, to supposedly "solve" the problems which Badawey's own Liberal colleagues created in the existing NHS!

The catch-22 duplicity just rolls along...
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Hypocrite Liberal McGuinty has been cutting health care in Ontario

2012-01-19T23:28:00.001-05:00

While McGuinty's smug Liberals are whining about the feds' health-care transfers, why hasn't anyone bothered to ask Dalton or Good Ole Liberal MPP Jim Bradley about how Ontario's Liberals were cutting their provincial hospital transfers in St.Catharines?

And: that was occurring under the existing Paul Martin 'health care solution for a generation' arrangements (having nothing to do with any of the current squabbles) and under the new-cash-flow auspices of McGuinty's 2004-created multi-billion-dollar hated Health Tax!!

One would think that the St.Catharines Standard's Wendy Metcalfe and her self-appointed gang of laughable wrong-righters would bother to remember their own FLICKING story from just a year ago, from Jan, 15, 2011, and examine what McGuinty and Jim Bradley were doing to their own hospital budgets, in context to what the smarmy, sanctimonious McGuinty was just recently spinning on the federal stage

But Niagara's wrong-righters haven't interviewed local Liberal hack Jim Bradley about his Liberal health care cuts, have they?!!

Nope: best not to dim Jim Bradley's carefully-constructed impeccable Liberal aura with pesky questions about ideological contradictions... ... hey: lookit!! Jimmy's shilling coke rain barrels! That's fun! Let's go see!!!! haha
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Liberal Jim Bradley is the GreenFear-mongering enviro-goof putting Ontario in peril

2012-01-19T17:45:00.001-05:00

Garnet Bloomfield Ilderton wrote in "McGuinty's Mickey Mouse ideas just plain goofy" (Beacon-Herald, Jan,19, 2012):

"Premier Dalton McGuinty and his great adventure have entered into la la land. First there was the great discovery of smart metres then the curly light bulbs followed by the sun pads and then came the big grounded whirly birds. All of these fads were supposed to greatly assist in his race to be politically correct and solve our energy problems at the same time. Ontario Auditor General Jim McCarter, in his recent report, has questioned the rush into these programs of renewable energy without good solid research taken into consideration or what the likelihood would be of success or failure of these programs. Maybe just good old fashioned horse sense would have served Dalton much better.

The best description of our present provincial situation could be that we have a Mickey Mouse operation with Goofy running it."
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Well, Ontario's environment minister is the cartoonish Jim Jimmy J.J. James Jimbo Bradley, aka Mr.Kyodiot.

Bradley has not yet been asked by anyone to respond to McCarter's recent report, or to Gord Miller's recent report, about the blowback from Bradley's Liberal GreenFear fiasco!!

Secretive, slippery Ole Jimmy gets away with this regularly!

Just yesterday, the local Niagara paper in Jim Bradley's own riding of St.Catharines did a fine butt-kissing story fawning about Ontario's environment minister shilling Coca-cola rain barrels at some save-the-planet-from-doom GreenFear-mongering event; yet, reporter Fraser - when he had a chance - couldn't be bothered to ask Bradley about his costly failed Liberal GreenFear-instigated energy experiments!!

Was this reporter ordered by his bosses at the St.Catharines Standard not to question Liberal Jim Bradley?

As has become blatantly clear, Niagara's local press bends over backwards to accomodate their local Liberals. As we saw at yesterday's feel-good-Jimmy photo-op, there is no questioning Jim Bradley's failing Liberal policies and politics; just loyal stenography and blind GreenFear-biased acquiescence from the Mickey Mouse press.

Actually, it is McGuinty and Bradley (and their cheerleaders) who give Disney's good characters a bad name.
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Liberal Jim Bradley's toxic barrel of GreenFear

2012-01-19T01:03:00.000-05:00

Funniest thing, to see Ontario's environment minister Jim Bradley, freely propagandizing his GreenFear yet again in the pages of the St.Catharines Standard (in "Putting the fizz in water conservation", Jan.18, 2012) with "reporter" Don Fraser obligingly writing snippets of what Ole GreenFear Jimmy said, without asking any questions at all about Jimmy's pronouncements.

Yep: Ontario's environment minister Bradley came out to stand as a photo-op prop at some save-the-planet rain-barrel sale...

(...btw: Bradley was shilling old plastic Coca-cola syrup containers! Note how very interesting it was that Liberal environment minister Jim Bradley - Ontario's greatest hater and demonizer of carbon dioxide - didn't say one damn word about the gas contained in Coca Cola's carbonated soft drinks; you know, the gas which makes the "fizz", which the Standard cleverly (but ignorantly) referred to in their headline.
What gas is that, Jim??!
Why did McGuinty's environment minister Jim Bradley demure from slamming Coca Cola's toxic planet-murdering gasses?! 'Cause Bradley's shilling their discarded syrup holders as save-the-planet rainbarrels?!
And why didn't "reporter" Don Fraser bother to ask?! heh heh heh...)

...incoherently blabbing his greenshevism that "Even though we have a lot of water...as the years go on, the population increases and climate changes (so) we're going to want to conserve as much water as we can".

Really Jim?! What specifically do you mean? Or are we just all supposed to nod knowingly and bow our heads in silent deference to Ontario's great Kyodiot, Ole BS Bradley?

Naturally, the Standard's stenographer Good Ole Donny Fraser couldn't think of even one question to ask Good Ole Environmental Jimmy about Enviro-Jim's claims and general GreenFear-spinnery! Fawning: well done!!

Why didn't the Standard's Fraser - when he had the chance - actually ask Ole Jimmy why his Liberals are re-releasing old reports about the supposed "safety" of their GreenFear-instigated wind turbines??????????????????!

Looks like more Metcalfian wrongs have been righted by the ~~unofficial standing committee to reelect Jim Bradley~~ St.Catharines Standard!
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Dalton McGuinty: Liberal destroyer of Ontario

2012-01-18T00:34:00.000-05:00

Further to my previous related post...

Kelly McParland wrote in "McGuinty demonstrates Ontario's loser mentality" (National Post, Jan.17, 2012):

"How mortifying it has become to be from Ontario.
Once we were Canada’s cocky engine of growth and defender of federalism, bestriding the country and lecturing lesser provinces on their inadequacies. Now we send our premier to a gathering of the provinces, where he bleats about our inability to compete, desperation for handouts and need for guidance from Ottawa.
Dalton McGuinty went to Victoria to join the other premiers in a discussion about health care and other shared interests, and quickly joined Quebec Premier Jean Charest in decrying the raw deal Ontario gets from Ottawa. Quebec, of course, is Canada’s unchallenged champion in moaning about the lack of appreciation it’s been getting from Canada since approximately 13 September 1759, but only recently has Ontario taken to backing it up, shaking its first and grousing in tandem: “Yeah, you tell ‘em Jean! We’re getting robbed.”
Here’s what Mr. Charest had to say on Monday, while Mr. McGuinty almost injured himself from nodding so hard: “There are two realities in Canada. There are the economies of oil, gas and potash – and others.”
Get that? There’s the rich guys and the poor guys, and Ontario now reflexively counts itself among the poor guys. More than that, it has adopted the hang-dog attitude of the habitually embittered, which holds that the rich provinces — Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C. — only got that way because they happen to stumble on valuable energy resources within their borders. It’s not like they did anything to deserve their wealth; any idiot can get rich if they drive a stake into the ground and oil spurts up.
The have-not provinces are upset that Ottawa’s recently revealed funding plans for health care — a generous pledge to maintain increases at 6% a year until 2017, followed by a minimum annual increase of 3% — treats all provinces the same. The funds will be distributed per capita, which means Albertans will receive as much as Nova Scotians, as if all Canadians were equal. When it was rich, Ontario used to ignore the discrepancies in federal funding because it could afford to. Now that it has to share space with the rabble, it’s incensed at being short-changed.
Mr. McGuinty has made it clear he doesn’t feel the provinces are up to the task of efficiently and effectively operating the health care system without regular input from Ottawa, even though health care has long been a provincial mandate. “It’s unacceptable for the Prime Minister to say he’s effectively going to passively preside over the evolution of health care in Canada,” he told the other premiers.”We need the federal government to be an actual committed participant in this.” As in: “Wait a minute. We’re good at spending the money. But make smart decisions … are you crazy?”
If there was any doubt that the axis of influence in Canada has shifted to the West, Mr. McGuinty is here to dispel it. The western provinces are more comfortable with Ottawa’s funding formula, since they’re the fatcats now, and perhaps because they’ve always been more skeptical of Ottawa’s right to meddle in provincial affairs. Alberta has long chafed at being issued instructions by eastern politicians and their tame bureaucrats. From habit and necessity they’ve grown more confident in their ability to fend for themselves.
Ontario, unfortunately, has been going in the other direction. It now eagerly seeks subsidies and support payments from federal coffers, from taxpayer-funded regional development offices to debt-financed “stimulus” schemes. It fears that Ottawa’s plan to fund health on a per capita basis will translate into a long-term shift in the West’s favour, as people uproot from Ontario and head west in search of opportunity, taking their subventions and tax points with them.
Of course, if Ontario had better managed its economy, this might not have happened. But Mr. McGuinty happily spent and spent, borrowed and spent, then borrowed some more, during his first eight years as premier. Latest figures show the province missed falling into recession by the skin of its teeth, but is still struggling with high unemployment and low productivity, and an accumulated debt approaching $300 billion. Moaning about Alberta’s unfair advantage doesn’t cut it when the province has contributed so mightily to its own demise. Having brought the province to this unhappy position, Mr. McGuinty now shows he’s given up believing he’s capable of reversing it, and has joined the ranks of permanent supplicants. When the Montreal Canadiens’ Mike Cammalleri recently berated his team for thinking and acting like losers, they summarily shipped him off to Calgary. Too bad Ontario couldn’t go with him."
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Jack M. Mintz also had a great summary on this federal/provincial health-transfer issue in "What is the premiers' beef?", (National Post, Jan.18, 2012):

"...The provinces were unhappy with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty when he laid out the funding plan at a lunch a few weeks ago. Almost choking on their sandwiches, the Ministers of Finance came out swinging, arguing there should have been consultation before the federal announcement. But for what aim? More money? They already got that in spades, getting good support even though the federal government is once again challenged with deficits.
In the past, provinces were more than happy to take federal tax dollars that they could spend on programs that made their own voters happy. So the premiers this week continued to complain that they are not getting enough.
Some premiers, including Ontario’s Dalton McGuinty, who has his own financial headaches, are proposing an ill-defined “innovation fund” for health care. I’m not sure what innovation means in health care. The federal government already supports medical research and development through various programs so the notion is to help provinces introduce new management techniques. This is something they should already do to contain costs, rather than adding to the total with more federal dollars.
The most important principle being introduced by the federal funding formula is that the provinces, which cover 90% of health-care costs in Canada, should be accountable to their electorates for their constitutional responsibilities, especially health care. Unlike the Martin government, which tied funding to five specific waiting-time objectives, the Harper government is not attempting to micro-manage provincial decisions.
The Harper arrangement, providing a solid funding base and principles under the Canada Health Act, lets the provinces decide how best to spend the money that they receive. If the provinces botch their efforts, they can no longer blame the feds for a lack of funding, which is at historically high levels..."
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Just think back several years, when Ontario's premier Liberal liar McGuinty was laughing with derision at the west's "we want in" mantra. Now McGuinty, Jim Bradley, Kim Craitor, and the rest of Ontario's unaccountable Liberal douchebags, 'want in', too; by whining about the unfairness of it all, by demanding strings, by spinning the blame on the feds, by jealously blaming the west - by looking everywhere else but at their own hypocritical, miserable Made-In-McGuinty-Ontario have-not-status selves.
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Smitherman's Liberal stench still haunts Ontario

2012-01-16T04:14:00.000-05:00

Martin Regg Cohn in the Toronto Star, Jan.11, 2012, noted how that disastrous former Liberal hack George Smitherman's festering turds are still smelling throughout Ontario.
Earlier on it was David Caplan who found Smitherman's piles of eHealth shit sticking to him; then we had Smitherman's secretive multi-billion-dollar GreenFear-instigated Samsung deal; now it's Deb Matthews' turn to wipe Smitherman's droppings from her shoes, dealing with the air ambulance fiasco, which has Smitherman's stench all over it, though Furious Diaperman claims he had nothing to do with this dump:

"...Last month, infuriated by a series of Star articles, she [Matthews] sidelined the charismatic Chris Mazza from his perch as CEO — he of the egregious $1.4 million annual income.
This week, she swept aside the rest of that legacy by bouncing the interim ORNGE president and the entire board. The affiliated Ornge Global Solutions — whose questionable side deals were shrouded in secrecy — will be wound down.
Matthews is not covered in glory here, nor are the Liberals. The government ignored persistent opposition questioning for months, and it took sustained coverage in the Star to ratchet up the pressure.
But she has acted decisively against an organization that was midwifed by her government and is still heavily staffed by Liberal insiders. Mazza’s rise to power at ORNGE came courtesy of former health minister George Smitherman, who eagerly embraced his vision for a privatized air ambulance service. As with ORNGE, Smitherman’s fingerprints are also on eHealth — another notorious political albatross that Matthews inherited.
But in retirement, Smitherman refuses to wear any of this, blaming his successors for dropping the ball and insisting he would never have let things get out of hand. In an 800-word letter-to-the-editor published online last month, he lashed out at the Liberal government.
“That the ministry did not conduct proper oversight, and did not (as of two days ago) understand what was happening at ORNGE, is a commentary on my successors and the ministry,” he argued. “The lack of a defence of the Ontario Air Ambulance service shows a withering backbone that day in and day out becomes a more prominent feature of the current government.”...
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Smitherman will probably also deny that he had anything to do with the NHS's HIP; that it was all solely somehow Harris' fault... oh, and Debbie Sevenpifer's... but certainly neither he nor his LHIN had anything to do with it!!
And, so what about that continuing C.difficile outbreak in Niagara in 2011-12? Only 40 patients dead?! What's that got to do with Smitherman's secretive Liberals in 2008 quashing a C.difficile public inquiry, at a time when hundreds of C. diff patients died in Ontario?
Cohn could look into that, seeing as that Niagara's local Liberal friendly press couldn't be bothered to.
*
By Jan.19, 2012, the CBC and CTV were reporting about 4 alleged deaths in relation to ORNGE.
*

McGuinty tries to hide from his Liberal health-care obligations

2012-01-15T20:15:00.001-05:00

Lee Greenberg wrote in "Ontario Liberals back health ‘innovation fund’", Ottawa Citizen, Jan.15, 2012):

" An idea designed to supplement a 10-year, take-it-or-leave-it health funding deal tabled by the federal Conservatives last month will receive key backing by Premier Dalton McGuinty at this week’s meeting of premiers and territorial leaders.
McGuinty officials say the Ontario premier likes Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s idea to create a separate ‘innovation fund’ that would add more cash to the criticized deal while also targeting specific health reforms.
Ontario has said it would like to see additional funds available for seniors and home care. It is unclear whether McGuinty will be able to convince his colleagues to adopt similar goals.
Typically, the outcome of meetings between premiers is pre-ordained. The two-day meeting in Victoria, B.C. is a rare example to the contrary. “I think there’s a little more movement at this one,” said a senior Ontario official.
Ontario officials would like to see unified support behind Wall’s idea, leading to a stronger bargaining position with the federal government.
“The hope would be that we would put some meat on the bones,” the official said. “We need to define what it will cover and how much it will be worth. I think that’s one of the most interesting things that will come out of this (session).”
Ontario officials wanted a new federal health accord with six-per-cent annual hikes in each year of a 10-year deal. Instead, they got six per cent in the first three years and a promise to tie the increase to grwoth in the GDP thereafter.
McGuinty has said that proposal, presented by federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty as both a preliminary and final offer, is “less than ideal.”
The country’s largest province is seeking both more cash (the federal government funds less than one-quarter of all health spending in Ontario) and more unified goals, similar to the emphasis placed on wait times in the current health accord, which expires in 2014.
“There may an opportunity for us now to develop a consensus in terms of creating a transformation fund or an innovation fund the way we did with (former) prime minister (Paul) Martin,” McGuinty said on Friday. “Where the feds supply some additional funding and in return for that, we agree to pursue innovation in some distinctive areas. I’m hoping we can develop a consensus around that.”
McGuinty’s health minister, Deb Matthews, says Flaherty’s “bombshell” ultimatum will undo considerable national momentum on health reforms.
“They’re cutting back transfers to the provinces just as the demographic shift will be moving into full gear. It’s a very poorly thought-out proposal,” she said.
“I learn, and my officials learn, from practices in other provinces. When I go to a (meeting) with other health ministers I come back with a lot of good ideas from successes they’ve had in other provinces.”
Ironically, many provinces have in the past bucked at receiving funding with strings attached, says health reform expert Dr. Michael Rachlis. Now that the federal government has removed conditions on funding, some, like Ontario, are complaining.

Rachlis, who authored the book Prescription for Excellence: How Innovation is Saving Canada’s Health Care System, said much of the Victoria get-together is posturing on the part of the provinces. He says the reductions in federal health spending are considerably less than portrayed by the provinces.
“This is all about the spin, about who can we blame for health care problems in the future,” he said. “They’re setting up the feds to be the bogeyman for having problems with their budgets.”
Ontario received $10.2 billion in federal health funding in 2010-11. The total health and long-term care budget was $45 billion that year. (The province received $97 million that same year in targeted funding for wait time reductions.)
Any reductions in health funding would hit Ontario particularly hard. Health currently accounts for 46 per cent of total government spending and is growing at a disproportionate pace. Left unchecked, experts warn it will take up 80 per cent of the provincial budget by 2030.
The McGuinty government has telegraphed significant reforms beginning in the upcoming March budget.
At the same time, the government has come under severe criticism for some of its spending practices. It gave doctors raises of up to 40 per cent over three years, for example, in return for specific reforms, but has done “virtually no work” to learn whether the hundreds of millions in spending has resulted in better service, according to Auditor General Jim McCarter.
Rachlis credits the province for good work on reducing wait times, but says the areas of reform it now wants targeted could have been acted upon decades ago."
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Rachlis here has cut to the chase: Liberal hypocrites, such as McGuinty's lying scumbags in Ontario, are looking anywhere else but at themselves for the problems in their health-care monopoly-fiefdoms.

Dalton McGuinty, Jim Bradley, Kim Craitor, Deb Matthews: these Ontario Liberals are all about posturing and duplicity.

Vote-buying Liberals were all about smugly waving the Canadian flag alongside the myth of endless "free" medicare, spouting homilies to Tommy Douglas, while at the same time officially demonizing and denouncing ANY "innovations" whatsoever within their health monopoly status-quo.

One needs only to look, for example, at the track record - a thirty-plus year record - of Ontario Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's utterly smarmy adherence to failing health-care monopolism; to Bradley's kneejerk reactionary maintenance of the single-payer statist status-quo; to Bradley's disdain and dismissal of even the slightest innovations.

Bradley's Liberals had eight years of majority government during which to "innovate": now, all of a sudden, Bradley's Liberal hacks are spinning it that Harper has somehow failed them?!?!?! [pot: meet kettle...]

The "problem" with health care in Ontario isn't Harper or Conservatives; the problem is anti-choice, anti-innovation statists like Bradley and his lying hypocrite Liberals.

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Is monopoly health care legal?

2012-01-13T19:20:00.000-05:00

Further to the subject of my detailed earlier post, Liberal Healthcare Duplicity ...

and further to my previous Romanow-related post...

The Jan.10, 2012, National Post editorialized in "Roy Romanow's one-note-tune":

Give Roy Romanow credit for one thing: consistency. For the past decade, the former Saskatchewan premier and head of the 2002 Royal Commission on health care has sung the same tune: The government health monopoly must be preserved at any cost.
Literally, any cost.
Mr. Romanow’s solution to whatever ails medicare — soaring costs, faltering health outcomes, slow uptake of new technologies and medications — is always the same: more federal money. Time and again, Mr. Romanow has stated that the monopoly public-payer system envisioned by those who favour a dogmatic reading of the Canada Health Act is the ideal around which all health policy should be focused.
Next week, the provincial premiers will convene a health-care summit in Victoria. By his own choice, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will not be there. (And given the way these meetings all turn into anti-Ottawa whine-fests, we don’t blame him.) Mr. Romanow is appalled by the PM’s hands-off approach. In an interview with Postmedia News, Mr. Romanow insisted that if the PM does not take an aggressive leadership role in talks about the future of medicare, public health care will weaken, private care will spread and the very fabric of our nation will be imperilled.
Reality check: Canada’s Constitution gives the federal government no role in setting health-care policy. None. For half a century, Ottawa has bought a place at the health-care table only by shipping billions annually to the provinces in the form of health transfers, and then slapping conditions on how the money is spent. In other words, the entire structure of the Canada Health Act — which leftists identify as one of the great pillars of our nation — is essentially based on extortion.
Then-prime minister Paul Martin bought a decade of relative health-care peace in 2004 by agreeing to give the provinces nearly $5-billion more each year through 2014. But with that agreement nearing its end, the old intergovernmental theatrics were beginning to boil once again in late 2011. So last month, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told his provincial counterparts what Ottawa was prepared to pay them annually after the current funding agreement expires: From 2014 to 2017, Ottawa will continue to raise its annual contribution to provincial health budgets by 6%. Thereafter, yearly contributions will rise only by the rate of economic growth and the rise in inflation — currently about 4%. Yet in no year will the provinces receive a rise of less than 3%.
This seems eminently fair to us — generous, in fact — especially since the feds are demanding less say over provincial health policy in return for the extra money they will be shipping the provinces.
This approach is not something new. The reduction in federal demands in return for larger health transfers began in earnest under the Liberals, who averted their eyes from the expansion of private health clinics in the 2000s — especially in Montreal and Vancouver — despite their opposition to the very same type of clinics when they popped up in Alberta during the 1990s. When Mr. Martin signed his decade-long funding agreement with the premiers in 2004, the new money came with few new obligations for the provinces — something (the admirably non-partisan) Mr. Romanow complained about at the time.
But so what if the provinces don’t all offer identical services and delivery models? Let them devise blended public-private systems that work best for their residents or for their budgets — and let provincial governments live with the political consequences of those choices. How does that threaten “national unity”?
It is time for Canada — and particularly for Canadian politicians — to get beyond the notion of health care as national symbol. The universal, government-funded health monopoly has been faltering for decades. Since Mr. Martin increased the provinces’ health transfers, each province has increased the per capita amounts it spends on hospitals, clinics and health workers, but waiting lists have continued to grow. And international rating agencies, such as the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation continue to rank Canada in the middle of the pack or below in health outcomes, such as survival rates from cancer and heart disease. That’s why people are going to private health clinics, despite their limited range of services.
This is not an argument for an “American-style” system: It should be remembered that every single European country permits private health insurance for those seeking better or faster treatment — even as those nations also provide a baseline of universal government-provided care.
The frozen-in-amber, don’t-change-a-thing attitude of Mr. Romanow is a relic of the 1990s. Canadian health consumers have moved on. And so should he.

Burton H. Kellock responded to the above editorial in "Is our health-care unlawful" (National Post, Jan.12, 2012):

Re: Roy Romanow’s One-Note Tune, editorial, Jan. 10.
I was delighted to read these statements in your editorial: “Canada’s Constitution gives the federal government no role in setting health-care policy. None,” and “the entire structure of this Canada Health Act (the CHA) is essentially based on extortion.”
I assume that is a reference to the fact that the CHA is based on federal/provincial transfer payments, which section 4 of the CHA makes conditional upon the provinces enacting provincial legislation in accordance with “criteria” mandated by Ottawa. These transfers are based upon an entirely fictitious unlimited federal spending power which, to quote section 6.8(a) of Professor Peter Hogg’s text book, Constitutional Law of Canada, “is nowhere explicit in the Constitution Act, 1867.”
In other words, the Canada Health Act is utterly unlawful. I am writing a book which demonstrates that all of the attempts to find legal support from the constitutionality of these transfer payments are not only without any foundation but face insurmountable legal obstacles including the fact that the Fathers of Confederation considered and then rejected the suggestion that the federal government should have any such power.
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Looks like McGuinty's local Liberal health-care monopoly-pushers Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor will have some 'splainin' to do about their own despotic single-payer-health-care's systemic failure... ...well, that's only if the local Liberal-friendly 'Wendy Williscraft/Mike Metcalfe' orchestrated Niagara press ever bother to ask them, that is...
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40 C. difficile patients dead in continuing Niagara outbreak

2012-01-13T18:35:00.004-05:00

As was reported by Richard Hutton...
(under the headline "Second C.diff death at GNGH", published in the Jan.11, 2012 printed edition of Niagara This Week; the same story also appeared dated Jan.6, 2012 on NTW's web version)
...there have now been a total of two C. difficile deaths in Niagara's second outbreak, in addition to the 38 C.diff deaths which occurred in the first outbreak.

...[Note: as I had previouly written about here, the Dec.28, 2011 St.Catharines Standard had reported that 37 patients had died during the first outbreak; this differs from Niagara This Week's Jan.11, 2012 report that 38 had died during the first outbreak. What's that discrepancy all about?
Niagara's first C.difficile outbreak was declared on May 28, 2011, and lasted for 5 months, being declared over on Oct.24, 2011, with 37 (or 38?) dead.
Niagara's second C.diff outbreak was declared on Dec.8, 2011; on Dec.20, 2011, the first patient (of this second Niagara C.diff outbreak) died.]...

So: 40 Niagara patients are dead of a disease...
(which local MPP's Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor's Liberal government told us in 2008 not to worry about, that everything was under control, and, that no independent inquiry was needed into the already-then HUNDREDS of C. diff deaths occurring throughout Ontario)
... yet, what "investigative journalism" does the St.Catharines Standard decide to do?

Well, the Standard's self-appointed 'wrong-righters' are not investigating the political crime scene at the NHS, and the McGuinty Liberal's complicity by enforcing a no-patient-choice health-care monopoly while concurrently deceiving trapped-taxpayer-patients; nope, the Standard sent Doug Herod on an important mission to "investigate" how wide the seats are at the hockey rink.

Wow...! Excellent, Wendy... just grreaaat: 'Fer Gaia's sake, let's do everything we can not to ask Jimmy'N' Kimmy anything specific about anything specific! Can't have that!!'

Maybe Herod should measure the length of Ontario premier Liberal liar Dalton Pinocchio's nose.
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Jim Bradley's Liberals are 'transforming' - into what??

2012-01-13T03:31:00.000-05:00

Christina Blizzard wrote in "Moody's puts Ontario on credit watch" (Toronto Sun, Dec.15, 2011):

"This province has been put on credit watch by Moody’s — one of the biggest credit rating agencies in the world.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

As far back as 2008, I can remember asking Duncan why he wasn’t freezing civil service salaries, given the downturn in the economy.

He didn’t.

It’s tempting to say he spent like a drunken sailor, but that’s an insult to sailors.

In eight years, the Liberals have doubled the debt — from $110 to $200 billion.

Spending on government programs has soared more than 70% as they’ve added costly vote-getting frills like all-day kindergarten.

They’ve squandered cash for votes — such as the estimated $1 billion they’ll spend cancelling the unpopular gas-fired power plant in Mississauga. They’ve given massive pay hikes to Liberal-friendly unions.

Now Moody’s has made it official. Worse, they warn our Double A credit rating could be at risk if Duncan doesn’t get the debt under control.

In a press release, analyst Jennifer Wong says the change ,“reflects Moody’s assessment of risks surrounding the province’s ability to meet its medium term fiscal targets given the recent slowdown in provincial economic growth and the resulting risks to the province’s ability to stabilize the recent accumulation in debt.

“The negative outlook on the province reflects the softening economic outlook, Ontario’s growing debt burden, and the extended

timeframe to achieving a balanced budget.”

“While Ontario retains sufficient fiscal flexibility inherent in the institutional framework to adjust its fiscal outcomes, thereby improving its financial position, difficult policy decisions are required.”

And she warned that if the province doesn’t stabilize the debt in the next budget, our good credit rating could be threatened.

“We believe that increased fiscal discipline will be required to sustain debt affordability,” said Wong.

Duncan was on the defensive at a hastily called press conference Thursday night.

“We do have to make some very difficult choices in the coming years to ensure that we stay on the track back to balance,” he told reporters.

“There are a number of challenging decisions ahead. We are going to have to be relentless in our pursuit of transformation to ensure that we make sure that we are focusing our resources on those pivotal areas that are going to be important to job growth in the future.”

He wouldn’t elaborate on just which parts of government will be “transformed,” but insisted it will be a “transformational agenda as opposed to straight across the board cuts.”

Hmm. Methinks I see a pattern emerging here. If the federal Tories cut, it’s “slash and burn.” When provincial Liberals cut, it’s “transformational.”

Tory MPP Monte McNaughton blamed the ratings watch on Liberal incompetence.

“We have a record deficit in Ontario. We have a government that’s doubled the debt since they’ve taken office. Ontario is in bad fiscal shape and we have a larger deficit per capita than in all the other provinces combined.

“It’s just complete incompetence on the part of Premier Dalton McGuinty and Dwight Duncan,” McNaughton said.

The credit watch makes it tough for Duncan to argue with federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty when he talks about the need to cut transfers.

And it all sets the stage for economist Don Drummond’s highly anticipated report on where the province should cut to get the deficit and debt under control. This report justifies unpopular cuts that are in the works.

How does the ad go? Fiscal prudence. Respect for our children and our grandchildren’s financial future – priceless.

There are some things money can’t buy.

For everything else, Dwight Duncan thinks you can put it on the province’s maxed out Mastercard.
Not any more."
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When will Wendy Metcalfe's Wrong-Righters at Sun Media's (that's for, you, Kinsella) Liberal-friendly St.Catharines Standard ever dare bother to ask their secretive Grit buddy MPP Jim 'Slash and Burn' Bradley all about his sudden "transformational" Liberal hypocrisy?!!
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The Kyodiot's Suzuki sings back-up harmonies for Liberal GreenFear-monger Jim Bradley

2012-01-11T23:51:00.000-05:00

Looks like Ontario Environment Minister Jim Bradley's symbiont David Suzuki took another smelly green dump in the St.Catharines Standard on Jan.11, 2012, spreading more GreenFear about Bradley's aborted Kyoto love child.

BTW, when you read Maria Babbage's Jan.6, 2012 CP report which mentions Jim Bradley belatedly whining to the feds about Kyoto (Bradley and Suzuki are singing from the same hymn book), why is it that Babbage did not ask secretive Jim Bradley to reveal his specific scientific evidence of AGW, which Bradley has apparently had in his possession for some twenty years, but has never publicly revealed ?!

Babbage, in her report, did not actually interview secretive Ole Liberal Jim Bradley!! All Babbage apparently did was react to some letter which Ole Jimmy sent to Federal Environment minister Kent and the Globe and Mail.

We weren't told in the story: did Babbage try to contact Jim Bradley? Or - as usually is the case with the Liberal-friendly stenographer/reporters in Niagara - did Babbage just give up, and simply rehash whatever boilerplate partisan tripe Bradley had written, instead of obtaining an actual interview with him?

Reporter Babbage would have done all Canadians a great public service, had she managed to get onto the public record, once and for all, the specific scientific evidence which twenty years ago had convinced Ontario's chief Liberal GreenFear-spreader Jim Bradley to push his non-sensical political green bolshevism.

How is it, that even da clueless Kyodiot Liberal 'da proof is da proof is da proof Chretien' had no proof of AGW; yet, somehow - over the course of two decades - no-one has bothered to ask Ole Jimmy?!
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Liberal MPP admits McGuinty's health-care delivery is all backwards

2012-01-11T20:05:00.001-05:00

Further to Kim Craitor's supposedly new-found penchant for cost-cutting and private member's bills, when will we see his Liberal proposals to sell their LCBO liquor monopoly?!

Funny also, how Craitor is only now telling us (which he did not tell us before the Oct.2011 election) that:

"We're spending a lot of money on health care, but we're not measuring whether patients are being cared for properly," said Craitor. "So, we're spending more and more, but what are we getting? When it comes to the delivery of health care, we've kind of done it backwards. We need to start putting patients at the front end. Patient care has to come first.""

...yet, no local press has bothered to question Craitor about his sweeping statements!

How can it be that over the course of 8 YEARS, in a majority-Liberal-controlled health monopoly, no Liberal has bothered to measure what their monopoly is spending our health-care taxes on?!

So now Craitor has revealed to us that, when his Liberals raised their health care tax and cut previous coverage, they, in effect, didn't know what they were doing!

Now Craitor tells Ontarians that McGuinty's despotic Liberal health-care-monopoly-pushers have been doing it all backwards for eight years!!!

Whaaaaaat?!

Where are Niagara's grand press barons, the Liberal-friendly amalgam of 'Wendy Williscraft/Mike Metcalfe', when it comes time to assessing the Liberal's ideological proclivity to enforce a backwards, unaccountable health-monopoly onto patients, while at the same time falsely pretending that they are putting patients first?!

Craitor should be interviewed and scrutinized by the national press for his statements. We cannot rely on Niagara's inbred Liberal-licking press for any non-status-quo analysis of Liberal health care policy and its corresponding hypocrisy.

Why hasn't Liberal Deb Matthews responded to Liberal Kim Craitor's statements?

Funny also, that McGuinty's Liberals just chopped $66-million from the research budget that serves universities and hospitals, yet, the St.Catharines Standard hasn't yet shown us a cartoon of Liberals Jim Bradley, Dalton McGuinty, and Brad Duguid, dressed in their red ermine robes, with toilet paper hanging out of their asses, being assaulted for setting fire to hospitals and schools. Don't hear the St.Catharines Standard now wailing about how Jim Bradley is against health care research, because... well... Jimmy's a Liberal, and therefore, can do no wrong!!

Just imagine the Standard's (...and Jim Bradley's!) smug, unending, outrage if a conservative had done this!!
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Will McGuinty's Liberals retain their own comfy salary increases and pensions?

2012-01-10T19:34:00.000-05:00

CTV reported in "McGuinty vows to protect core services as cuts loom" (Jan.5, 2012):
"Health and education will remain funding priorities as Ontario makes deep cuts to trim a $16-billion deficit, but doctors, teachers and everyone on the public payroll has to do their bit to help, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Thursday.
"We're all going to have a role to play if we're gong to be as effective as we need to be in terms of strengthening this economy and ensuring that we're getting ever more value for the public dollars that are being invested," McGuinty said at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Economist Don Drummond has said he will make some difficult and unpopular recommendations in his review of the province's public services, including spending cuts as deep as 30 per cent in some ministries.
However, McGuinty suggested the Liberal government will not follow through on all of the several hundred recommendations Drummond is expected to make later this month.
"Mr. Drummond's responsibility of course is to advise and ours is to decide, so there's a distinction, first of all, to be drawn between his responsibility and our responsibility in government," said McGuinty.
"We will ask the legislature to help us by giving the best advice on those (recommendations), and we also want to give Ontarians an opportunity to comment as well."
The deep spending cuts expected in the spring budget will not have the same impact in schools and hospitals as the cuts implemented by former Conservative premier Mike Harris in the 1990s, said McGuinty.
"We will do everything we can to protect our health care, protect our education and put in place the kind of measures that can support a stronger and growing economy."
The New Democrats were concerned that a squabble over the makeup of legislative committees in the minority government meant there were no pre-budget hearings going on, work they said should be done now in conjunction with Drummond's report.
"I'm pretty concerned about the dysfunction around here, and the fact we're not having those pre-budget conversations early on," NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said in an interview.
"There's no doubt priorities have to be set, and people can rely on New Democrats to fight for things like our health-care system, and making sure that everyday folks who are struggling don't bear the brunt of this upcoming budget."
The Progressive Conservatives said they have no confidence that McGuinty will make the spending cuts that Drummond is expected to recommend in his report.
"We don't have any inclination to believe that Dalton McGuinty and his government are going to make the tough decisions necessary to get our fiscal situation back in line," said Opposition critic Rob Leone.
McGuinty left the door open Thursday to delaying a planned cut in the province's corporate tax rate, from 11.5 to 10 per cent, which is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2013.
When asked if he would delay the business tax cut so companies "share the pain" of the looming spending cuts, McGuinty said only that he didn't want to speculate on what would be in the spring budget to be introduced in March. The premier then dismissed suggestions that he was backing off the scheduled tax cut.
"I appreciate your interpretation of my words, but I'll just use the words," McGuinty told reporters.
"We want to be fair when it comes to finding the best way possible to addressing our economic challenge."
The government must "hit the pause button" on the corporate tax cuts, said Horwath.
"They can't complain that the cupboard's bare and then continue with their corporate tax giveaways," she said.
"As long as you keep letting corporate taxes hit rock bottom and forgo those revenues, then you're not taking a balanced approach."
McGuinty was at the university to announce people could apply online starting Thursday for the government's 30 per cent tuition rebates for college and university students from families with incomes under $160,000 a year.
The Tories said Ontario cannot afford the $420-million annual cost of tuition cuts.
*
So now Dalton and Jim Bradley will soon be cutting, cutting, cutting, when before the election they were spending spending spending... what hypocrites.
What will McGuinty's own Liberal MPP's sacrifice? How about retroactively removing all their salary increases since 2003, putting millions back into Ontario's treasury, as well as cutting the MPP's pensions?
Maybe Liberal Jim Bradley would like to proudly show Ontarians the size of his pension, if only Mike Metcalfe/Wendy Williscraft would nicely ask.
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Jim Bradley spreads more post-mortem Kyoto GreenFear

2012-01-09T21:27:00.001-05:00

Further to my previous post about McGuinty's Liberal MPP Kim Craitor's Bizarro world, now Liberal MPP Jim Bradley, Ontario's Mr. Kyodiot, has finally come out and revealed his statist tendencies. Maria Babbage wrote:

"Ontario is warning the federal Conservatives not to retreat from plans to create national regulations governing coal-fired power plants.
Such a "short-sighted" move would be another blow to Canada's international reputation when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and spark more serious consequences at home, Ontario Environment Minister Jim Bradley said Friday.
"It is not in the national interest to continue with coal-burning policies that fail to contribute to the global effort to combat climate change," Bradley wrote in a letter to federal Environment Minister Peter Kent.
"Nor is it in the national interest to continue with coal-burning policies that fail to protect the health of Canadians, especially young Canadians."
Bradley was reacting to a Globe and Mail report that Ottawa is offering the provinces a way to avoid new regulations that would force companies to clean up or shut down their old coal-fired plants, or require new plants to be low-emission designs.
Citing provincial and industry sources, the newspaper reported that Kent and Prime Minister Stephen Harper have privately indicated that they are willing to provide flexibility on how new power-plant emissions rules are implemented.
According to the report, the government is willing to cede regulation of power-sector emissions to the provinces, as long as they have rules in place that would achieve equivalent reductions in emissions set under 1999's Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA).
Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Kent, said the provincial equivalency component doesn't represent a shift in the government's position.
Any provincial provisions must either meet or exceed the level of environmental protection mandated under the act, he said.
It was all spelled out in draft regulations that were published online last August for public comment, said Sweet.
A review of the draft rules is still underway and the Ontario government was involved in the process as recently as the week prior to Christmas, Sweet added. No final decisions have been made.
"This is not new," he said. "These are draft regulations published five months ago and they're part of the CEPA."
But Bradley argues the regulation of coal emissions shouldn't be left in the hands of the provinces.
"It's always good to have national, consistent regulations that affect the entire country, as opposed to a hodgepodge of regulations under the jurisdiction of provincial governments," he said.
Ontario still burns coal, but Bradley said his government has made great strides in phasing it out and plans to shut down all coal-fired plants by 2014.
The lack of national regulations will send a signal to the rest of the world that Canada "is not interested" in reducing emissions after withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol — the world's only binding climate treaty, he added.
Kent announced in mid-December that Canada was ditching the treaty, just two hours after returning from marathon United Nations climate talks in South Africa.
Environmental groups have panned the move and both the United Nations and China have asked the Tories to reconsider their decision.
Canada signed Kyoto in the late 1990s, but neither the current Conservative government nor their Liberal predecessors met targets."
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Jim James Jimmy J.J. "great strides" Bradley is so full of hot air, it's unbearable that anyone should have to take this Liberal FLICKING greenshevik clown seriously. Once again, Jimmy is recycling his decade-old 'we're closing the coal fired generating plants' deceptions.
We've seen McGuinty positioning his lying Ontario Liberals by demanding that Ottawa force Ontario to take care of health care ('we want strings! we want strings!'); now Good Ole Statist Slimebag Bradley similarly wants Ottawa to force environmental regulations onto Ontario (much the way Jimmy and Smitherman forced their authoritarian GreenFear fiasco onto Ontarians, much in the way Ole Jimmy believes that the same should be done on a planetary basis...).
Funny that Bradley and McGuinty aren't playing their proud trailblazer roles anymore, and are now seeking someone else to blame for their failed, costly social engineering pipedreams.
As I outlined in an earlier post, compare what McGuinty's Liberals are saying now, demanding that Ottawa place them in bondage, to what McGuinty was saying in 2006, that Ontario "will not abide in any effort on the part of the national government to unduly impose greenhouse gas emission reductions on the province of Ontario at the expense of our auto sector." (Vancouver Province, Oct.10, 2006) Yeah: read that again, just so you know what Ontario's premier Liberal liar McGuinty is - or isn't - saying at any given point in time...
Maybe someone from Niagara's local Liberal-friendly press - maybe a 'Wendy Williscraft' or a 'Mike Metcalfe' ...ya just can't tell them apart, anymore - should actually ask Good Ole Jim Bradley about that; about how Jimmy's Liberal hypocrites are flip-flopping on a host of issues.

{...maybe McGuinty's Liberals should be forced out of governance altogether, then, by stripping Ontario of all its constitutional powers, thereby rendering McGuinty's Liberal gang of duplicitous posers irrelevant and unnecessary...! Is that whatcha want, McGinny?!}
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Kim Craitor's phony Rebirth: a Bizarro Liberal world where 'Through The Looking Glass' meets 'Brave New World'

2012-01-09T21:17:00.000-05:00

Ray Spiteri wrote:

"Kim Craitor is a pretty optimistic guy.

So it's no surprise when the Niagara Falls Liberal MPP says he's looking forward to 2012 and helping to make life better for his constituents and all Ontarians.
But the next 12 months will be different for Craitor. It will be his first full year in a minority parliament. He, and his government, are used to having the majority of power since 2003, when Craitor, and the Liberals, were elected to government. Now, he and his Liberal colleagues have to share.
No problem, he said.
"I am quite excited about working with a minority government. So far, I've heard words like 'partnership,' more than ever before. And you know my philosophy: 'People come first.'"
Craitor said along with working with Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats at Queen's Park, two of his other priorities in 2012 will be to help get the province's financial situation "in order," and to continue improving the lines of communication between the public and the Niagara Health System.
"With a minority government, the structure of parliament has changed," said Craitor. "Private member's bills, which I am a big supporter of, will now play a more significant role in parliament. The other two parties will actually have the majority, so bills will be decided by all three parties, not just one."
He said the government will have to make some "tough decisions" if it wants to start shedding its $16-billion deficit.
"All programs have to be out there. We'll have to make tough decisions on what we really need versus the nice things to do, but that the taxpayers can't afford anymore. You can't spend what you don't have."
Craitor said since the government appointed Kevin Smith supervisor of the embattled Niagara Health System in August, patient and public confidence in the local hospital corporation has started to improve.
"The lines of communication at the NHS have opened. Patient complaints are immediately being responded to. The NHS is ensuring people in the media are getting the information they need in a timely fashion. I know in my conversations with Kevin Smith, everything is on the table. He is taking a fresh look at things. It's encouraging."

As for the health-care model across Ontario, Craitor is not as optimistic.

The Ontario government runs a $124-billion a year operation with $47 billion going to health and long-term care.
"Financially, it's at a breaking point," said Craitor.
He pointed to a recent report issued by Ontario Auditor General Jim McCarter, which, among other things, indicated a significant discrepancy between the money being pumped into health care, including salaries, and the care patients are receiving.
"We're spending a lot of money on health care, but we're not measuring whether patients are being cared for properly," said Craitor. "So, we're spending more and more, but what are we getting? When it comes to the delivery of health care, we've kind of done it backwards. We need to start putting patients at the front end. Patient care has to come first.""
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Amazing, eh, to hear all this faux-sincerity from a Liberal! It is Craitor's sincerity which is literally "at a breaking point", with all his new-found talk about making "tough decisions" on what "we really need versus the nice things to do, but that the taxpayers can't afford anymore. You can't spend what you don't have."
Yes, yes: this is a McGuinty-Liberal [not "harris"!!!!!] saying this; mind you, a Liberal saying it, conveniently after an election!
"We're spending a lot of money on health care, but we're not measuring whether patients are being cared for properly," said Craitor. "So, we're spending more and more, but what are we getting? When it comes to the delivery of health care, we've kind of done it backwards. We need to start putting patients at the front end. Patient care has to come first."
Welcome to the Bizarro land of Craitorian Liberal politics; Kim Craitor has bravely come Through The Looking Glass into some new kind of contradictory world, the world of Ontario minority government.
Obviously, Craitor has no problem blowing with the wind; or, more likely, pretending to be.
His is the Liberal party which supposedly 'cares so much for the patient' (puke) that they ordered Don Drummond NOT to discuss private healthcare!!
Craitor - in his supposedly new-found 'collaborative, let's all work together now, though we didn't do that when we were the majority for 8 years' epiphany's supposedly-new parallel-universe - still, ironically, doesn't recognize a private-parallel health-care system!
So, who believes the horseshit that drops out of Craitor's mouth anymore?
It is ideology, not "people", which 'comes first' to Kim Craitor. The two-faced, slimy Liberal duplicity inherent in Craitor's words today is shockingly patent.
Patient confidence in the NHS is improving? Really, Kimmy?! Your Liberal-enforced health-monopoly has just had another C. diff patient die in Niagara, following hundreds of other C. difficile patient deaths throughout Ontario during your Liberal reign. Feh: no matter... What about public confidence in your Liberal LHIN's; how's that little Liberal scam going, Kimmy?! Or your Liberal GreenFear scammery?
It's as if the greaseball political shapeshifter Kim Craitor, and his Liberal party, have never had anything to do with Ontario politics for the last eight years... it's as if Orwell's 1984 is McGuinty's 2012... as if what's happening in today's brave new Ontario has nothing to do with McGuinty's past eight years of (mis)governance... how many fingers can you see now; Jim Bradley is my friend; you are getting sleeeeepy... ...
What an utter pile of Liberal guile.
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McGuinty is sporting a legacy of Liberal debt

2012-01-03T06:17:00.000-05:00

Further to my previous post about Ontario's premier Liberal liar Dalton McGuinty's little secret agent mission in 2009...

...we now have this subsequent brewing fiasco as reported in the Jan.2, 2012 Toronto Sun:

" The numbers are shocking since it’s taxpayers plugged in to receive the shock.

Premier Dalton McGuinty has been put on notice that 2015 Pan Am Games costs are skyrocketing and accountability is urgently needed.

“The magnitude of the total taxpayers’ exposure should wake up those involved to the fact that major TO2015 restructuring must be done,” wrote Paul Henderson, the very man who lobbied for the Pan Am games to help future athletes.

Now he says “costs will, when all taxpayers’ exposures and student taxes are totalled, be at least $4 billion.”

That’s a lot of cash for a two-week party few care about.

Henderson wrote “in these difficult times, consultants, and others looking for jobs, will tell the various political arenas what they want to hear not what they should be clearly told.”

He’s certainly telling them how he feels it is.

And if he’s correct, the games, which includes $1-billion for a Portland’s athletes village, are already $1.6-billion over budget. The original cost was pegged at $1.4-billion.

If accurate, Toronto should cut its losses now and walk away from this obscene waste of money that benefits hardly anybody.

“Ontario, along with the federal and municipal governments, have given TO2015 a mandate to deliver on time and on budget,” assured Lise Jolicoeur, on behalf of the premier. “TO2015 have submitted a business plan which is currently under careful review.”

Hope it’s not the people governments put in charge of spending hall of fame members e-health or the G8/G20.

Mayor Rob Ford has told me he won’t allow “a gun” being put to Torontonians heads when push comes to shove. It’s refreshing because we all know when these unnecessary construction projects are at risk of coming in late, politicians will throw around our money to make the deadline.

Meanwhile, Henderson offers savings that “would approach $750 million and possibly $1 billion.”

These include saving $300-million by running the PanAm and PanPara Games simultaneously, from July 31-Aug. 16, and use more existing facilities which do not require major installations. He said using Varsity Stadium for athletics would save on building a new $75-million stadium at York University, employ more temporary stands and make stadiums closer to the Athletes Village.

He also suggests to “review over-the-top facilities” including the “two major white elephants” in the “swimming pools and velodrome..."
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I'm sure Wendy Metcalfe's laughable gang of "Wrong-Righters" at the St.Catharines Standard will be asking their Liberal buddy Jim Bradley all about that, eh........?! After all: what's any of this got to do with Ole Liberal Jimmy?! There're no wrongs needing righting here!! hahahaha
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Canada's Kyodiot Dion blathers on..

2011-12-31T04:01:00.000-05:00

Canada's AGW stooge Stephane Bumbledore Dion, The Disciple of David Suzuki, is still spouting his shifty GreenFear climate socialism. How quaint. Too bad the St.Catharines Standard couldn't be bothered asking their local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley (umm: he's only Ontario's Environment Minister, btw...) about the year passed, and the year in store, and how the world will be destroyed if we don't obey the fearsome climatalarmist commands of Bumbledore!
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Heavy snow proves global-warming, except when lack of snow proves climate-change: ya got that?!

2011-12-29T01:44:00.001-05:00

Remember, just back in Feb.2010, how the GreenFear TM crowd of global-warming climatalarmists were chortling about this during the Olympics? Funny, then, how they're not now talking about this! Lack of snow in certain regions of B.C. was a highpoint for the smug Greensheviks; to them, an obvious ominous sign of climate catastrophe which could only be stopped by Jim Bradley-style climat-olitical TM socialist solutions. But, now, with heavy snow and avalanche warnings, the GreenFear silence is deafening.

Niagara's Top News Story of 2011: how the St.Catharines Standard aided and abetted Jim Bradley during Niagara's Liberal Summer of C.diff Death

2011-12-28T21:49:00.000-05:00

Further to my earlier post:

It's officially a pathetic tragi-comedy: Health care is the top story of the year, the "Newsmaker of the Year", as the Dec.28, 2011 St.Catharines Standard proclaimed; yet of course, local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley, whose government created the LHIN's which forced the HIP cuts onto the NHS, was not even mentioned.

What else is new from Niagara's oldest Bradley-butt-wiping rag of record?

Yep: the front-page story in the Dec.28, 2011 Standard (written by "Standard Staff", under the headline "Niagara Health System dominated headlines mostly for wrong reasons") noted that "37 patients with hospital-associated C.difficile infections died" in Niagara...

(...in Bradley's Liberal-run health monopoly; you know, the one Good Ole Jimmy [suddenly] has nothing to do with...!)

...yet ...uh... because Jim Bradley has nothing to with it, the Standard, therefore (...it all makes sense, really...) has never carried an interview with their own secretive local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley about these deaths!!

See: it does makes sense: had a Conservative been the MPP during Niagara's Summer of C.diff Death, the Standard would have been working overtime devoting reams of editions dedicated to the story, scrutinizing its part-and-parcel politics...

(...btw: it wasn't even clear in this Standard story what exactly they meant about the NHS being in the headlines (...mostly their and NTW's headlines...) for the "wrong reasons"; the mysterious "Standard staff" writers did not say what the "right reasons" would have been. The headline just doesn't make sense in context to their story. Over 3 dozen C. diff patients died in Niagara - were we supposed to pretend that this WASN'T newsworthy??)

It's just that easy for Jim Bradley to vanish.

And it's just that easy for the St.Catharines Standard to act as Jim Bradley's enablers; protectively, sensitively, carefully and strategically looking the other way when it comes to analyzing Precious Ole Jim.

Score another wrong-not-righted by Wendy Metcalfe's unofficial Niagara Liberal Propaganda Unit.
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...and, no, Bolichowski's year-end-story "Bradley sees brighter times ahead", tucked into the Dec.31, 2011 Standard, was not an interview, but simply stenography sans analysis - typical Standard regurgitated stuff, almost election-style friendly fodder, an 'atta-boy' gift of enablement from the Standard to Jimmy. Whatever Ole Brighter Times Jimmy spouted, the Standard gobbled it up.

Bolichowski didn't bother asking Jim Bradley how many C. diff deaths could have been prevented in Niagara in 2011, had Bradley's secretive lying Liberals not quashed a public C. difficile inquiry in 2008!

Gosh: Jeff didn't even bother to go off-script and ask Jim Bradley (Ontario's Alberta-hatin' climatalarmist E~~nvironment Ministe~~r ...oops, pardon... Kyodiot) whether he's a Chiquita or a Dole banana man!

See the Mobil ad near the Jimmy-fawning story?! Ironic placement, eh, considering how Jimmy hates oil! ...and doctors ...and truth...
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Canada's Cagey Climatologist David Phillips teases about climate change

2011-12-28T21:11:00.000-05:00

Loved that nice, sustained pile of GreenFear propaganda which was peddled at around 7:18 pm EST, Dec.28, 2011, on Buffalo's 970 AM, on the Gwen Ifill hosted Newshour. Climate change - man made - was not even challenged by those NPR "reporters". This is the kind of climate fear propaganda which Jim Bradley needs to hear more of in Canada!

Speaking of Good Ole Jimmy - once again, the St.Catharines Standard carried another of those always-funny Cagey Climatologist David 'maybe/maybe not/I dunno' Phillips' weather stories [where some reporter is sent in to decipher what Phillips says, and then try to spin some climate-change innuendo out of it], and once again, Jim Bradley (aka Ontario's Environment Minister!!) was not mentioned.

Ray Spiteri tried that same dance with Phillips a coupla days ago in the Standard; now, in the Dec.28, 2011 Standard, Don Fraser was sent in to do his best to somehow prove the fearsome existence of man-made climate change by cobbling together a string of David 'it's a crapshoot of fits and fickles' Phillips' scat-like climatological observations.

Yet, dammit - as Spiteri had found out - Cagey Climatologist Phillips came so close with his climate-fear innuendo, but couldn't actually give Fraser the smoking climate money shot, which would prove once and for all the existence of man-made climate change (or 'global-warming', or 'unprecedented-extreme-weather-events', or whatever the GreenFear industry's euphemistic-terminology-du jour for climate-socialism is).

Phillips' teased and toyed with Fraser and led Fraser to the loquacious brink of climactic climatic release, but, dammit - pulled out just shy of actually saying that the Planet is in Peril, and that Jim Bradley is right, and that the Earth will be flooded as it dries up, and that the polar bears will drown as they're frying...

No, Fraser didn't get satisfaction from Canada's Cunningly Cagey Climatologist David Phillips. Fraser and his frustrated readers were left blueballed and breathless, having come so close to proving their socialist doomsday climate nirvana.

We don't even know whether Fraser had even bothered to come right out and ask Phillips outright for the definitive proof of man-made climate change; at least Spiteri made it look as if he had begged. But, although both Fraser and Spiteri dealt with the Cagey Climatolgist, they also both completely ignored the One Man In All Of Liberal Ontario Who Knows All About Climate: Good Ole Jim Jimmy J.J. James Bradley!!

As with Spiteri, and countless previous lemmings who were sent to uphold the climate fear tradition, Fraser also did not dare bother to approach Climate Change GreenFear Chief Jim Bradley for the definitive proof of AGW. Strangely, Fraser didn't bother to provide readers with any reaction from Jim Bradley to Phillips' comments!

Perhaps the Standard's boss Wendy Metcalfe saw no wrongs here which needed righting, and ordered reporters such as Fraser not to contact Ontario's Environment Minister Jim Bradley, when her newspaper is writing stories desperately trying to peddle climate fear.

Or, maybe these "reporters" are protecting Jim Bradley on their own, and Wendy doesn't mind.
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Health-care status-quo is working just fine for secretive Liberal Jim Bradley!

2011-12-28T11:52:00.002-05:00

Further to this previous post...

Fred G. Peet wrote in "Health-care status quo not working" (National Post, Dec.28, 2011):

"Re: In Defence Of Public Health Care, letter to the editor, Dec. 23.
In defending the current one-payer medical system in Canada, Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, talks about medical care for the poor. However, she avoids mentioning the person who has carefully put money aside for a medical rainy day only to find that they are unable to spend it on their own care when that rainy day arrives, thanks to the Canada Health Act. We thus have the absurd situation that a person can spend their own money on health care for their dog or cat but not for themselves.
Second, she claims that choice means fend for yourself. She avoids raising the possibility that a government monopoly may not be the most efficient way of delivering health care, even within a singlepayer system.
Lastly, she refers to medical public policy being based on research and evidence. She ignores the public policy that reduced the number of student seats in medical schools in the mid-1990s, leading to today's current doctor shortage.
It is time to fix the Canadian medical system, in spite of the views of Ms. Silas, and that fixing can begin with an overhaul of the Canada Health Act."
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The health monopoly's workin' fine, if ya ask Ontario Liberal MPP Jim Bradley [...well, ya gotta find Secretive Ole Jimmy first, though...]
Why, 37 patients died during two C.difficile outbreaks in Bradley's own region, yet Ole Jim had nothin' to say about it!!
And better yet, no-one from the press even bothered to ask Jimmy about it!!
How about that, eh?!!
The health-care status-quo sure is working for Jim... bigtime... with blindfolds on...
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Looks like Ontario's Environment Minister Jim Bradley has nothing to do with the environment!

2011-12-27T17:43:00.003-05:00

Interesting article by Greg Van Moorsel in the Dec.27, 2011 St.Catharines Standard, "Ontario's dirt hides behind oilsands', which points out that McGuinty's Liberals should be thankful that Alberta's oil industry is supporting Ontario economically, while at the same time also taking the spotlight away from McGuinty-run Ontario's own abysmal environmental record (as Ontario's environment commissioner Gord Miller had recently reported)

Despite adopting a GreenFear-fallacy within his own story (peddling unsubstantiated links to "climate-warming greenhouse gases") Van Moorsel nevertheless makes some good points about how Alberta gets vilified, yet Ontario gets a free environmental pass.

The astounding thing about this report - coming as it does from Sun Media's own national comment editor, and appearing in Wendy Metcalfe's notoriously faux-'wrong-righting' St.Catharines Standard - is that - once again! - there was no analysis of, no comments from, no reactions from, no mention whatsoever about St.Catharines Liberal MPP Jim James J.J. Bradley - who is Ontario's Environment Minister!!!

There was nothing at all in this story from or about Jim Bradley - a TWO-TIME ONTARIO LIBERAL environment minister, no less!!!!

Why was Good Ole Jim Bradley, the Liberal Kyodiot who practically gave birth to Kyoto in Ontario a decade ago, ever-so-conveniently missing in this report?!

Don't Wendy Metcalfe or Greg Van Moorsel know who Jim Bradley is, or what he's (not) done??! hahaha.

And Kinsella calls Sun Media 'right-wing'!! hahaha
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The St.Catharines Standard peddles more GreenFear

2011-12-26T18:46:00.000-05:00

An impressive bit of GreenFear-mongering appeared on pg.A9 of the Dec.26, 2011 St.Catharines Standard, in Thane Burnett's ominously titled story "Could 2012 be The end?".

Of course, Wendy Metcalfe's wrong righters at the Standard printed Burnett's column without any scrutiny regarding the accompanying photo's outrageous claims.

One great GreenFear doozy was the scary photo of the Earth in some kind of fearsome brown tinge, with this classic smelly 'piece of Justin Trudeau' caption: "Between global warming and rapid change in climate, we are seeing a rapid alteration of our biosphere alongside climatic catastrophes".

Now, that's some Good Ole GreenFear-mongering for you: scared yet, that Armageddon's gonna getcha?!

Read that ridiculous St.Catharines Standard bullsh!t once more, just for fun!! It's almost as if Wendy's Standard is trying to pull off a parody here, and that the fear mongering hyperbolic captions below the photos are actually a spoof, not supposed to be real!!!

It's funny, because Wendy Metcalfe's St.Catharines Standard editors never really provide any evidence to justify the GreenFear which they have just published. Just saying it is proof in itself: after all, AGW is 'all settled', so, how can anyone question it?!!!

If one reads Burnett's story, it's not at all clear who actually makes this claim: Burnett's column doesn't actually make the claim which accompanies the story's photo. Burnett writes of subject Larry Hall mentioning "climate change", but nowhere in the story does Burnett actually write that Hall himself believes it; Burnett reports Hall only saying that others - those who have been GreenFeared into buying his disaster shelters - do; and, Burnett shows us that Hall is more than happy to profit from their fears.

Burnett, in the body of his story, doesn't actually peddle the doomsday scenario, yet, he doesn't question it, either: so it is not clear who, then, actually made the claims in the photo captions which accompany the Standard's story! Did QMI agency writer Burnett also choose the photos and write the captions, or were these inserted and editorialized by others?

Will Standard boss Metcalfe bother to explain why the photo-caption claims which came alongside the story, were not actually part of the story? Jim Bradley, Stephane Dion, and David Suzuki salute you, Wendy.

Wendy could have assigned some other reporter - maybe Spiteri - to examine the claims attached to Burnett's story, or the Standard's manipulative editorialization of Burnett's story, by referring to Ontario's own Blessed Environment Minister Jim Bradley, for final confirmation that the planet is indeed in 'catastrophic biospherical' meltdown, as Wendy Metcalfe's Standard has actually reported.

Bradley, Ontario's Environmental Sage, could have easily - once and for all - proven that 'the Planet is in Peril', and, that the Standard is not peddling a smelly 'piece of Justin Trudeau', but is printing true scientific facts: Jim Bradley, after all, knows all about the... ahem... reality of global warming.

Gawrsh: all Wendy - or Thane Burnett, or Spiteri - had to do, was call Good Ole Liberal MPP Jim Bradley, who is always available (...hahaha...) and is always eager (...bwaahaha...) to publicly show the definitive scientific evidence, which only he knows, which proves anthropogenic global warming and climate change!! Why wasn't Environment Minister Bradley consulted?!

Although 2011 'should have been the end' of the St.Catharines Standard's GreenFear peddling, it's apparent that the end of Kyoto has not brought about an end to the Standard's penchant for climate deception.
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Jim Bradley's non-reaction to auditor McCarter's report

2011-12-26T02:42:00.002-05:00

Have the St.Catharines Standard's Wendy Metcalfe or Niagara This Week's Mike Williscraft bothered - yet - to ask local Niagara Liberal MPP Jim Bradley for his comments about this CBC story, where the "Opposition suggests Ontario's Liberal government may be using a community grant program as a slush fund to reward friends and supporters, just like it did with grants for multicultural organizations four years ago."
Scandal... what scandal? Questionable Trillium grants? How dare ya ask secretive Ole Jim Bradley about Liberal accountability? Righting-wrongs... huh? Why should anyone demand that Liberal Jim Bradley provide his detailed local response to the auditor's report?! What nerve...
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Who is responsible for Tommy Douglas' negligence?

2011-12-26T01:02:00.000-05:00

Further to this previous post...
Sidney Braun wrote in "National spirit not part of health care" (National Post, Dec.24, 2011):

Re: In Defence Of Public Health Care, letter to the editor, Dec. 23. Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, fails to recognize her own "evidence-empty" (and very tired) arguments and alludes to facts and reasons, but lists none. Funding for health care is already divided between the public, insurance and private/corporate purse. Health care isn't about national spirit - it is about delivering quality care to those who need it. The problem is not in the funding but rather in the delivery, which is due to lack of accountability. Publicly funded and privately delivered health care is what we need to really ensure that quality care in a timely fashion is indeed provided for those who need it. If publicly funded and privately delivered care costs less, why is that not the Canadian way?
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Canada's reactionary political enforcers of status-quo health-care, and their sycophantic self-appointed higher-moral-standard-bearing symbionts, have a very comfortable monopoly they insist on protecting and propagating.
Isn't the argument now really about private-parallel, ie, privately-funded/privately delivered , NOT about publicly-funded/-privately-delivered ?!
The latter is essentially what we already have now.
This is about going beyond monopolist, state-controlled, single-payer health-care; it is about introducing privately-funded/privately delivered health care, in other words: non-state-funded health care, parallel with the state's public (but non-monopoly) care.
But it's not surprising that the status-quo-enforcing monopolists are still agitating even against relatively innocuous improvements within the publicly-funded/privately-delivered category.
Let's recall that reactionary Liberals even demonized their own health minister Pierre Pettigrew for daring to suggest that provinces in Canada should be allowed to mildly experiment with health care in the publicly-funded/privately-delivered realm!! (see here, pg.17-20) And the same reactionary leftists also demonized John Tory for essentially saying the same thing.
Neither Silas, nor Liberal monopolists such as Deb Matthews, nor Jim Bradley, nor Kim Craitor, have yet explained who is accountable for the deaths of dozens of C. diff victims in Niagara's McGuinty-run-public-health-monopoly this year.
No one's accountable when the state's monopolists are in charge.
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see also here
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Merry Christmas, 2011

2011-12-25T17:29:00.003-05:00

Tommy Douglas responsible for C.diff patient deaths

2011-12-24T02:24:00.001-05:00

Lorne Gunter wrote in "Leaving Canada's health care myths behind" (National Post, Dec.21, 2011):

I was reading a fascinating piece on Canadians’ newfound national confidence in Maclean’s on Monday when a story moved on the newswires reporting that six of 10 provinces are unhappy with federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s new health-care transfer plans. It may be a bit of a stretch, but I think the two are related.
The contrast between the two shows how ordinary Canadians have escaped the insularity and smugness that have driven our elites’ image of Canada for at least four decades. No longer do we find it necessary to define ourselves through comparison with other countries, notably the United States, or by constantly reassuring ourselves that being a “soft power” makes us morally and intellectually superior.
Nicholas Kohler’s Maclean’s article claims Canadians are among the most optimistic people in the world about the future of their nation; 86% of us believe Canada is the greatest country in the world, 87% that it is the best place in the world in which to raise kids.
In a way, that’s not surprising. Majorities in most countries like to think their nation is best. But what makes it remarkable is how our sanguinity stacks up against that of other countries’ residents. Just 61% of Americans think the United States is the best place to bring up children, while 50% of Brits believe Canada is a better place for families than the U.K.
And while just 42% us of believe Canada’s best days lie in the future, rather than the past, that is considerably higher than the 36% of Americans who believe the same. Fifty-eight percent of the British are convinced their glory days are gone.
This new pride has been emerging for a while, but I think it broke through in a big way at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010. Athletically, we nearly won the thing outright. But it was culturally where we truly shone. The performers at the opening and closing ceremonies, and at various venues, were all world-class and all Canadian. But they didn’t make a big deal about being Canadian. They let their talent do the boasting.
The street parties were hip, the organization second-to-none. And we, as hosts, were neither apologetic about our success nor sneering about how this showed our way of doing things is ethically purer. We simply welcomed the world in, offered guests as good a party as they would find anywhere, then joined them in the fun.
That’s the new Canadian spirit.
Now contrast that with the way six of 10 provincial finance ministers reacted to Mr. Flaherty’s plan to solidify federal health-care transfers through 2024. The federal Finance Minister announced Monday that the federal government would continue to increase its annual health-care transfers to the provinces by 6% a year until 2017. By that year, Ottawa will be shipping the provinces about $38-billion annually to help pay for doctors, nurses, hospitals and medical equipment. Thereafter, the increases would be tied to economic growth (currently about 4%), but will never fall below 3%, no matter how bad the economy gets.
Admittedly, Ottawa sprang this “deal” on provincial governments without warning. The current 10-year health funding arrangement runs out in 2014 and the provinces had expected to have until then to make their case for more money. Mr. Flaherty and the Harper government were eager to prevent a lot of drama and political grandstanding, so they short-circuited the process.
Manitoba NDP Finance Minister Stan Struthers whined: “This is not fair, it is un-Canadian.” His Ontario counterpart, Dwight Duncan, mewled that Ottawa’s plan “destabilizes the federation” and puts at risk “access to quality health care, from sea to sea to sea, in French and English.” (Funny. I thought the point of the health-care system was to make Canadians well, not to promote bilingualism.)
Clearly many of our politicians haven’t caught on to the new confidence and independence most ordinary Canadians are feeling. Having emerged from the shadow of the United States, we no longer feel the need to define ourselves as a nation by claiming our health care is morally superior to theirs.
Provincial politicians, though, seem mired in the notion that our single-payer system is sacred. The only solution they can imagine for its shortcomings is more money from Ottawa, when what is really needed is for them to move on. Take the cash Mr. Flaherty is offering, experiment with new delivery models, permit Canadians greater health care choice and get with the new national spirit.
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In response to Gunter's above story, Linda Silas wrote "In defense of public health care" (Dec.23, 2011, National Post):

Re: Leaving Canada's Health-Care Myths Behind, Lorne Gunter, Dec. 21.
Lorne Gunter accuses provincial politicians of wanting to keep the single-payer health-care system for no particular reason. I am so tired of evidence-empty arguments calling for more corporate involvement in health care. Let's debate the merits of a single-payer public provider versus a parallel for-profit, based on fact and reason.
The national spirit that created medicare is one of a caring society, so that the sick and the poor do not have to worry that they will not get timely quality care because their health-care provider is working at the rich person's hospital.
Choice means fend for yourself and since when has that been our national spirit or even an option for those who want to see public policy based on research and evidence?
*

We're tired of an unaccountable Tommy Douglas recklessly staggering around Canada, killing patients at will, while forcing them into Silas's single-payer socialist nirvana. Silas isn't talking of 'public' health care, as the headline suggests, she is propagandizing about monopoly health care. Leftists like to use the term 'public', as it doesn't sound so authoritarian, though, of course, it is, seeing as it is being used as an euphemism for no-choice.
The public should be entitled to the health care of their choice.
Silas trots out the ole 'national spirit' canard (another example of Keith Martin's noted head-in-the-sand tactic) and can find no 'corporate reason' to show why Tommy Douglas' zombie killed some 40 C.diff patients in Niagara, despite all the phony promises, all the deceptive research, all the false assurances, all the incompetent unaccountability, in Niagara's 'poor people's' monopoly hospitals, run by monopolists Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor.
It's as if patients must first shove the Constitution and the Canada Health Act in front of the faces of these despotic agents of Tommy Douglas, for them to see that they have no right to force a statist health monopoly upon the public.
Choice does mean choice - but Silas has no idea of the concept: Silas' status-quo is despotism; is the demonization of choice; is the absence of choice; is forced dependence on the state, mandated by the state.
That's exactly what statist Liberals Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor want in Niagara, and exactly why - when their monopolist health charade goes haywire, and when they no can no longer slough off the blame on "harris" boogeymen, or on some fictitious 'privatization', or on some dreaded "Americanization" red-herring - they simply vanish with their rhetoric while Tommy's dead continue to pile up in Niagara.
Yeh... that's the ticket: Ole Tommy did it.
*
see also here; here
*

Say whaaat? Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips can't prove "climate change"?

2011-12-22T18:41:00.000-05:00

Looks as if Ray Spiteri (in the Dec.22, 2011 St.Catharines Standard story "White Christmas? Dream on") engaged Environment Canada's senior climatologist David Phillips to determine whether a not-yet-snowy December in Niagara is proof of "climate change".

Spiteri reported Phillips' reply: ""Climate Change? Could be" said Phillips "We don't know what it is.""

Pardon?!
"We don't know" ???
Yikes... that's probably not the answer which the St.Catharines Standard was really hoping for.
[...see some of my favourite Cagey Climatologist David Phillips stories here; here; here; here !]

Spiteri didn't bother to ask Phillips about the 'toxicity to The Planet' of the heat-trapping water-vapour cloud which Niagara Falls has been constantly releasing for some 12,000 years! [Whaaaaat? Whazzzat 'bout? Whaddaya mean..?]

Why didn't Spiteri or his Standard editors also provide readers with Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's response to Phillips' "we don't know" answer?

Did Spiteri even bother to ask Niagara's Greatest GreenFear-monger, Jim 'Kyodiot' Bradley, who, by the way, is Ontario's Environment Minister?! You'd think that Bradley would have a completely opposite point of view than Phillips on the matter!

Jim Bradley and his entire Liberal party believe that the causes of, the existence of, and the political solutions to, the issue of "climate change" HAVE ALL BEEN SETTLED!!! Spiteri surely knows about the Liberals' GreenFear peddling, doesn't he?!

Bradley personally claims that man made climate change/global warming is real, and, obviously, Bradley's been blabbing that way for at least twenty years. Of course, Bradley has never provided any specific scientific basis for his claims, going back to at least 1991. The St.Catharines Standard, meanwhile, has gladly never asked. [see: Liberal MPP Jim Bradley shoots crap]

Bradley most certainly claims to believe that he knows what climate change is - though strangely, a secretive Jim Bradley has never publicly revealed his supporting 'scientific basis' for his climate change beliefs - which he clearly must have already had twenty years ago!

Reporter Ray Spiteri had the opportune time to ask Jim Bradley all about his Liberal global warming AGW "evidence"; all about ClimateGate (one and two); all about the Mann-made hockey stick climate hoax; all about the dismantling in Durban of Bradley's GreenFear weapon Kyoto, and why Bradley (McGuinty's supposed environment minister) did nothing about it; and... oh, yeah... about Phillips' 'we don't know' about climate change comment.

Conveniently, the wrong-righters at the St.Catharines Standard only brought us half the story.

There are a lot of other GreenFear-mongers in Niagara - why didn't Spiteri talk to any of them, either, so they could, once and for all, prove that Phillips is just 'full of steamy Justin Trudeau'?
*

Liberal Dwight Duncan's tiresome health-accord fear-mongering

2011-12-22T00:54:00.001-05:00

Further to my previous post...

Debt-ridden Liberal Dwight Duncan hasn't been able to spin the health-transfer accord the way McGuinty's greasy Liberals had wanted him to. Here are some of the perspectives on monopolist-pusher Duncan's irresponsible recent foot-stamping and deceptive fear-mongering:

On Dec.20, 2011 Sun Media's Mark Dunn reported in "Ont., Que. need to fix health system or feel the pain: Expert":

"Ontario and Quebec are the most vocal critics of a new health funding formula because their own budgets are hemorrhaging red ink, says an expert on finances from the western home of medicare.
"It's much easier to blame the federal government for their problems than to actually sit down and address their own situation, their own spending," says Janice MacKinnon, a former finance minister in Roy Romanow's NDP government.
Now a University of Saskatchewan fiscal policy professor, MacKinnon says Canada's two largest provinces are failing at righting their economies.
She described Monday's no-strings deal as "very fair" and "reasonable" compared to the present transfer agreement that calls for annual transfers of 6% - a figure Finance Minister Jim Flaherty says is unsustainable.
Ontario and Quebec finance ministers hyperventilated over the deal that gives the provinces five years to fix their systems before the new funding arrangement kicks in - one that ties funding to GDP growth and never slips below 3%.
Both provinces are broke and the economic outlook is grim - hence the provinces wagging a finger on one hand and stretching out the other hand for more cash.
MacKinnon says the 2004 original deal was flawed from the outset because the biggest chunk went to salaries, with some of it used to lower wait times, but not to the broader issue of fixing the health system.
With an aging population and all that comes with that demographic, MacKinnon says provinces are out of touch with health needs and service delivery.
She points to the cost of MRIs, hip and knee replacements and other ailments that develop with age. A Saskatchewan study suggested millions in savings if some of those procedures were conducted outside hospitals.
"You really have to get serious about changing your system to make it more affordable," she said".
*
Note that the same above story was also carried in the Dec.21, 2011 St.Catharines Standard, buried back on page B6, but did not include the last four paragraphs!! Why - was there something MacKinnon said which would upset secretive Niagara health monopoly pusher Jim Bradley? Like that Bradley's and Kim Craitor's monopolist Liberals "are out of touch with health needs and service delivery"??

MacKinnon - and she's an NDP eer! - is saying that Flaherty's deal was very fair and reasonable - yet, Jim Bradley's and Kim Craitor's Liberal status-quo-pushing, health-care-monopoly-enforcing statists are already moaning and whining about it. As is now usually the case, the St.Catharines Standard hasn't yet bothered to interview their local MPP, Jim Bradley, about the new health accord!

Janice MacKinnon, writing in the National Post back on July 14, 2004 noted:
“One of thegreatest threats to medicare is posed by those who cling tenaciously to thestatus-quo and claim they are defending Tommy Douglas’s vision of medicare bydoing so. Too often in politics, what we cherish most we inadvertently destroyby believing that protecting something means freezing it in time, when in factprotecting it may require dramatic change”. (see here, pg. 30)

Ignorant Ontario Liberals such as Jim Bradley and former health minister George Smitherman ended up being the poster-boys 'threatening and destroying the vision of medicare'; a prescient MacKinnon may well have been writing about them in 2004, considering what these Liberals ended up doing in Ontario from 2004 on! Their Liberal majority government was all about clinging tenaciously to some faded, failing, monopolist, anti-patient-choice status-quo mythology of the untouchable Saint Tommy Douglas. McGuinty's Liberals were status-quo-enforcing reactionary thugs, and Good Ole Nice Guy Jim Bradley was one of the leading proponents. Duncan is in denial about how his Liberals have destroyed health care in Ontario.

*

On Dec.20, 2011, the CBC reported on Dwight Doofus Duncan's deceptive Liberal fear-mongering claim that "health cuts will hurt hospitals"; to which here were some of the reader's replies:

EdmundBurke wrote:

EVER INCREASING HEALTH CARE COSTS UNSTAINABLE
Linking health care increases to the GDP is a pragmatic, bold, fiscally responsible alteration in the right direction; however, an even more contemplative small-c fiscally responsible conservative modification that would be attentive to the $580 billion debt and the $30 billion deficit would be to implement it immediately. Implementing it in 2017/18 will make it more difficult to eliminate the deficit, and would save billions in interest payments.
It's nauseating to listen to the fiscally unaccountable extremist on the far-left moronically screaming about limiting the increments in health care spending. Socialist provincial functionaries like Ontario's Duncan, who refuses to make any significant cuts to eliminate his $16 billion deficit must analyze their own socialistic-inspired, financially moronic budgets that are spending their provinces into insolvency.
A genuine small-c fiscal conservative would begin the process to re-write the Canada Health Act that currently places control of our top-down, government-rationed system in hands central planning, incompetent bureaucrats.
Government must welcome inclusion by the more efficient private sector, or permit the provinces to compete by experimenting to uncover cost savings. Health care cost $135 billion a year that are filtered through layers of expensive and wasteful bureaucracy before any of it ever gets to the actual health-care providers. Since 1998 federal health transfers to the provinces increased at an average annual rate of over 10%. Total health spending accounted for 11.4 per cent of Canada's GDP in 2009 compared with an average of 9.5 per cent across OECD countries. Canada's health spending per person was valued at $4,363 U.S., with the OECD average being $3,223 U.S. Rather than criminalize the purchase of private health care; the government must permit a parallel system similar to that allowed in every other Western democracy.
*

Mr. Right 2U wrote:

This guy is too much!
He has the audacity to refer to Mike Harris, and the cuts he had to made to villify the feds.
So let's review his train of thought.
Mike Harris had the federal transfer payments cut by a liberal government.
That was Harris' fault.
Dalton McGuinty is having the federal rates cut-in five years from now, and he instantly points back to Mike Harris.
Am I missing something here?
You can't blame the person who faced immediate cuts for what someone else deprived him of. (Paul Martin)
But you can blame the feds for cuts (in 5 years from now) for what the premier must budget for come 5 years from now. (Stephen Harper).
The double talk coming from politicians these days is indicative of the way the view the voter.
Hint: We must all be forgetful idiots in thier eyes.
Hey Duncan! You can fool some of the people some of the time. But quit trying to fool everyone all the time.
You hopefully, will be unemployed when the reduced inflationary payments come along. If for some bizarre reason you are still there, I hope you take back all you have said about Mike Harris and eat a little humble pie.
You have hidden from reality for years. Paying off workers to get yourself elected. Now you face what others have faced, and you cry like a little baby.
Maybe, just maybe, if you had read the winds and could see past your rose-coloured glasses, you would have known and accepted the facts of constantly increasing costs to satisfy a blaoted and over-paid labour force was not in the best interest of Ontario. Rather, the best interest of your party.
What a patriot you must be!
I can hardly wiat for your next twisted take on reality. It's like watching the muppet show, only not funny.
*

Paul Young wrote:

Duncan has no clue about healthcare and its funding and/or what is wrong with healthcare?

Let's look at some facts about healthcare:

1. LHIN - why was this Agency created? Well, because McGuinty wanted take responsibiliites from MHO and created LHIN. So why did McGuinty not fixed the root causes at MHO. I am all for ensuring moneys get to healthcare, but i am not for duplicate departments that can be eliminated by streamlining business process and/or creating better compliance/governance models at MHO.

2. eHealth is a good idea, but poorly implemented. I am all for technology, especially if it helps with managing healthcare costs. However, eHealth has been poorly managed with lack of cost controls and oversight.

3. Drug costs - the government needs to work with drug companies, especially on drug costs.

4. CEO Hospitals/administration need to have the salaries/benefits reviewed and look at ways to better align it to performance. Performance metrics should included wait times, bed utilization, etc.

5. Where is the drummond report in his discussion? Drummond has already stated that there are waste in govt

McGuinty and Duncan only know one thing that is tax and spend. McGuinty and Duncan managed government by throwing money at the symptoms, not the causes. This is how mcguinty has dealt with governing Ontario since 2003. I am tired of blaming Harris, especially when Ontario receives higher transfer payments and equalization payments, which Harris never received. It is easy to blame Harris, but what did McGuinty do once in office how about the health premium tax. So, McGuinty needs to take a hard look at himself because he has been a failure to Ontario. There is a reason McGuinty has the name quick hits!
*

slightly right wrote:

waaaaaah wahhhhhhhh. Cripes Duncan the slow down in spending will not happen for 5 years and your blaming the Feds now! Three percent is plenty and you know it. Just because you are in the hole spending like a mad man on "green jobs" and other make work programs do not blame lack of coin for a provincial responsibility on anyone but you and your budgets!

Every Canadian can see through you and your other have not Provinces complaints. You do not appreciate the Billions you get plus the built in increases for what there are. Its what Canada can afford to give you for Increased payments year after year.

Yes -- you are a have not right now---- you put your hand out more than you chip in. Yes it will change but wow guy its a increase not a reduction/cut back!
*

savant1 wrote:

Duncan and McGuinty don't know how to spend wisely.
With a provincial debt that they have doubled to $220 billion and which is growing by $59 million each day I would have thought the Ontario liberals would want to do more than rob Canadian taxpayers, inflate energy costs with a "green" initiative and avoid government economies.
Remember:

1) the billion dollar scandal at eHealth continues. 109 staff still receiving $100 K salaries.
2) the provincial budget deficit adds $16.7 billion annually to the current $302 billion debt..
3) the 'golden parachute' severance contracts for disgraced public service executives such as Eleanor Clitheroe continue.
4) the Samsung Korea windmills guarantee exhorbitant feed-in tarriffs for electricity
5) granting of war measure powers to police in Toronto during the G20 resulted in civil liberties breaches.
6) additional schemes have increased the "cost of government" 77 % in 7 years.
7) enabling Stewardship Ontario to attach an eco-fee on dangerous products like aspirin, cement, fertilizers..
8) not enforcing spending controls at the OLG until breeches were uncovered by the ombudsman.
9) granting a 14% salary increase to Ontario MPP's in the middle of a recession.
10) creation of 13 LHINs to employ failed liberal politicians. None have treated a patient yet but each CEO is paid handsomely.
*

DBT1979 wrote:

What hurts hospitals is that they refuse to take my money. I'm not saying get rid of the social safety net or not provide care to people who can't afford it. I'm suggesting that if I want to spend my hard earned money on healthcare, I should be able to.

If you want to spend your money on a second car or a 500,000 house in Toronto, you can choose that option for your family.
*

Readers in the Dec.22, 2011 National Post also responded with views on Dwight Duncan's Doofusry:

Tony Beckett wrote:

Re: New Health Rule Angers Premiers, Dec. 20.
On my way to the fitness facility in the hotel where the ministers of Finance were meeting on Monday, I just missed the interviews and palavers. As an ex-provincial budget bureaucrat who tried to limit increases to health budgets in Ontario and British Columbia, I was pleased with the approach proposed by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Phasing out the existing 6% annual increases after several years and capping future increases to GDP increases with a floor of 3%, is very generous.
I was appalled by the whinging of provincial finance ministers, even if they were perhaps only crocodile tears, given that healthcare funding has become governments' largest expenditures. I hope that the disproportionate future increases will remain affordable to taxpayers, given demographic and economic factors.
As part of governments' needs to review expenditures, they should pay particular attention to future capital and equipment costs, fiscal year-end splurges, regional health authority empire-building, the pay and benefits of health-care workers, overmedication of seniors and creative billing by some physicians to medical service plans.
Health-care costs can and must be controlled, and incentives provided to those who show the way.

and

Jeff Spooner wrote:

After Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced that the federal government would no longer be a bottomless pit when it came to health-care funding, Ontario's Finance Minister Dwight Duncan gave the most over-the-top reaction. If you believe his rant, the Conservatives were destroying federal and provincial relations and that they didn't care about the health of all Canadians.
The reality, of course, is that without the impetus of a control on federal transfers, many of the provinces would continue to drag their heels on any meaningful innovation in how health care is delivered. Canadians now will have the opportunity over the next five years to see which provinces are making an effort to move forward and improve health care for their citizens, and which provinces continue to whine. My bet is that Ontario will be in the latter group.
*

Yes: Liberals Dalton McGuinty, Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor were and still are in that latter group, whose failing and arrogant idea was to stifle health care development by thuggish statist fiat and by ideological monopoly-forcing demagoguery.
Let's hope, though, that Ontario's Liberal goons are gone before five years.
***
See also here
***

Despite the above reactions to the fed's transfer proposals, it was revealing (and disgusting) how Niagara This Week's editor Mike Williscraft came up with fresh McGuinty-bootlickery in his Dec.24, 2011 'piece of Justin Trudeau' column "A glimpse into Santa's Christmas mailbag".

Williscraft's column should have more accurately been titled "A glimpse into the making of Liberal-friendly propaganda".

With this shallow column, Williscraft has clearly already begun crafting next year's narrative propaganda of 'poor ole Liberals are victims of federal health cuts', which his favoured Liberal party obviously wants Williscraft to peddle.

So - like Dwight Duncan - that's what Williscraft is also trying to do.

Williscraft DIDN'T actually bother to ascertain what NHS supervisor Kevin Smith's REAL thoughts were; the slick Williscraft propagandized HIS OWN Liberal-friendly narrative, and falsely attributed it to the NHS's Smith, all disguised, of course, as a "Christmas wish story".

'Why, it's fake, ya see; it ain't real' Williscraft will say. But that's the beauty of Williscraft's propaganda.

Williscraft didn't have the nuts to actually get Kevin Smith to say the words which pamphleteer Williscraft shoved into Smith's mouth: that would then have become an actual worthy story; what Williscraft did here was turn McGuinty's real Liberal health care fiasco into a propagandist's joke.

Williscraft didn't actually bother contacting Smith, nor Jim Bradley, nor Kim Craitor, nor Dalton McGuinty, nor Dwight Duncan, nor Deb Matthews, nor any of the Liberal-appointed LHIN lackeys for their REAL comments and reaction to the REAL health transfer story.

Williscraft -strangely hahaha!- couldn't even find any imaginary 'lump of coal' commentary to shove into any real Liberal's mouth, within his fake-wish column, either..!

Williscraft made light of Niagara's health issues using his faux-wish column to further what must be his pet agenda (to propagandize for McGuinty and protect his incompetent Liberals from blowback to their killer C. diff fiasco, by falsely involving Smith, as if his comments were funny, or reflective) thereby dumping McGuinty's eight-year-long Liberal culpability in Niagara's health mess conveniently onto the federal government.

This facile approach of the Liberal-licking Niagara media is becoming patently obvious; eventually Niagara This Week's Williscraft and the St.Catharines Standard's Wendy Metcalfe will have to ferret out Jim Bradley's Liberals, and to actually begin holding them responsible for their constitutional health care responsibilities.
*

...and in this corner, Ole Dwight 'The Deficit' Duncan!

2011-12-21T13:19:00.003-05:00

This article, "New health rule angers premiers" (National Post, Dec.20, 2011), noted some reactions by delegates at the federal-provincial health-transfer-payment talks:

"This is not fair, it is unCanadian," said Manitoba Finance Minister Stan Struthers. "It is not so much creating wealth as it redistributing wealth, and we are redistributing wealth from some of provinces who have a very limited capacity, to some of the richest provinces."
Mr. Struthers called the move "a slap in the face" by Ottawa.

Ahh, yes: the good ole I'll slap ya in the face cuz you're "Un-Canadian" canard!

Wow: this is the same kind of jingoistic deceptive-nationalistic-rhetoric, the same ole kind of crap which MPP Good Ole Jim Bradley and his smug McGuintyite Liberals used to regularly spew in Ontario! Can the smug socialist rhetoric of "Slippery Slope"; of "Americanization"; of "Two-tier"; of "Hidden Agenda"; of "Ole Tommy Douglas is spinning in his grave", be far behind?!?

Status-quo Struthers, the 'Great Re-Distributor', is exactly the kind of obstructive reactionary which former Liberal MP Keith Martin wrote of, who stick their head in the sand while prosletyzing at the crumbling altar of Tommy Douglas.

But socialist Struthers is not alone: Ontario's status-quo-monopolist Liberals - naturally - also were whining:

Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, the most outspoken critic of the proposals so far, said the new formula will cost his province $400-million in health funding. "It means less access to quality health care, from sea to sea to sea, in French and English, in Ontario, Quebec and all of these provinces," he said.
"This, in my view, destabilizes the federation to some extent and will make it still more difficult for us to provide the basic services we're required to and at the same time get back to balanced [budgets]."
He took particular issue with how Mr. Flaherty "put the document in front of us and said, 'This is how it is going to be.' And that's just no way to do business."

Now, talk about a hypocritical 'piece of Justin Trudeau'! Duncan reeks of it!! Duncan, McGuinty, and Bradley shoved a lot of things onto Ontarians, simply telling us 'that's how it's going to be'!!What Liberal hypocrites!

Duncan and his greaseball Liberals FORCED a new health tax onto Ontarians! Duncan and his Liberals DE-LISTED previously-covered health services! They forced the LHIN's onto Ontario! They forced a Green Energy fiasco onto Ontario! They forced their secret G-20 law onto Torontonians! For hypocrite Liberals such as whiny Ole Dunco, that was their way of 'doing business'!

Duncan and his negligent Liberals have "de-stabilized" healthcare in Niagara, forcing cuts and HIP plans onto the NHS, to the point where we've had nearly 40 patients killed this year in two C.diff outbreaks - with no explanation from Duncan 's Liberals why this had happened, seeing as the Liberals had been geting ALL their promised billions already, under the current accord, since 2004.

As the Dec.21, 2011 National Post pointed out:

"In 2004, when these same provinces agreed to the current funding formula with then-prime minister Paul Martin, it was on the understanding that they would use the 10-year accord to find ways to make health-care funding sustainable. That didn't happen, and now they want another decade to delay making the kind of tough choices needed to sustain medicare, while someone else picks up the tab. But all reasonable people know that the status quo can't last forever."

Yet, Duncan's duplicitous Liberals smugly forced their failing ideological status-quo health monopoly onto Ontarians, spinning yarns that it would last forever.
*
see reaction from Kelly McParland; from Christine Blizzard
*

The St.Catharines Standard's green landfill

2011-12-21T13:18:00.000-05:00

Looking at the St.Catharines Standard's Dec.20, 2011 story "Dreaming of a green Christmas", one might be forgiven for at first thinking that this was a typical VanDongen/Mayer piece of GreenTeamsterism; but no, it's the same kind of green pandering propaganda, now purveyed by Don Fraser, enabled by photos from Bob Tymczyszyn.
The "season is rife with things given" which "might end up in landfills", we are ominously informed by Fraser, who uses St.Catharines City Hall employee Melissa Hellwig as a conduit exemplifying How The Planet Can (Should/Must) Be Saved, and, also includes a good, quick dose of anti-import and buy-local disjointed rhetoric from Niagara's pseudo-environment minister Jane Hanlon.
Of course, in that typical green-biased way pioneered by the GreenTeamsters, Fraser didn't concern himself with actually challenging anything his subjects said - this was simply a fine fluffy piece of light-green propaganda, brought to us by the Metcalfian wrong-righters at the Standard. It was pointless diversionary enviro-babble to fill column inches; in other words, it was itself green landfill.
Thankfully, Wendy Metcalfe's Standard didn't bother sending Fraser and Tymczyszyn to stake out their secretive local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley, to obtain a real story detailing Bradley's comments on Niagara's killler C.difficile horror unfolding (again) in Bradley's Liberal-run health monopoly!
Wow......
*

The NHS should be treated as a crime scene

2011-12-21T00:05:00.000-05:00

Further to my previous post ...

...the Dec.20, 2011 St.Catharines Standard reported that a C.difficile patient had died Dec.18 at GNGH, the hospital in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Oh, and a Norovirus outbreak was declared in Niagara as well, at the Welland hospital.
The story by Brett Clarkson, of course, did not mention any comments or reaction from the two local Niagara Liberal health-care monopolists, Kim Craitor or Jim Bradley, whose government runs the infection-plagued Niagara health monopoly.
No mention was made of any comments from the LHIN; and of course, no mention was made of any comments from health minister Deb Matthews.
Funny how the big-mouth local monopolist mayors such as Brian McMullan and Jim Diodati weren't asked for their comments either.
There have been no demands from these mayors that a public inquiry be called into the C.diff horror which McGuinty's Liberals have subjected our population to. Diodati and McMullan are quiet as church mice when it comes to demanding answers from their Liberal MPP's about these scores of Niagara patient deaths. Better to still blame Harris, eh?!
So, let's just forget - as Niagara's monopolist-friendly status-quo-supporting press has done - about examining Dalton McGuinty's Liberal impact on Niagara's 2011 C.diff deaths due to his Liberal's secretive decision to hide from a public C.diff inquiry back in 2008!!
The NHS should be treated as a crime scene: why isn't it?
*

Roy Romanow shills for McGuinty Liberal health-care cuts

2011-12-20T06:18:00.000-05:00

Pauline Tam wrote in "Quick action on healthcare best" (Ottawa Citizen, Dec.20, 2011):

"Roy Romanow, the former Saskatchewan premier who slashed medicare in an effort to save it, has fighting words for Premier Dalton McGuinty, whose minority government is seeking ways to rein in skyrocketing health-care costs.
No matter how the McGuinty Liberals decide to cut spending and reshape Ontario's health system, they should act decisively, move fast and brace for political heat, said Romanow.
"What you have to do is implement the reforms as quickly as you can and as effectively as you can in order to get the population to understand that it isn't all bad," Romanow said in an interview. "In fact, it's probably the right thing to do."
The Ontario government, crippled by a $16-billion deficit and weakening economy, is contemplating spending cuts and changes to the health system that broadly resemble those of deficit-plagued Saskatchewan in the 1990s. As premier of the province that invented medicare, Romanow enraged many people by closing hospitals, slashing public drug spending and reorganizing the way health services were delivered.
Rural residents grumbled about losing their hospitals - and the jobs that went with them. Scores of nurses were laid off. Doctors complained about their diminished clout.
Voters and labour unions were particularly shocked that the austerity measures came from an NDP government that styled itself a guardian of Tommy Douglas's medicare legacy.
The Ontario Health Coalition, a pro-medicare group, has warned that this province faces a similar fate, which would jeopardize the quality of patient care.
Yet despite fierce public opposition, Romanow's reforms allowed Saskatchewan to balance its budget three years into his term and won his party a second majority government.
Romanow said he tried to remain faithful to medicare's core values of fairness and compassion. He indicated, for example, that his government avoided privatizing certain health services or introducing user fees, which would only have shifted costs from the public purse to individuals who had to pay out of pocket.
Such an approach would have done nothing to reduce the overall share of provincial wealth devoted to health spending - a situation that McGuinty also understands, said Romanow. "In my judgment, I think Premier McGuinty has recognized the traps of false economy. I would say Premier McGuinty is making all the right overtures.""
*

Wow - just look at that:

Romanow is a now some kinda FLICKING socialist hero for trotting out the Michael Decter-ian contradiction of "slashing medicare, in order to save it" (see here, pg.11-12).

It was Romanow's NDP predecessor Tommy Douglas who invented the "false economy" called medicare!

Now, Roy Romanow has strangely somehow become a fountain of sage advice for Dalton McGuinty's monopolist Liberal ideologues?!?! WTF?

Romanow was squeezed by the Martin/Chretien health cuts, as Ontario's Harris also was - yet look at who's now being touted as some kind of advisor/ hero to the Liberals, and who's been incessantly demonized by the lib left!

The only Liberal overture playing here in Ontario is a prelude to tragedy, with McGuinty's faux-finance minister ~~Dwight Duncan~~ Don Drummond and faux-health minister ~~Deb Matthews~~ Romanow setting the sombre tone.

Enjoy your holidays; next year will be real ugly.
*

Profligate McGuinty wants more federal cash

2011-12-20T01:22:00.000-05:00

John Ivison in "Reality tempers health discord" (Dec.14, 2011 National Post) reported how Newfoundland is demanding that the federal government pay 25% of their health care costs (a 49% increase in health care transfers) because of the province's greying population.

Compare Newfoundland's demands today in 2011 to what Newfoundland's premier Danny Williams was saying in 2004, (during the health care transfer talks under Paul Martin) as Ivison himself reported in his story "Money will not fix what ails system: Summit was a missed opportunity" (National Post, Sept.17, 2004):

"...Williams, who had previously said that the whole process was a "farce" that could "destroy health care for a generation," was much more emollient after the deal was signed. The vision of dollar signs he saw on the road to the conference centre persuaded him that they had reached an agreement of which everyone could be proud. He did say his province still had serious fiscal problems but told Paul Martin, "It's not your problem ...that's my problem, that's our problem and I don't expect you to fix and heal all those problems." Martin should put such provincial empathy down to sleep deprivation because Williams is unlikely to be as understanding when the premiers crash antlers with the Prime Minister over equalization payments next month..."

Have Newfoundland - or Ontario - bothered to solve their 'serious fiscal problems' yet, seven years later?! Or are the 'visions of federal dollar signs' still dancing in their heads?

McGuinty, the single-payer health-care monopoly-pushing premier Liberal liar of Ontario, is billions in the hole, with debt-rating downgrades looming in his now-have-not province. McGuinty's wasted billions on his Green Energy scams and eHealth charades; now duplicitous Dalton too wants more cash from the feds, to enable him to continue in his unaccountable ways?! Does a profligate statist such as Dalton intend to surrender any of the constitutional responsibility his province has over health care, in return for federal cash, or does he feel he's just damn well entitled to be given such largesse, without question or stipulation?!

Where does 'suck-and-blow' Dalton think this money comes from, anyhow?
*

Niagara's Top News Story of 2011: how Liberal MPP Jim Bradley vanished during Niagara's 'Summer Of C.diff Death'

2011-12-19T19:17:00.001-05:00

Let's see: what will Wendy Metcalfe's St.Catharines Standard come up with, at year's-end, as Niagara's 'top news story of 2011'?

Hmm.

Will we see Grant Lafleche write another summation, similar to this previous doozy, which had named healthcare as the top Niagara story of 2008...
(you know: when Smitherman, Bradley, Craitor, and McGuinty forced the NHS to create a HIP; after which the Liberals then closed two ER's in Niagara)
...yet, somehow, Lafleche and his Standard editors... um... forgot to mention St.Catharines' Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's role in the creation of the HIP!! (hahaha)

Somehow - Lafleche also didn't mention Jim Bradley's comments regarding his secretive Liberals quashing a public inquiry that year, in 2008, which would have openly examined the HUNDREDS of C. diff deaths which had already then occurred in Ontario's Liberal health monopoly!

That was a great example of the St.Catharines Standard's propensity for blatant Bradley buttlickery.

So, we can almost see Metcalfe's Standard 'wrong-righting' spin for any 2011 summary: continuing covering up for Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's abdication of responsibility while almost 40 patients were killed during Niagara's Summer Of C.diff Death.

During the entire summer of 2011, the St.Catharines Standard carefully avoided any mention of Liberal MPP Jim Bradley regarding the killer C.diff outbreak in Bradley's Liberal-monopoly-run Niagara hospitals. ...[After all, the Honourable Jim Bradley is a Busy Man, a Busy Cabinet Minister, y'see; how can Busy Liberal Men Such As Jim Bradley have the time to comment on trivialities such as Killer C.diff Outbreaks, when they are Busy with Other More Important Grand Projects??]

The St.Catharines Standard made a concerted effort to cover up for Liberal MPP Jim Bradley: the Standard did not carry any stories which, when dealing with Niagara's 2011 C.diff outbreak as the subject matter, also indicated to readers whether or not Jim Bradley had been contacted by the Standard, and, whether or not Jim Bradley had answered any Standard request for his comments on the killer C.diff outbreak unfolding in his own city.

The Standard purposefully isolated Liberal MPP Jim Bradley from scrutiny during the entire duration of the (first) Niagara C.diff outbreak, from when it first began developing in May 2011, right up until Dec.2011, when another Niagara C.diff outbreak was declared!! Somehow, suddenly Jim Bradley and his Liberal policies had nothing to do with healthcare in Niagara!

It wasn't enough that secretive Liberal MPP Jim Bradley ran away into his Cone Of Silence during the initial summer 2011 C.diff outbreak, and the St.Catharines Standard conveniently couldn't be bothered to hunt him down; the same thing happened again, when another C.diff outbreak was announced in the first week of Dec.2011!

Liberal MPP Jim Bradley simply and conveniently vanished from the pages of the St.Catharines Standard when it came to the issue of two 2011 C.diff outbreaks in his own backyard!

Lafleche's 2008-summation Standard story didn't bother to examine Liberal Jim Bradley's reasons for his Liberals hiding from calling a public C.diff inquiry in 2008 - the findings from which might very well have had positive preventative implications in Niagara three years later in 2011, saving lives which were otherwise lost; the Standard hasn't yet bothered to ask Jim Bradley about why - despite Liberal lying assurances that C.diff was under control in 2008 - Niagara ended up with not one, but TWO C.difficile outbreaks in 2011!

So it would be awkward, to say the least, for the hypocritical St.Catharines Standard to name Niagara's Summer of C.diff Death as the top story of 2011, without mentioning their own role in aiding and abetting the sudden sounds of silence emanating from Niagara's other-wise loudest Liberal health care monopolist, Jim Bradley.

I'm sure that Lafleche would be willing to try, though: I mean, look at how wonderfully Lafleche spun his Dec.19, 2011 Standard story about the Salvation Army's fund-raising efforts - even, forsooth, using the word "Christmas" - completely omitting to mention his Hitchens-onian disdain for religion and his apparent willingness to assault priests with large sticks of lumber to prove it.

To paraphrase Warren Kinsella's smelly 'piece of Justin Trudeau' article in the Dec.19, 2011 St.Catharines Standard: the St.Catharines Standard is simply Jim Bradley's not-so-stealthy Liberal water carrier.
*

A little shiddle-diddle at the Liberal-friendly Standard

2011-12-17T15:34:00.001-05:00

There was a great editorial cartoon in the Dec.17, 2011 St.Catharines Standard, showing Ontario Liberal MPP Environment Minister Jim Bradley, depicted as a caveman neanderthal, holding a bloody club in his hand, dragging a Burning Planet Earth in a net trailing behind him, wearing a banner saying "8 years of Liberal despotic majority", trampling dead C. difficile victims and secret-Liberal-G20-law victims under his feet. Very good choice of political cartoon for Wendy Metcalfe's St.Catharines Standard; Warren Kinsella, I'm sure, will be outraged at how "right-wing" the St.Catharines Standard (a Sun Media paper) is!! There were so many... sooo many... wrongs righted here with this cartoon, eh Wendy?!
Oh, the only question is, why has it taken the St.Catharines Standard this long -8 years- to finally paint a true picture of... um, how did that shiddle-diddle fop mini-Trudeau put it? ... of how 'full of sh!t' Jim Bradley and his Liberal goons are?!
*

The St.Catharines Standard's gift to Liberal MPP Jim Bradley: silence

2011-12-16T19:42:00.000-05:00

Funny that the Metcalfian 'wrong-righters' at the St.Catharines Standard haven't yet bothered to interview or even mention their local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley in regards to Canada's move last week in Durban to finally and mercifully get ourselves out of Liberal Jean Chretien's Kyoto GreenScam.

When it comes to the blessed environment, Ontario's blessed Environment Minister Jim Bradley has once again vanished into the Standard's Cone of Convenient Silence.

Keeping Ole Jimmy under wraps, are we, Wendy?! No wrongs to be righted here, Wendy?!

Ole Jimmy James J.J. Bradley was Ontario's smuggest Kyoto-pusher a decade ago; media outlets such as the St.Catharines Standard happily and without much question eagerly parroted and amplified Jim Bradley's Liberal GreenFear climate-change/global-warming economic thuggery.

Now, Bradley's green love child has been aborted, and Ole deadbeat Green Jim has beat it and vanished - conveniently, with no questions or scrutiny from the only major daily in Bradley's own city! The 'planet was in dire peril' the Standard had once loved to pronounce/fear-monger; why isn't the Standard demanding answers now from their local GreenFear god Jim about why he has now Abandoned The Planet; about why he is no longer Preventing Global Doom; about why he didn't personally intervene in Durban to Save the Earth?!

Whaddaya expect from the local Liberal Clarion which, somehow, miraculously, didn't bother to pursue Jim Bradley for his reaction to the Jack Kitts NHS HIP review three years ago;
which didn't bother to interview Bradley about his knowledge of his Liberal's secret G20 law;
which didn't bother to interview Bradley about Niagara's Summer of C.diff Death;
which didn't bother to get Jim Bradley's local response to auditor Jim McCarter's recent report, or, to environment commissioner Gord Miller's recent report.

What a ~~Christma~~s, pardon, holiday present from the St.Catharines Standard to their buddy Ole Unca Jim: keeping Good Ole Jim Bradley carefully and lovingly protected from scrutiny, safely wrapped and covered up from questions or controversy!

The double-standard courtesy of the St.Catharines Standard: not just a silent night, but silent years... the Liberal media gift that keeps on giving.
*

Ontario needs an inquest into the 'misconceptions' of Liberal monopolist health care

2011-12-13T19:36:00.001-05:00

Compare these two stories:

Alison Langley wrote in "Douglas Memorial not equipped to handle serious trauma cases, inquest told" (posted Dec.12, 2011, Niagara Falls Review):

Douglas Memorial Hospital was not equipped to handle serious trauma cases long before the Niagara Health System proposed its emergency department be downgraded to an urgent-care centre, an Ottawa physician who reviewed the NHS hospital improvement plan said Monday.

While he understands residents can be "very passionate" about their local hospitals, Dr. Jack Kitts testified there were a lot of misconceptions surrounding the NHS's plans for the Fort Erie and Port Colborne hospitals.
"The public felt they had a full-service hospital, but in reality they didn't," he said.
At an inquest probing the death of Reilly Anzovino, Kitts testified Douglas Memorial had not been a full-service hospital since the mid-1990s.
The hospital did not have a surgeon on site and it did not have diagnostic tools such as a CT scan.
Paramedics have taken patients from the Fort Erie area to hospitals in Niagara Falls, Welland, St. Catharines or Hamilton for a number of years, he added.
"Severely injured patients should not go where they can't be helped," Kitts told the three-woman, two-man jury.
The Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant Local Health Integration Network in July 2008 appointed Kitts to review the feasibility of the NHS hospital improvement plan.
Kitts hosted a number of town-hall forums across the region to consult the public on the controversial plan.
"There was a lot of media (coverage) and a lot of negative reaction by physicians and members of the community," Kitts said.
Kitts' report, released in November 2008, largely endorsed the NHS restructuring plan, which recommended the emergency rooms at Douglas Memorial and Port Colborne General be downgraded to urgent-care facilities.
Less than two months later, Anzovino suffered critical injuries following a two-vehicle collision on Highway 3 between Fort Erie and Port Colborne.
Paramedics rushed her to Welland County General Hospital where the 18-year-old college student was pronounced dead.
"My heart goes out to the Anzovino family," Kitts said. "I have two daughters myself. I really feel for you."
Fort Erie family physician Dr. David Henry testified that prior to the NHS's reorganization of Douglas Memorial, the hospital was capable of stabilizing serious trauma patients so that they could be transferred by ambulance to another facility.
That ability, he added, remains in effect.
"Our capabilities remain the same, it's just that we lost the designation of ambulance destination."
Since the reorganization, Henry added, the volume of patients going to Niagara Falls and Welland hospitals have "totally clogged up their ERs."
In his review, Kitts supported the NHS proposal of creating centres of excellence as a way to save money, and to concentrate resources to ensure the best quality care for patients.
"Instead of having five separate hospitals all fighting for limited resources, use the five together to benefit the whole Niagara peninsula by creating these centres of excellence," he told the jury.
He said a Welland surgeon's suggestion last week that an NHS site be designated as a trauma centre could fit in that "centre of excellence" definition.
Such a proposal, he added, would require an extensive feasibility study.
The nearest designated trauma centre in Ontario is Hamilton General Hospital.
Henry said the closest trauma centre, Erie County Medical Centre in Buffalo is less than 15 minutes from Fort Erie.
Bureaucratic obstacles, however, have made it "near impossible" to get approval to send patients across the border, he added.
The inquest continues today in Welland.

******

John Robbins reported in "ER conversion not to blame: Kitts
Dr. Jack Kitts testifies at Anzovino inquest" (Dec.12, 2011 Niagara This Week):

The man who gave the thumbs up to Niagara’s controversial hospital restructuring plan three years ago says the conversion of emergency departments in Fort Erie and Port Colborne in no way contributed to the death of Reilly Anzovino.
Dr. Jack Kitts, president and chief executive officer of the Ottawa Hospital, took to the stand at the inquest probing the December 2009 death of the 18-year-old Fort Erie teen, who had been critically injured when the car she was a passenger in spun out on an icy stretch of Highway 3 almost midway between the Port Colborne General and Fort Erie’s Douglas Memorial hospitals.
Kitts, who in the summer of 2008 was asked to review the Niagara Health System’s so-called hospital improvement plan, testified before the inquest Monday in Welland the ERs at Douglas Memorial and Port Colborne General had been treating few seriously ill patients and virtually no trauma patients for more than a decade by the time the NHS redesignated the ERs at those two facilities “urgent-care centres.”
Rather than some kind of overnight change, the conversion happened gradually as a result of changes in medical technology that left the two hospitals behind as well as the loss of on-call general surgery capability.
“They (the ERs) had converted over time to that,” said Kitts. “This was a formalization of what they had become.”
Sitting in the witness chair a few dozen feet away from Reilly’s parents, Tim Anzovino and Denise Kennedy, both of whom have been attending the inquest every day it has met since Oct. 31, Kitts offered his condolences on the loss of their daughter.
“My heart goes out to the Anzovino family,” said Kitts. “I hope with the passage of time something good can come out of this.”
Just what can be done to prevent similar deaths – one of the key questions the five member inquest jury has been charged with answering – remains unclear.
All previous witnesses at the inquest have said they know of nothing that could have been done to save Anzovino, who, according to medical witnesses, went into cardiac arrest as the result of massive internal bleeding caused by the force of the collision around 11:30 p.m. on Boxing Day 2009.
Bad weather contributed to a delay in getting Anzovino to hospital by ambulance. By the time she arrived at Welland County General hospital about an hour later, she was considered VSA or vital signs absent.
The emergency room team at Welland County General spent more than 50 frantic minutes trying to revive her in hopes of sending her to surgery to stop the internal bleeding.
The ER doctor who worked on Anzovino that night testified last week that her injuries were so extensive that even if the accident had happened outside a specialized trauma centre, such as Hamilton General or Toronto’s Sunnybrook hospital, she likely couldn’t have been saved.
None of the NHS hospital sites is a designated trauma centre, which would typically have a team of specialist surgeons and nurses and at least one operating room ready at all times to receive critically injured patients by land or air ambulance.
Kitts said the “definitive care” for trauma patients such as Anzovino is such a trauma centre – including near by Erie County Medical Centre, in Buffalo.
If unable to transport to one of those facilities, the next best place for trauma patients to go is one of the NHS’s three larger hospitals – Welland County General, Greater Niagara General and St. Catharines.
While not trauma centres, all three of those hospitals have on-call general and orthopedic surgeons and anesthesiologists.
The hospital improvement plan, or HIP as it has come to be known, is nearly three years into the implementation-phase, and it has failed to gain widespread support from either the medical community or from citizens.
The plan was first made public in 2008. It’s a five-year strategy to improve the quality of care at Niagara hospitals and balance the NHS budget by 2013.
To achieve these goals, the plan calls for a sweeping reorganization of hospital services across the region by clustering clinical programs into what are termed “centres of excellence.”
Only a portion of the changes envisioned in the plan have been implemented, such as the conversion of emergency rooms at hospitals in Fort Erie and Port Colborne into urgent care centres.
Many of the proposed changes, including the closure of maternity and pediatric wards in Niagara Falls and Welland, are contingent upon completion of the new St. Catharines health-care complex.
Kitts said it while in Niagara in 2008 reviewing the plan and repeated it again at the inquest Monday: The centres of excellence make for a “critical mass” of patients, where medical staff and expensive equipment can be used to their maximum potential.
“If you don’t have critical mass, you won’t have the best (care),” said Kitts, adding it’s sometimes better for a patient to travel further for the most appropriate care rather than go arrive sooner at the nearest hospital, which may not be able to provide the proper care.
The hospital improvement plan is no more popular today than in 2008, when thousands of people in Fort Erie and Port Colborne rallied in opposition to the changes at their community hospitals.
Kitts said many people in both communities were and likely still are under the wrong impression that they had a full-service hospital at the time the ERs were converted to urgent-care centres.
Among those who protested the changes was Dr. David Henry, a Fort Erie family physician and emergency room doctor, who was also called to testify at the inquest on Monday.
Like Kitts, Henry said Douglas Memorial was not equipped to handle trauma cases like Reilly Anzovino at the time the ER was converted to an urgent-centre, nor had it been able to do so for many years before.
“I don’t think Fort Erie or Port Colborne would have made a difference (in Anzovino’s case),” said Henry. Fort Erie did at one time have a general surgeon, but he retired in the mid 1990s and was never replaced. After that, the hospital did mostly minor procedures and day surgeries until the operating rooms were closed for good as part of the hospital improvement plan.
Although the hospital still has a supply of blood products and at least one doctor working around the clock inside the urgent-care centre, Anzovino needed surgery to stop the internal bleeding, said Henry.
In cases were a person suffers major injuries in an accident, they are better off going to a full-service hospital where there is a surgeon available.
“It’s as simple as that,” said Henry.
Despite the conversion to an urgent-care centre, Henry said Douglas Memorial still does treat some critically ill medical patients, such as people having heart attacks.
He estimated before the ER conversion about one half of all heart attack patients came to hospital by car, rather than ambulance. While ambulances no longer bring critically ill patients to Douglas Memorial, some people still present at the hospital on their own, often thinking they have something less serious wrong with – such as indigestion – when in fact its a more serious cardiac problem.
“We still get those drive-ins despite all of the publicity (to the contrary).”
Henry bemoaned the fact that it has, in his opinion, become more difficult in recent years to transfer patients to Erie County Medical Centre, a recognized leader in trauma care, in recent years.
“That’s the bureaucracy of Ontario. They don’t want their patients going to Buffalo,” said Henry.
Both Henry and Kitts supported in principle an idea put forward earlier in the inquest by Welland surgeon Dr. Peter Willard, who suggested while Niagara may not be big enough to warrant a full trauma centre, there may be some merit in pooling resources currently spread out across the NHS’s three largest hospital sites into a single location.
A model for this kind of thing already exists in Niagara. All stroke patients are taken to Greater Niagara General hospital in Niagara Falls, which is home to a dedicated stroke team.
Pooling resources into one site could maximize the use of available manpower. With high volumes of patients, medical staff would have more opportunity to hone their skills.
Kitts suggested a feasibility study would need to be done first to fully explore the idea and determine whether it makes sense to have a dedicated trauma unit and where best to locate it.
“It isn’t just flip a coin and pick the best (hospital site),” Kitts said.
The inquest continues Tuesday.

*****
Note, in the above two stories, the two completely different reports (highlighted in context above) about Dr. David Henry's testimony -

Alison Langley of the Niagara Falls Review reported this:

Fort Erie family physician Dr. David Henry testified that prior to the NHS's reorganization of Douglas Memorial, the hospital was capable of stabilizing serious trauma patients so that they could be transferred by ambulance to another facility.
That ability, he added, remains in effect.
"Our capabilities remain the same, it's just that we lost the designation of ambulance destination."
Since the reorganization, Henry added, the volume of patients going to Niagara Falls and Welland hospitals have "totally clogged up their ERs."

...while John Robbins of Niagara This Week reported this:

Among those who protested the changes was Dr. David Henry, a Fort Erie family physician and emergency room doctor, who was also called to testify at the inquest on Monday.Like Kitts, Henry said Douglas Memorial was not equipped to handle trauma cases like Reilly Anzovino at the time the ER was converted to an urgent-centre, nor had it been able to do so for many years before.“I don’t think Fort Erie or Port Colborne would have made a difference (in Anzovino’s case),” said Henry

Which of these versions is accurate?

Did DM have the "capabilities" to treat and stabilize trauma patients before DM lost its ambulance destination designation (as Henry seemed to be saying in Langley's story), or, were these capabilities not there at all, regardless of the Anzovino incident, as Kitts seems to be saying?

It's like these two reporters were at two different hearings - not when it came to what Kitts was saying, but what Henry was saying.

Robbins wrote that Henry seemed to agree with Kitts that DM was not equipped to handle trauma cases, and hadn't been for years.

Yet Langley reported of Henry saying that 'prior to the NHS's reorganization of Douglas Memorial, the hospital was capable of stabilizing serious trauma patients so that they could be transferred by ambulance to another facility. That ability, he added, remains in effect'.

Furthermore, why isn't anyone examining specifically why Buffalo's medical facilities aren't being more often utilized? Why is or isn't ECMC being utilized by Ontario? Have patient transfers to the U.S. from Ontario (especially Niagara) gone down? Has -as Henry says- it become more difficult to send patients to the States??

Why aren't any reporters asking these questions? They've had three years to examine the issue! Why - in the last three years - has no local press ever bothered to ask Niagara's secretive Liberal health care monopolist Jim Bradley about his government's policies on patient export; especially in light of how smug Liberals such as Bradley, Smitherman, and Dalton McGuinty loved to demean and denigrate the American health care model - which is there, available across the river in the U.S., but which would be illegal if it was on McGuinty's side of the river. What have Bradley's Liberals done to remove "bureaucratic obstacles" when it comes to emergency patients being forced to leave Ontario because Bradley's monopoly can't provide for them here?

Aren't the politics of Liberal bait-and-switch health-care monopolism part and parcel of this inquest?

Kitts tells us:

"The public felt they had a full-service hospital, but in reality they didn't," he said.
At an inquest probing the death of Reilly Anzovino, Kitts testified Douglas Memorial had not been a full-service hospital since the mid-1990s.

Is this a 'blame Harris' move by Kitts?! If so, the St.Catharines Standard will be ebullient with this !! See, toldja: it's Harris' fault!! Kitts says DM has not been a full service hospital since the mid-90's; yet, Henry says that DM was capable of treating trauma victims, until the HIP cuts! Well, which version is correct?!

And - 'if in reality, DM was not a full service hospital' as Kitts says - then what exactly did McGuinty's Liberals do about that, since 2003???!!! Were Kim Craitor's and Jim Bradley's Liberals running a NON-FULL-SERVICE hospital in Fort Erie, and passing it off to the public as something else?

Oddly enough, no local reporters are scrambling to ask Kim Craitor or Jim Bradley about that!

Henry says the 'bureaucracy of Ontario doesn't want patients taken to Buffalo'; why aren't the local Niagara reporters looking into that? This isn't, um...news to them - is it? McGuinty's Liberals control Ontario's bureaucratic health monopoly!

Where are all the investigative reports from Niagara This Week, the St.Catharines Standard, the Niagara Advance, the Niagara Falls Review, over the last eight years, detailing their local MPP's comments and responses to their Liberal healthcare monopoly's patient export policies?!
Good luck finding anything about that from Niagara's press.

Notice the spin Robbins puts on Dr. Kitts as being the person who "gave the thumbs up" to the HIP . Kitts was hired by the NHS to review the HIP which the LHIN had forced the NHS to produce. Interestingly, Robbins - and his editors - just plain forgot to mention that the Liberal LHIN had the final authority to approve the HIP for implementation! This wasn't Kitts' call, all on his own; nor the NHS's call, all on its own.

It was the Liberal's LHIN which had demanded that a HIP be created by the NHS, and it was the Liberal LHIN - when it got its ducks lined up in the way which McGuinty's Minister of Health wanted - which then approved the HIP's implementation.

Robbins doesn't bother mentioning that the LHIN - after considering the HIP, even after considering Kitts' "thumbs up" review of the HIP - could have gone another way, and not approved it. Robbins forgot to report that it was ACTUALLY McGUINTY'S LIBERAL LHIN which gave the FINAL "thumbs up" to the HIP, and which ordered the NHS to then implement the HIP.

Funny, how these wee wittle factoids just seem to get lost in the statist-friendly narrative. The NHS did not close/re-purpose the Fort Erie and the Port Colborne hospital ER's all on its own: the decision to do so was approved and finalized BY McGUINTY'S LHIN.

Also note another amazing thing:
that in the last THREE YEARS, Liberal MPP Jim Bradley has never been interviewed by his Fan Club in the press about his views regarding the Jack Kitts HIP report!! Dare you to find anything about Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's reaction to and comments about the Jack Kitts HIP review!!
More pathetically: no-one's bothered to ask Ole Jimmy about that since! And: no-one's asking him NOW!!!

Why isn't George Smitherman, McGuinty's former health minister, the person responsible for the HIP, testifying at this inquest?!
*

The tragedy is that McMullan - when he had the chance to - didn't call for a public C. diff inquiry in Niagara

2011-12-12T03:20:00.001-05:00

Further to this earlier post:
Not that long ago - just back in June, 2011 - the St.Catharines Standard's Jeff Bolichowski had interviewed Brian McMullan about the then-current C. diff crisis in Niagara.
McMullan was being used as the Standard's stand-in proxy for local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley, who, as we all by now know, had conveniently disappeared from the scene during Niagara's 2011 summer of C. diff death. (Bradley never once was the subject of any in-depth interviews by the St.Catharines Standard about the C. diff crisis in Niagara - from at least May of 2011 to Dec. of 2011 - there was nothing!!)
The Standard reported at the time:
McMullan, meanwhile, said he wants to know why the outbreak happened and how to prevent it from happening again.
"I think we're all anxious about the situation," he said. "The fact that there's been any loss of life is tragic."
So - let's see: will the Standard's boss Wendy Metcalfe assign Bolichowski to follow up with McMullan, to ask about how many "answers" he had actually received about how to 'prevent a C. diff outbreak from happening again'?
Because, well... another C. diff outbreak HAS 'happened again' in Niagara - and McMullan has come up with no answers at all.
Mayor McMullan was spewing empty rhetoric then - let's see what he says now. (probably nothing...)
McMullan DID NOT immediately call for a public inquiry in the last C. diff outbreak, which killed over 30 Niagara patients; apparently it wasn't that important for McMullan to 'get the answers'.
Did McMullan ever bother to ask Jim Bradley about the C. diff deaths?
Why isn't McMullan calling on Bradley, publicly demanding that an independent inquiry be called into this CONTINUING C. diff horror in Niagara?
McMullan called Niagara's C. diff deaths in Jim Bradley's health-monopoly "tragic".
What specifically is the 'tragedy' about these deaths? Did the patients bring death upon themselves, because of their own personal flaws? Is that what McMullan meant - that the patients had tragic flaws which led to their own downfall?!?!
This was no tragedy - it was negligence then, and it is still negligence again. The patients were victims - and we have been given no answers.
Why did a C. diff outbreak occur once again, especially after McMullan's bluster about 'getting all kinds of answers so this wouldn't happen again'?!? How did the NHS allow this to slip through again? Will the Standard be interviewing the LHIN about their role in allowing the C. diff outbreak to recur?
This is a crime being perpetrated in an unaccountable Liberal-monopoly-run health system, time and again; those in charge spew meaningless assurances but hide from and do not bother calling for an inquiry to examine these deaths, while the monopolist politicians who control the health system are protected from liability.
*

When will McMullan publicly ask Liberal Jim Bradley to account for the latest Niagara C. difficile outbreak?

2011-12-11T05:41:00.001-05:00

Further to my previous post:
So: here are Mayor McFullofit and Liberal MPP Jim Bradley all smiley-faced on another staged photo-op, while 21 patients (so far...) have died of C. difficile infection in Bradley's local Niagara single-payer health monopoly.
We all remember - right? - how back in mid-June, an oh-so-concerned Mayor McFullofit was demanding answers and explanations for this C. difficile outbreak in Niagara.
So here we are, once again... now 21 Niagarans are dead... and we have Mayor McFullofit at another photo-op, again standing happily next to Jim Bradley - the Liberal cabinet member from Niagara, whose despotic government is responsible for enforcing Ontario's health-care monopoly - and so again, we ask: Hey there, Mayor McFullofit: has Jim Bradley answered your questions yet?!??
Or haven't you even bothered to ask?!!
What a pathetic game these politicians are playing.
*
By Dec.8, 2011 - ANOTHER C. difficile outbreak was declared in Niagara: unbelievable, but true.
So: when can we expect Mayor McFullofit to again make his phony demand for 'answers and explanations'?
A lot of good that did last time, eh?
Where are all these forthcoming answers, which mayor Brian McMullan was earnestly going to get?!?
Let's hear Brian McMullan tell us exactly what Jim Bradley had ever 'answered and explained' to him about the C. diff outbreak - about any of Ontario's C. diff outbreaks. [Hundreds of patients were killed of C. diff in Ontario in 2008 - and Bradley's Liberals hid from a public inquiry! McMullan didn't bother to 'demand explanations and answers' from Bradley about that then, did he?]
So here we are, again - with another damn Niagara C. diff outbreak in Dec.2011, yet, Brian McMullan has NEVER PROVIDED St.Catharines residents with any answers to any of his supposed demands from the last time - just several months ago, this summer!!
*

Where's the Standard's detailed local coverage of Liberal Environment Minister Bradley's response to Miller?

2011-12-10T01:43:00.001-05:00

John Snobolen wrote in the Dec.10, 201 LFP:

"Does it seem like it's raining reports in Ontario?
Over the last couple of weeks we have been blessed with reports from the environment commissioner and the auditor general.
Next month we will get a look at the Drummond report on government spending.
No doubt Premier Dalton McGuinty is delighted all of this information is hitting Ontarians after the election.
Environment Commissioner Gord Miller is none too happy. In his recently released annual report, Engaging Solutions, he took a shot at the government for doing a lot of studying and very little acting to protect the environment.
Miller makes the case that endless studies have the delightful (for the government) effect of creating the appearance of being environmentally concerned without the mess and bother of actually doing anything.
As befits an environment commissioner, Miller is passionate about the work of the Ministries of Environment and Natural Resources.
He shares that passion with a lot of ministry lifers who view the job of protecting Ontario's natural heritage as a calling. Good on them.
A concern over funding for the ministries is the real fuel behind Miller's report.
He believes the government may be reaching a tipping point, below which the Ministries of Environment and Natural Resources may not be functional.
Miller has reason for concern. Ontario's hospitals just might eat the parks.
The McGuinty government is finally making serious noises about reducing the size and cost of government.
That is not particularly shocking, given that the government is mired in systemic deficit.
The budget deficit is historic.
Closing a $16-billion annual fiscal hole requires the government to reduce expenditures by about 15%.
No question, 15% is a big number. But things get really crazy when the government exempts the largest ministries - Health and Education - from any reductions and protects its latest spending announcements.
Enter the report from Auditor General Jim McCarter.
The AG says that the billions being spent on renewable energy lack any reasonable business plan. The announced 50,000 new "green" jobs are mostly short-term, cost about $300,000 each and come at the potential cost of hundreds of thousands of private-sector jobs.
McCarter also noted all is not well in the health sector. The new Family Health Groups have doctors earning 25% more, apparently without improving service. Emergency Room visits are up 7% while Emergency Room doctor pay is up 40%.
The costs in education are similarly upside down. Enrollment is down, costs are up.
Given everything in the AG's report, a reasonable person might expect a cash-scrapped government to make some fundamental changes in the big-budget ministries - Education and Health.
And you might expect some reversals in the troubled spending programs the government is rolling out, including the underfunded full-day kindergarten program and the green-energy mess.
Every family knows when the budget must be reduced, the first place to look is at recent spending increases and the big-ticket items.
But this government lacks the wisdom of an average family.
It's clear McGuinty has no plan to address the huge gaps in the business case for renewable energy or the obvious funding problems for all day-kindergarten.
More troubling to folks like Miller, the government seems determined to avoid any real change to the big-spending ministries.
Those exemptions put a big target on the relatively small budgets of Environment and Natural Resources.
And so the hospitals just might eat the parks.
Gosh, wouldn't it be great if we had had these reports before the election?"
*
Wouldn't it be great if the St.Catharines Standard would bother to carry a detailed local interview with their buddy Jim Bradley - who is their local Liberal MPP, and... oh, yeah... he's also Ontario's environment minister (!) - asking about Environment Commissioner Gord Miller's comments?
Good Gaia - if this had been during Harris' term, the Standard's reporters would have been chortling with glee, lapping up every word which a suitably smugly outraged Bradley would have been gladly spewing against the government!
But... now... the only thing reigning at secretive Jim Bradley's office is deafening silence.
And the St.Catharines Standard, of course, seems more than pleased to help their beloved Bradley keep things quiet.
*

Jim Bradley's Liberals will bleed desperate Ontario gamblers

2011-12-09T18:07:00.001-05:00

Nice to see Antonella Artuso's report in the Dec.9, 2011 St.Catharines Standard, that McGuinty's Liberals - in their quest for cash - are continuing their pursuit to engage in the on-line gambling world.
What's interesting is that no one from the St.Catharines Standard's Bradley Booster Fan Club has ever interviewed their local Liberal MPP about this!!
How many stories has Wendy Metcalfe's 'wrong-righting' Standard carried, examining and interviewing Jim Bradley and his hypocritical position on gambling?! None!
We all remember how smugly outraged Ole Jimmy got about gambling, years ago, when he was in opposition, when he accused others that gambling will 'bleed the desperate, vulnerable, and addicted people of Ontario'.
That's exactly what Jim Bradley and his Liberals are doing today - and the ever-so-devoted, Bradley-besotted St.Catharines Standard eagerly covers-up Jim Bradley's hypocrisy, once again!!
*

McGuinty's Liberal Green Energy lies exposed

2011-12-09T02:06:00.001-05:00

Further to my previous Feb. 2010 post "McGuinty's Windy Green Energy Disaster":

In reading the National Post's Dec.8, 2011 editorial, "McGuinty's Green Energy Disaster"...

"We have long argued that the Ontario government's headlong rush to convert Canada's industrial heartland to "green" energy would turn out to be nothing but a colossal waste of money. Since most alternative energies remain commercially impractical (that's why they're still alternative and not mainstream), the blind rush by Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government to substitute wind, solar and bio energy for coal and oil was never likely to produce much new energy, just higher power rates for residential and industrial consumers. But even we underestimated the extent to which the Ontario Liberals' 2009 Green Energy Act had failed in just over two-year's time.
In one of the most scathing indictments of government mismanagement we have ever witnessed, Ontario Auditor-General Jim McCarter reported Monday that Mr. McGuinty's green dream has rapidly become an $8-billion nightmare for Ontario taxpayers and electricity users. Almost no new net power will be generated by all the green-energy projects hastily funded since the bill was passed, but the average residential consumer will see more than $400 a year added to his power bill for a decade to pay for all the bad contracts with and subsidies to eco-friendly power suppliers.
Over the past year, the McGuinty Liberals have been forced to conduct a series of embarrassing climbdowns from their grand promises about the benefits that would flow from the switch from carbon fuels to renewables.
Last spring, the provincial government announced it would no longer push for the building of wind-power turbines in the Great Lakes or any other freshwater sites around the province. The technology, it suddenly claimed, was unproven. The decision was purely scientific, Energy Minister Brad Duguid insisted. It had nothing whatever to do with the turbines' unpopularity with landowners who would also be voters in October's provincial election. "There isn't a lot of science on freshwater offshore wind," Mr. Duguid admitted. "We need some time to review the science and we don't have it today."
Perhaps the Liberals should have realized that before they earmarked over $1-billion for the initiative.
But as Auditor-General McCarter pointed out several times in his annual report, this leapbefore-you-look approach was typical of the McGuinty government's haste to approve and fund environmental projects. For instance, hundreds of millions have been paid - and hundreds of millions more will have to be paid in the coming decade - to landowners who agreed to put up small-scale solar-energy farms on their property. Only after scores of these projects had been approved and paid for, though, did the Ontario government realize there was no economical way to connect all them to the provincial power grid, so little of this expensive electricity is reaching homes or factories.
Guidelines for ensuring public grants were going to worthy projects were ignored. Financial regulations were violated. Few cost-benefit analyses were performed nor business plans produced. Lower-cost alternatives were ignored, despite warnings from civil servants, and the whole scheme was largely designed by environmentalists and green-industry lobbyists - "stakeholders" in the government's euphemistic rhetoric. "Normal due diligence for an expenditure of this magnitude had not been followed," Mr. McCarter concluded.
If the same reckless approach were taken with shareholders' money in a private company, securities regulators would almost surely recommend charges be laid against those behind such a scheme.
Heads should roll in this case, too. The trouble is, as Mr. McCarter also identified, much of the final decision-making was tightly controlled by Premier McGuinty himself. And we suspect Mr. McGuinty is unlikely to fire himself from Cabinet. Though re-elected with only a minority government in October's vote, the Liberals are only two votes shy of a majority, and neither opposition Progressive Conservatives or provincial NDP are likely to topple Mr. McGuinty so soon after an election. The people of Ontario are likely stuck with him for the time being - as they are certainly stuck with the high costs of his green dreams.
While it's too late for Ontario to avoid these costly mistakes, other provinces can still learn from them. Other provincial governments may be tempted to consider similar green-energy programs, either for environmental reasons or in the hopes of establishing a productive, lucrative and morally pure industry by the magic of government fiat and wishful thinking. Let Mr. McCarter's findings be a warning for them: Don't copy the McGuinty example. It is good for neither the environment nor for consumers."

... we in Niagara must not forget that this was also Jim Bradley's and Kim Craitor's Green Energy Disaster.
These two Liberal clowns aren't immune from indictment in the energy fiasco which their GreenFear bolshevism has spawned.
And how many stories has the St.Catharines Standard written, examining their local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's years of GreenFear agitation in relation to McCarter's report?
None!
The Standard hasn't had the time (yet!) or the inclination to unpucker their lips from their beloved Bradley's butt.

*

'Another C. diff outbreak in Niagara? I'm outta here', says Liberal Jim Bradley.

2011-12-09T00:47:00.001-05:00

Another C. difficile outbreak has been called in Niagara - again.

Now that C. diff is back (if it had ever really left...) it can only mean that Liberal MPP Jim Bradley will vanish, as he had during this year's Niagara summer of C. diff death.

In the Dec.8, 2011 St.Catharines Standard report announcing that C.diff has re-appeared, writer (and apparently resident Standard Bradley baby-sitter) Grant Lafleche carefully ensured that no Liberals were mentioned in the story; after all, what do Liberal monopolists Jim Bradley or Kim Craitor have anything to do with any of this, right?!

And since the Standard doesn't have Harris or Sevenpifer to conveniently demonize anymore, it's getting harder for the Standard to hide its now-blatant love affair with Jim Bradley!

Gosh... who to blame, who to blame...? Hmmm... lessee... well, we can't blame George Smitherman's Liberal-created-and-appointed LHIN... we can't blame Jimmy or Kimmy or any Liberal... we can't blame the Liberal's new NHS supervisor Smith - although we would have happily blamed Sevenpifer, if only she was still here...dammit... well, there's always blaming the visitors, and the general public... oh, wait... we can still blame the NHS!!

Ohhh: yes!! The "controversial" NHS, with its "controversial" restructurings - you know, those restructurings which - hahahahaha - NO McGUINTY LIBERAL EVER HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH!! ha ha ha!

You know the spin: the LHIN is pure and good, y'see, because it was created by McGuinty's Liberals; the NHS, though, is evil - because Harris created it!!

Bingo - there's the scapegoat connection - the one which Kim Craitor and his supporters love to trot out, so as to deflect from the monopolist disaster which Smitherman had wrought upon Niagara!!

Imagine: from the time of this summer's C. diff disaster, to another outbreak re-appearing in December, the St. Catharines Standard Bradley Bootlicker hasn't bothered to conduct a single interview with their beloved local Liberal buddy Jim Bradley about Niagara's deadly C. diff situation!!

And now the C. diff's back, but secretive Ole Bradley's still missing. Guess he's already off on his vacation and his Liberal fundraising junkets.

Funny that the Standard's Wendy Metcalfe can't see her own paper's hypocritical 'wrong-righting', eh?
*

Who will ask Jim Bradley about his Liberal's fake "50,000" green jobs?

2011-12-08T03:13:00.001-05:00

When will Ontario's Environment minister Jim Bradley be asked by Niagara's local press about the very same issues which the NorthumberlandView wrote of:

"Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak pressed Dalton McGuinty to come clean today and tell Ontarians when exactly he found out his failed energy policies were unaffordable and killing jobs. Ontario’s Auditor General would have submitted his scathing report to the government months in advance of its public release earlier this week, yet Dalton McGuinty continues to deny there’s a problem with his energy schemes.
Hudak repeatedly asked the Premier when he received the Auditor’s report – and if he knew the contents of the report months ago, why did he continue to make false claims about his energy record during the recent provincial election campaign. Contrary to Dalton McGuinty’s claims that the Green Energy Act is creating jobs and Ontario is profiting from electricity exports, the Auditor confirmed these energy schemes kill up to four jobs in the broader economy for every job they create. He also confirmed Ontario consumers didn’t benefit, but paid $1.8 billion since 2005 to export power to New York and Quebec.
Dalton McGuinty also claimed the Auditor regularly reviews the revenue collected on hydro bills through the Debt Retirement Charge to pay off $7.8 billion in residual stranded debt. However, the Auditor claimed this week that the McGuinty government continues to keep the remaining debt a secret, raising even more suspicion as to where the more than $8 billion already collected has really been going.
QUOTES:
“It’s time the Premier come clean about when he first received the Auditor General’s initial findings and stop misrepresenting these job-killing energy policies.”
–Tim Hudak, Ontario PC Leader
“Day after day, time and time again, the Premier and his Ministers said the Auditor signed off on their handling of the Debt Retirement Charge. He in fact did not. Why did the Premier tell the people of Ontario over and over again something that he knew was not true?”
–Tim Hudak, Ontario PC Leader
QUICK FACTS:
During the recent Ontario election, the McGuinty Liberals issued at least 15 news releases claiming they were creating 50,000 jobs. However the Auditor General reported, “The high proportion of short-term jobs was not apparent from the Ministry’s public announcement.” (Auditor General’s 2011 Annual Report, Page 117)

As recently as November 10, 2011, a Ministry of Energy news release claimed that over the last five years Ontario “generated $1.8 billion through net exports.” However the Auditor General reported, “Ontario received $1.8 billion less for its electricity exports than what it actually cost electricity ratepayers of Ontario.” (Auditor General’s 2011 Annual Report, Page 112)

On March 2, the Minister of Finance claimed, “We’re paying [the hydro debt] down each and every year. The auditor signs off on it. The books are open and clear.” However the Auditor General reported, “Our view is that the Minister should make a formal determination of the outstanding amount of the residual stranded debt in the near future and make this determination public.” (Auditor General’s 2011 Annual Report, Page 126)"

*
When did Liberal MPP Jim Bradley know that his Liberals were lying about their bait-and-switch "50,000" green jobs fantasy?!
When will someone from the St.Catharines Standard or Niagara This Week ever bother to actually track secretive Ole Jimmy down, and to actually ask Good Ole Jimmy about that??
When will these Liberal-loving rags ever bother to examine their Boy Bradley's years of Liberal hackery? Did they even try to contact their FriendlyLocalLiberal buddy, at all?!?
[Oh, yeah: it's Dec.8 - and there hasn't been any article yet in the Standard about Jim Bradley's reaction to auditor McCarter's report!! heh heh! Way to go, you gang of Metcalfian 'wrong-righting' hyporites/ Bradley Bootlickers!! Way to go!]
*

The 'adult conversation' which Liberal Jim Bradley won't have

2011-12-07T19:57:00.001-05:00

Scott Stinson wrote in "Ours is not public health care: Dodge", (National Post, Dec.6, 2011):

David Dodge wants Canadians to have an “adult, public conversation” about health-care funding. Finding someone to have that conversation with, though, has proven difficult.
“It’s hard, it’s really hard,” Mr. Dodge said in an interview on Monday after speaking to the Toronto Board of Trade, where he said the worst thing governments could do would be simply to stick to the status quo. The pressures on the system will become too great, and more money won’t cause them to abate.
It’s a conversation, he argues, that needs to include some form of “co-payment” — in which individuals would contribute to the cost of their health care. It could mean user fees. It could mean having health costs treated as income at tax time. It could mean having taxpayers contribute to “health savings accounts” that they would draw on when needed.
Asked if any politicians seem to be listening, the one-time deputy minister of both the finance and health ministries waves his arms and clenches his fists to express how hard he knows this kind of talk can be.
“All a kibitzer like I am now can do is prepare the public ground so that the political systems can do what they know they have to do,” he said.
“There are enough people who have been at this for enough time that maybe, just maybe, the thing is getting more fertile.”
Then he smiled. “Maybe.”
Mr. Dodge’s message is straightforward: Canadians are going to be paying significantly more for health care over the next two decades. Unless things change, he said, we should expect that total health spending will be almost a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product by 2030, up from 11% today — and up from 7% in the 1960s.
That looming problem demands major changes.
“The real disaster would be if governments stood up and said, ‘We have no money, so we’re going to freeze wages in the sector and cut services.’ You do that, and five years down the road you’re going to have all the same problems and the care being provided will be that much worse.”
In April, Mr. Dodge produced a report for the C.D. Howe Institute in which he said that steadily rising health-care costs — partly, but not exclusively, due to the aging population — would force governments to either increase fees, raises taxes or delist services. “Federal politicians are going to have to face this issue,” he warned.
But in the middle of an election campaign, federal politicians did precisely the opposite, falling all over themselves to pledge perpetual increases in the amount of health money transferred to the provinces while offering nothing in the way of reform.
The problem with calling for an adult conversation is that someone else has to be willing to talk.
The general reluctance to do so, Mr. Dodge says, both among politicians and the public, stems from the misunderstanding about how our system works.
“Most Canadians think we have a purely public health-care system,” Mr. Dodge says. “We don’t.”
About 70% of total health spending comes from the provinces, with the other 30% coming from individuals out of pocket, or through private or corporate insurance plans. Canada’s system is actually less public than most places in Europe, he says, where countries on average have about 85% of health spending in the public sphere.
When our system was created in the 1950s and ’60s, he says, it ensured that governments paid for acute care, for hospitals and for doctors. Drug costs? Chronic care? Physiotherapy? All of it, and more, falls outside the government envelope. It’s been that way for 50 years, but to suggest otherwise is to border on heresy.
“We have clung to that model with absolute tenacity, even in the face of evidence that it is no longer the right model,” Mr. Dodge says. He outlined some ways in which the system could be changed, then apologized if his speech was starting to sound a little prosaic.
“But it kind of has to be prosaic,” he added. “Unless we get it off the emotional, we’re never going to solve the damn problems.”
The budget crunch won’t be addressed by piping in more money, he says. “Forty years ago, if your knee was bad, we gave you a cane,” as Mr. Dodge put it. Today, when more costly treatment is available, it is inevitably done.
Most important, he says, health care needs to be considered comprehensively, “not just hospitals and docs,” with the public system including a broad range of services such as chronic care and home care.
If all aspects of health care were under the public umbrella, people would “be able to use the services and the provider that are most appropriate,” he says. “Right now, all of the incentives for both doctor and patient are to use the very expensive acute-care system. But in many cases there is more effective delivery outside the acute-care system.” Specialist clinics over hospitals, in other words.
But the broadening of the system, though it would help find efficiencies, would burden the taxpayer unless reforms were part of the plan.
Which brings us back, again, to that adult conversation that no one wants to have.
*
So, let's ask Liberal MPP Jim Bradley about Dodge's comments.
After all, Jim Bradley is a practising single-payer-pushing health-care monopolist, who has made a comfortable career maintaining that rigid, unsustainable status-quo. Do we need 'all aspects of health care to be under the public umbrella'?!
Will Jim Bradley ever have this 'adult conversation' publicly with David Dodge about the issues raised here?
For several elections now, secretive Bradley hasn't bothered to have one with the St.Catharines Standard!
*

Where are Niagara's trauma patients "ending up"?

2011-12-07T03:37:00.001-05:00

John Robbins wrote in Niagara This Week, Dec.6, 2011:

Unlike many remote parts of Ontario, Niagara has the benefit of being located close to a well-equipped trauma centre just across the river in Buffalo.
But despite that fact, it seems few patients are actually transported directly from the scene of an accident by land ambulance to Erie County Medical Center.
How few?
In his more than 14 years serving as a paramedic in Welland, Niagara Falls, Fort Erie and Port Colborne, Timothy Harrold has never taken a patient directly to ECMC, regardless of the extent of the person’s injuries.
And part of reason for it has to do with the rules governing cross-border patient transfers, Harrold told a coroner’s inquest in Welland on Monday.
“We can’t cross into the United States without permission,” said Harrold, the Niagara Emergency Medical Services acting supervisor on the night of Dec. 26, 2009 when 18-year-old Reilly Anzovino was critically injured in a car accident on Highway 3 near Nigh Road in Fort Erie.
Harrold was in Niagara Falls at the time the dispatch call was received, but he immediately asked to be assigned to the call given the seriousness of the accident and the fact there were multiple patients involved.
Arriving around midnight, Harrold took command of the accident scene and set about determining which patients should be transported to which hospitals.
Having spoken with the paramedic caring for Anzovino, who was by this time already in an ambulance, Harrold decided the most logical place for Anzovino to be transported was the nearest Canadian emergency department, located at Welland County General Hospital to the north-west of the accident scene.
While he briefly considered sending Anzovino to the trauma centre at ECMC, he soon ruled out a cross-border transfer.
The inquest has heard previously an air ambulance had been requested, but was grounded due to poor weather conditions.
Harrold testfied before sending Anzovino to ECMC he would have had to obtain permission from a emergency physician at the base hospital in Hamilton and the doctor evaluating the request would have required a “head-to-toe assessment” of the patient’s condition before granting the request.
Given the length of time the ambulance had already been on location at the scene of the crash and the foggy and icy conditions he figured were likely worse closer to Buffalo, Harrold said it was agreed the best place to transport Anzovino was Welland County General.
Although Port Colborne General hospital and Fort Erie’s Douglas Memorial hospital were closer than Welland, emergency departments at those two facilities had been converted to urgent care centres months prior to the accident as part of a larger restructuring of hospital services in Niagara.
One of the main issues the five-member inquest jury has been asked to consider is whether the closure of the ERs in Fort Erie and Port Colborne played a role in Anzovino’s death.
Even if those ERs hadn’t been shuttered, in Harrold’s opinion a patient suffering from life-threatening internal injuries, as Anzovino was, would still have been better off going to Welland County General hospital, where emergency surgery can be performed and doctors have access to advanced diagnostic imaging equipment, such as a CT scanner.
Dr. Jack Stanborough, the regional coroner who is presiding over the inquest, seemed surprised to hear that Harrold had never taken an accident victim directly to a ECMC during his career.
“I don’t get the sense Niagara trauma patients are ending up at trauma centres,” Stanborough said."
*

So, then: where are Niagara's trauma patients "ending up"? Dead??

Somehow, Helen Harris, a former St.Catharines city hall employee, did end up in a Buffalo hospital (and not in any Ontario hospital); she died. How and why did that happen? No one knows. There was no inquiry: it might have led to embarrassing questions about the shortage of medical facilities in Niagara courtesy of McGuinty's health monopoly.
Jim Bradley won't say anything about the American health system, except, of course, being the proud Liberal he is, to smugly demonize and denigrate it - while Ontarians are heading to the States for health care.
Is the issue here about cross-border medical co-operation, so that Ontarians from McGuinty's single-payer health-care nirvava can access American health care facilities, or is the issue about how McGuinty's ideological, rigid Liberal single-payer health-care monopolism has harmed the ability of Ontarians to have the best care here at home?
The problem is not Buffalo; the problem is McGuinty's disastrous Liberal bait-and-switch health-care monopolism.
*

McGuinty's Liberals created Niagara's HIP

2011-12-06T23:54:00.001-05:00

Why do St.Catharines Standard editors allow stories (such as Ray Spiteri's Dec.6, 2011 article about the on-going Anzovino inquest, "Ambulance waits at ERs continue") to propagate half-truths about who created the Niagara HIP?

The Sun Media Niagara Liberal Propaganda Unit (...hey, ya got that, Mr. Liberal Kinsella??) keeps on purposefully omitting the fact that the HIP was forced onto the NHS by George Smitherman, McGuinty's Liberal health minister!!

Spiteri knows it; as does the Bradley Fan Club at the Standard.

{After all, even the Standard's Grant Lafleche had actually reported in a Jan.3, 2009 story that "the Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) ordered the NHS to come up with an improvement plan to address its inability to balance its budget"!}

Why is Spiteri only providing a disingenuous partial view of the truth? The NHS did what McGuinty's Liberals ordered them to do!

Why, then, are McGuinty's Liberals not mentioned in Spiteri's story?!

After all, Spiteri did bother to mention that the Fort Erie and Port Colborne ER's were "downgraded" as "part of a controversial restructuring plan by the NHS", but... ooooooppsie... Spiteri conveniently forgot to mention WHY this downgrade happened, or, WHO asked for it to be made!!!

The point of such (deceptive) media spin is to keep linking the "controversial" HIP to the NHS, but not to the Liberals who had demanded and instigated the HIP's creation!!

Spiteri's story doesn't even tell readers why the HIP restructuring was so "controversial", in the first place; we're just supposed to 'know'!!! The more we are led to believe by the media that the 'controversy' is about the NHS, the less we will see the real complicity of McGuinty's monopolist Liberals.

Somehow, Spiteri just forgot (haha!) to mention the entire lead-in prologue-part of this 'controversial restructuring' story: that it was the LHIN - yes, Smitherman's Liberal-created LHIN - which demanded that the NHS create a restructuring plan, in order to reduce, so to speak, its (monopolist-state-controlled) "deficit"; and that it was the Liberal government which closed the Fort Erie and Port Colborne ERs!

Of course, Spiteri knows this, as do the Liberal-Friendly Bradley Boosters at the Standard!

And: Spiteri and his Standard editors purposefully neglected to mention that it was McGuinty's Liberal LHIN which not only forced the NHS to create the HIP, but then subsequently also APPROVED the HIP restructuring plan for implementation!

Of course, Spiteri and his editors know full well that the NHS did not initiate the HIP, and, Spiteri and his editors also know that the NHS did not approve the HIP for implementation. McGuinty's Liberals did that: McGuinty's Liberals instigated the HIP, and, McGuinty's Liberals then approved the HIP.

But why print the entire truth, when a Liberal-friendly half-truth can be neatly spun so as not to involve unpleasant questions about Jim Bradley, Kim Craitor, and their their monopolist Liberal health care policies!

What blatantly subtle Liberal-friendly propaganda - the kind of stuff Prof. Moon wrote about!
*

Smitherman's secretive Samsung stench still stinks

2011-12-06T03:19:00.001-05:00

Well, Ontario's auditor Jim McCarter had a bit to say, amongst other items, about the McGuinty Liberals' spending splurges, as Lee Greenberg wrote:

"The report says the same lack of analysis in the green energy program overall was evidenced in the signing of a $7-billion deal with a Korean consortium led by Samsung.
“No economic analysis or business case was done to determine whether the agreement with the consortium was economically prudent and cost-effective and neither the Ontario Energy Board nor the OPA was consulted about the agreement,” the report states."

Yeah, read that: "lack of analysis"; "no business case was done"; no consultation with the OEB or OPA - on a 7 billion dollar "deal" which was forced onto Ontario by the politics of GreenFear, peddled by incompetent Liberal hacks such as Jim Bradley, Kim Craitor, and Dalton McGuinty, and former loud-mouth Liberal enablers such as Joe Fontana.

Of course, a lot of this despotic GreenStink originated from the piehole of former Liberal deputy premier and Samsung-sweetheart-deal-maker energy minister George Smitherman. See the Nov.1, 2009 Star story where Smitherman was smugly dismissing concerns over his Samsung sweetheat deal - the same concerns which two years later have now become FACT in McCarter's report, and which amply demonstrate the fiasco Smitherman started.

Oh, well... McCarter's report just brings up another set of questions which Wendy Metcalfe's 'wrong-righting' St.Catharines Standard reporters will now carefully make sure they won't ask Jim Bradley about.
*
In the Dec.6, 2011 St.Catharines Standard, there was - predictably - no interview, no comment, no story at all regarding Jim Bradley's reactions to auditor McCarter's report!! Now, that's some real good 'wrong-righting' by Wendy Metcalfe's Standard!!
*

Niagara press ignores Jim Bradley's Liberal energy rip-off

2011-12-02T23:33:00.001-05:00

It's funny how the Dec.2, 2011 St.Catharines Standard runs Jonathan Jenkin's celebratory story about the closure of two generating units at Nanticoke, without mentioning that Dalton McGuinty's lying Liberals had promised - and broken their promises - to close ALL of Ontario's coal generation plants by 2007!

OOOPs! We done bin jes' plain ole plumb fergot 'bout dat!!

The Standard dutifully carried this story, which did not include any response on the issue from the opposition: all we had in this typical one-sided story was stenography and blather from Liberal Chris Bentley.

It's funny how Wendy Metcalfe's gang of 'wrong-righters' at the St.Catharines Standard can't seem to get around to asking Bentley - or even their local Liberal bestbuddy, Environment Minister Jim Bradley - about the subject which this Dec.2, 2011 National Post article by Parker Gallant dealt with.
The St.Catharines Standard HAS NEVER really bothered to seriously take their Liberal MPP Jim Bradley to task for any of his Liberal energy fiascoes, have they? They have eagerly parroted and peddled Jim Bradley's GreeenFear agenda from the start; we just saw a bit more of that in Susan Batsford's scary (and, note: carefully pre-Durban-timed!! hahahaha) "world Co2 emissions" graphs in the Dec.1, 2011 Standard, pg.D8.

Wendy Metcalfe's Liberal-friendly Standard "newsroom" never has bothered to, and apparently never will, ask their GreenGod Jim Bradley about... oh.... let's see, claims such as:

The Ontario government is hiding the fact that adding intermittent wind and solar production to the province’s baseload generation capacity has done nothing more then drive up the price of a basic need and benefited companies in New York and elsewhere.
This is not a new development. Last January, the Toronto Star reported that “Ontario electricity customers have subsidized power exports to the tune of $1-billion since 2006.”

The St.Catharines Standard hasn't bothered to wrote much about that: why??!!

No interviews about that with local Liberal Jim Bradley: why???!!

Electricity prices are going through the roof under McGuinty's energy-fiasco regime - yet we in Liberal Ontario are forced to subsidize GreenFear-generated power which McGuinty then essentially gives away to the States!!!

"That loss is paid by Ontario ratepayers. The exports keep costs up, not down. The real cost of electricity is buried in an arcane pricing structure that seems to have been designed to hide the facts.
The provinces and states purchasing Ontario’s surplus electricity don’t have to pay the full cost of building, maintaining and expanding Ontario’s out-of-control electricity regime. On top of the so-called market price for electricity, Ontario ratepayers must foot the bill for Ontario’s multi-faceted politically micro-managed power system. All these other costs are accumulated and calculated under an accounting conceit called the “Global Adjustment” (GA).
According to the IESO, the Global Adjustment includes “the rates paid to regulated and contracted generators and for conservation and demand management programs.” In such few words are packed a multitude of hidden costs.
The market price, based on trades in the wholesale market among major generators and buyers, is merely the base for a series of Global Adjustment add-ons. The average market price of 2.98¢ must be adjusted to pay for electricity the province has contracted to buy at above-market prices. Wind power generation is paid at 13.5¢ a kWh and solar at 80¢ a kWh. Another cost is the province’s policy of paying generating companies not to produce electricity. If wind power is being generated, displacing gas plants, the government pays gas plants not to produce electricity.
All these costs add up. The Ontario Power Authority reports that the GA for the 12 months to the end of October 2011 exceeded $5.1-billion, or about 30% of total system revenue of about $14.5-billion
Here’s a rough breakdown of the key GA electricity price add-ons:
Non-utility generation (NUG) Private companies that hold long-term contracts to provide power to the system (hydro, gas, biomass). Many of these are money-losing legacy contracts that the province is obligated to honour and are held by an off-balance-sheet operation called the Ontario Electricity Finance Corp. Total NUG payments: $1.06-billion.
Nuclear generation and certain hydro power Nuclear plants are guaranteed an average 5.58$, and receive the bulk of this GA payment of $1.28-billion.
Renewable energy Payment of special 13.5¢ and 80¢ feed-in tariffs for wind and solar, plus the cost of paying standby gas plants to not produce electricity, accounts for the largest portion of the Global Adjustment: $2.8-billion.
The power sold for export fetched only 3.38¢ per kWh over the past 10 months, which means Ontario ratepayers picked up 3.62¢ to cover the GA costs for wind, solar, nuclear and other electricity sources. In effect, the $375.3-million in revenue generated selling “surplus” electricity cost ratepayers another $420-million (11,100,000 MWh times the average GA). Put another way, ratepayers in Ontario paid 3.8¢ per kWh so out-of-province electricity buyers would take our surplus power.
The benefit is no benefit. If the exported electricity (equal to about 25% of total Ontario residential demand) had not been produced and sold, ratepayers would have saved $420-million. How can the ministry claim selling our surplus power at a subsidized cost per kWh of 3.8¢ helps to “Keep costs down for families”?"
*
'Keep costs down'?!
Jimmy'n Kimmy laugh at that!!!
In Niagara, we can bet that the St.Catharines Standard won't be asking their Liberal friends about any of that, let alone report about it!!!
As far as the Liberal friendly press in Niagara goes, why, Ole Jimmy thare's gots nuttin' ta do wid dis stuff: nuttin, ya hear!?!
Yep: Liberals Jim Bradley and Kim Craitor are exporting electricity at a loss, dumping Ontario's over-taxed, expensive power to the States; forcing us to subsidize this exported electricity to the tune of a billion dollars since 2006 - all the while pretending that this is all somehow Green and Good!!
...and not a word from Wendy Metcalfe's Standard gang, or Mike Williscraft's Niagara This Week gang, about it!!!
Disgusting.
*
Check Lee Greenberg's Dec.5, 2011 Ottawa Citizen story for what Ontario's auditor Jim McCarter had to say about McGuinty's laughable greenie plans. (funny how this stuff wasn't revealed prior to the Oct. election, eh?!) You can bet that no St.Catharines Standard 'wrong-righter' will ever dare to ask Jim Bradley about his Liberal green scam!!
*

Niagara Falls subverts own smoking by-law; Environment Minister Bradley missing in action

2011-12-01T01:50:00.001-05:00

Ray Spiteri reported in the Niagara Falls Review:

"City council has agreed to allow for three smoking areas outside the Scotiabank Convention Centre.

The decision flies in the face of Niagara Falls' bylaw prohibiting smoking on any land or building owned by the city.
Politicians amended the bylaw at the request of convention centre management.
"Despite our best efforts, it has proven futile to enforce the non-smoking directive," Kerry Painter, the centre's president and general manager, said in a letter to city hall.
"We have guests that pay a great deal of money to rent our spaces, many of whom come from areas which allow smoking and are, therefore, not cognizant of any regulations to the contrary."
Painter said the centre has received "many complaints" the bylaw is "impeding our guests who smoke, many of whom have a limited few minutes to take a break during their conference schedule and it is not feasible for them to walk out to the boulevard or to their own vehicles to smoke."
She said as the centre continues to try and "woo new markets" such as Europe and China, the current bylaw will "become a growing challenge."
Coun. Joyce Morocco did not back the amendment, saying she supports healthy living and that the bylaw should be consistent.
Coun. Wayne Thomson said he thinks the decision will likely result in other requests for an exemption, but that the convention centre is unique.
"The only reason the city name is on that property is for financial reasons, so they don't have to pay taxes," said Thomson. "The city did not pay for it. It was all private sector and government (federal and provincial) grants, so it's not really a city building."
He said private buildings have an advantage because the bylaw doesn't apply to them.

"The convention centre is in competition with every other convention centre to try and get business here. The convention centre is inviting people for conventions from outside the city and they're not familiar with the laws. If you tell them there's no smoking, you've lost yourself a convention."

City clerk Dean Iorfida said enforcing the no-smoking bylaw is difficult because a bylaw officer is not always at sites when an infraction occurs. He said the intent of the bylaw is more so to bring about a change in public behaviour."
*
What a bunch of hypocrites in Niagara Falls' Diodativille council: now city hall is planning to create exemptions to the new (and apparently, not too busy...) Scotia Bank convention centre from the city's own non-smoking bylaw!

Let's see: will anyone ask local Liberal Environment Minister Jim Bradley (or Kim Craitor) - you know: the MPP's who proudly proclaim they're part of that 'CleanAir' McGuinty crowd - about this move to placate smokers on public property?

We all know how McGuinty's holier-than-thou Liberals sneer at smokers, while collecting their taxes!! This convention centre was built with millions of federal and provincial tax dollars - why aren't the feds or the province speaking up??

Why has no one from the Niagara Falls Review bothered to ask Jim Bradley about what his municipal-Liberal colleague Mayor Diodati's council is doing? Aren't the comments from Ontario's Environment Minister of any relevance here?! Why wasn't any comment from local MPP Kim Craitor made available in the story? Anyone bother to ask these Liberals?

Looks like smoking is now touted in Niagara Falls as being good for business - so they're getting 'unique' exemptions from the city's (apparently phony) non-smoking by-law!

Is this the kind of duplicitous, smoky international environmental image of the Honeymoon Capital which Ontario's Liberal Environment Minister Jim Bradley intends to uphold - just before the Holy Green Durban Climate Festival, no less?!?!

Good Gaia, Jim: do something!! Diodati's council will become complicit in enabling smoker's dependency and diseases, not to mention that they'll also be Destroying Mother Earth! Is that what McGuinty's Liberals want to see Liberal Jim Diodati's council do?! This is a slap in the face of the Kyoto Protocol!

Why isn't Environment Minister Jim Bradley forcing Jim Diodati's council to first undergo a lengthy series of multi-phase environmental-impact studies before such an exemption could be made?

Why isn't Ontario's Environment Minister Jim Bradley demanding that Diodati and his council reveal the carbon-foot-print and pollution damage to The Planet as a result of this move, as well as provide in-depth studies of the climate-change and global-warming impacts that their exemption will cause??

How many severe weather events and storms will this by-law exemption cause, Mr. Bradley? Do you know? Do you care?

How many floods, droughts, earthquakes, heat waves and hurricanes will be caused by the Diodati council's flaunting of their own non-smoking by-law, Mr. Bradley?

C'mon there Jim Bradley: stop hiding and publicly endorse - or publicly condemn - what Niagara Falls' faux-green mayor Jim Diodati and his council are now doing!!

Where are you, Mister Enviro-Hypocrite Bradley? Looking the other way?
*

McGuinty's Liberal Environment Minister Jim Bradley fails to defend Kyoto Protocol

2011-11-29T23:20:00.001-05:00

Further to my previous post...

... why hasn't McGuinty's Liberal Environment Minister, Jim 'Kyodiot' Bradley, publicly appeared defending his Liberal government's shoddy so-called commitments to their beloved Kyoto Protocol??

Where is Ontario's Environment Minister Bradley?!

Gosh: back in 2002, Jim Bradley had us all practically believing that he himself gave birth to Kyoto; well... that... and that the planet would be destroyed if we didn't heed Bradley's GreenFear edicts.

Why has McGuinty's Environment Minister Jim Bradley now abandoned and forsaken the Environment?

Where are you Jim? The Kyoto Protocol - the fruit of your Liberal loins - is calling for your help!

Where have you disappeared, Jim Bradley, when the 'Planet is in Peril' (as the St.Catharines Standard often propagandized)? Are you waiting for further instructions from David Suzuki, perhaps?

We now have the federal NDP taking over Bradley's job as wackjob greensocialism pushers, as can be seen in Kristy Kirkup's Nov.29, 2011 St.Catharines Standard article, below, which - of course - DOES NOT MENTION JIM BRADLEY!!!!!!

Un-FLICKING BELIEVABLE!! [...Jim who? ...Bradley...?? ...who's that??] Hahahahahahahahahaah

The St.Catharines Standard hasn't bothered to mention Jim Bradley yet, in any story regarding anything about Durban or Kyoto... and Bradley (...oh, did I mention that he's Ontario's Environment Minister?!) is the MPP in their own city!!!!

In her article, Kirkup somehow manages to mention everyone BUT Jim Bradley - who, after all, had been Ontario's head Kyoto pusher in 2002!!!

So, you'd think someone would interview Ole Jimmy 'bout that!! Oh... yeah... and, by the way... did I mention that Bradley is THE ENVIRONMENT MINISTER OF CANADA'S LARGEST PROVINCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yet, no one bothers to mention the guy!

The funniest lines of flabbergastingly pompous outrage reported by Kirkup were from the NDP, who are now actually stealing the Crown Of Smug Climate Outrage from Liberals such as Jim Bradley:

"Kyoto's time has come and gone, according to Canada's environment minister.
Peter Kent said the international Kyoto treaty on climate change is "the past" at an Ottawa press conference Monday, but he wouldn't officially confirm to reporters Canada is pulling out of the agreement.
The minister said he plans to work with other countries at a climate summit in Durban, South Africa, to reach a new treaty that would include all major polluters. The summit kicked off Monday, but Kent is set to join the talks next week. Representatives from 190 countries are participating in the conference.
"We're going to Durban to work in common cause with the other parties to the convention to advance a new climate change agreement, binding eventually, which will engage all emitters in both the developed and the developing countries," Kent said.
In 1997, Canada pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 2012 to 6% below 1990 levels. At a climate change summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Canada agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 17% by 2020.
Canada, Japan and Russia have already confirmed they will not take on "new commitments" under the Kyoto Protocol. The treaty is the only legally binding agreement that requires reductions on greenhouse gas emissions.
The NDP says "Canadians are flabbergasted to find out the Conservatives want to break our solemn commitment on the Kyoto protocol," and claims the government is abandoning its "legal and moral obligations."
The Opposition's environment critic admits Kyoto targets are not currently respected but says they are symbolically important.
"The fact that we will be the only country who has signed on and then walked away from it, it's a symbol of cynicism and a symbol of disrespect," said NDP environment critic Megan Leslie.
Leslie said the NDP plans to send a representative to the talks in Durban."

The Dippers are now using the same kind of pious stand-up climate-comedy lines which climate-clown Stephane Dion and his imploding Liberals had once been delivering.

Now the socialists are braying smugly about 'Canadians being flabbergasted', and about abandonment, and about solemn promises, and about climate morality - this is the same kind of climatalarmist GreenFear-garbage which could have just as easily spewed from Liberal Jim Bradley's mouth! It's boilerplate GreenFear bull. It's funny stuff, in its own pathetic way, really.

So why has Liberal MPP Jim Bradley abdicated his obligation to fight for the Glory That Is Kyoto?

Why is McGuinty's Environment Minister shirking his responsibilities, and not defending his Great Green love, that Great Work That Is Kyoto?

Why is it the Dippers - and not Jim Bradley - who will be ~~polluting their way~~ flying to Durban, to Save Mother Earth From Climate Perdition?

When will Ontario's Liberal Environment Minister Jim Bradley publicly respond to the Kyoto Protocol issues raised in articles such as:

- Terence Corcoran's "Door already shut on Kyoto"
or
- Peter Foster's "The left's climate moralism"
or
- Tasha Kheiriddin's "Just say no to Kyoto" ??

C'mon, there, Ontario Environment Minister Jim Bradley: stop hiding and reveal yourself for the Liberal Kyoto-hypocrite that you have always been.
*

Liberal Environment Minister Jim Bradley's years of Kyoto-pushing waste

2011-11-29T18:37:00.001-05:00

Further to my previous post...
...Michael Den Tandt wrote in "Of course, Canada ditched ramshackle, bloated Kyoto commitments", (Montreal Gazette, Nov.29, 2011):

"We didn't get it done," wailed Michael Ignatieff about Canada's lacklustre, ineffectual attempts to meet this country's Kyoto Protocol carbon emission targets, back when the Liberal government of Jean Chretien was serious about pretending it took climate change seriously.

Ignatieff was, of course, spot on: Ottawa's Kyoto commitments died on the operating table in the waning years of Chretien's third term, as the first of three Canadian prime ministers came to realize that implementing Kyoto faithfully would doom the oilpatch and Canada's economic future with it. None of Chretien's Kyoto plans had teeth.

Which raises the question: How can the Liberals continue to holler about Kyoto today, as though they were the treaty's greatest champions? After promising to adopt it, it was they themselves who kicked it to the curb.

In 2002-03, far more than now, a clear disavowal of Kyoto would have been politically disastrous in centrist Ontario and left-leaning Quebec. Who in his or her right mind could be seen to be against saving the planet?

So prime ministers Chretien and Paul Martin in turn adopted the same clever, disingenuous policy: Pay careful lip service to the religion of global warming (because to do otherwise incites the theological fury of the true believers) but move sure-footedly to ensure that neither Canadian industry nor consumers pay a measurable price, for which you'd be blamed later at the polls. It worked not too badly, until sponsorship came along.

In 2006, Stephen Harper inherited Chretien's strategy and refined it. The Harper government in all but name withdrew from Kyoto on Day One. Conservatives have continued to gamely insist they believe enthusiastically in the battle against climate change — because that's what the strategy requires. Unlike the Liberals, though, they never bothered to even try to persuade us they would slash Canada's GHG emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, as Kyoto requires.

Here's what both Liberals and Tories would say about climate change, if they were being honest.

The Kyoto Protocol has not mattered globally since 2001, when President George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew for the United States. Even before then, this ramshackle, bloated attempt at global engineering was dead on arrival because of the non-participation of China, India and Brazil, among other huge and fast-growing economies.

Why did Kyoto sacrifice never really take off in Canada? It's not complicated: We have a conflict of interest. According to Statistics Canada, households directly or indirectly contribute about half the country's emissions. We do that by driving cars and heating homes, and by consuming products or services created with the use of fossil fuels.

As both home insulation and cars become more energy efficient, you'd think, emissions must fall. And they do. But economic growth acts as a counter. Between 1990 and 2004, for example, the intensity of Canadian household greenhouse gas emissions decreased by more than 20 per cent. But a 25-per-cent increase in household spending over the same period offset any GHG reductions.

In other words: where there are jobs there are emissions, in equal measure. The only surefire way of slashing emissions across an entire economy is to have a deep and lasting economic collapse, as happened to the former Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Former Liberal leader Stephane Dion's Green Shift, which he rode into a wall in 2008, was a sincere but politically naive attempt to de-carbonize the Canadian economy by applying monetary levers to the habits of ordinary Canadians. It was offered as a given that said transformation was a necessary and good thing. Dion's plan went supernova because he asked that Canadians accept a lower standard of living — in the form of higher real prices for energy — in exchange for his vision.

But now even that old discussion is being superseded. The skeptical science, for years confined to the scruffy margins by the International Panel on Climate Change and its supporters, took a huge leap forward earlier this year with the discovery by no less than the CERN laboratories, based in Switzerland — arguably the most prestigious scientific group in the world — that fluctuations in the sun's magnetic field have a very large, perhaps dominant effect on the earth's climate.

If further study bears this out, then policymakers will soon be left with the rather stunning conclusion that all of it — Kyoto, Copenhagen, Durban — has mainly been a waste. Even as that work begins, the CERN findings are steadily trickling through the blogosphere, quietly altering the political discussion everywhere — including in Canada, beyond Ottawa."
*
Finally, Den Tandt mentions Chretien's Liberal climate duplicity. About time.

It's funny, eh, how the St.Catharines Standard, just before Durban, happens to... umm... suddenly lose all contact [!] with their local Liberal MPP, Jim 'Save-The-Planet' Bradley, who back in 2002 was one of Dalton McGuinty's chief Kyoto agitators in Ontario! (...and the Standard, of course, was one of Bradley's chief Liberal-policy trumpeters, doing their best to keep the Save-The-Planet Greenshevism alive).

Funny how there are no interviews today in the Standard with Bradley's like-minded federal colleague, former local Liberal MP Walt Lastewka, about the failure-from-day-one of his Liberal's climate charade.

Funny how there are NO interviews in the St.Catharines Standard with Good Ole Jimmy about his years of deceptive GreenFear-pushing Climate Doomsday Statism!

Funny that in the last... what... twenty years, at least... the Standard has never really bothered to examine their own local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley's GreenFear motivations and policies - even after dedicating a laughable token 'GreenTeam' at the height of the Al Gore-a-Palooza craze and Stephane Bumbledore Dion's shifty green Carnival of Climate Crapola.

Funny how the BradleyBootlickers in Niagara's press now can't find Bradley for his response to the slow, sad realization that his Liberal policies were an utter "waste".

Funny, how the St.Catharines Standard never carried a story examining Jim Bradley's man-made AGW global-warming "evidence", and his years of GreenFear agitation, even in context of the steady ClimateGate revelations! It's as if Ole Jimmy had never been involved in spreading GreenFear, ever!

Funny how the local press can't find responses from local Greenie-pushers like St.Catharines mayor Brian McFullofit, as well as many of Niagara Region's GreenFear political practitioner-opportunists, who fell for and merrily propagated Al Gore's and Dion's and Bradley's GreenFear baseless bullsh!t.

What a waste, indeed.
*

Kyoto: kaput! [...again...]

2011-11-29T03:43:00.001-05:00

The National Post (Nov.29, 2011) wrote in "Say it: Kyoto is dead":
"Shed no tears for the Kyoto Protocol: It was doomed to failure from the get-go. Scores of countries signed the 1997 global-warming treaty, but its carbon-emission limitations were binding only on the very richest of them. The world's two largest emitters - China and the United States - refused to accept any limits. Even most of the nations of Europe, whose leaders spoke of Kyoto's provisions as holy writ, never made the hard economic sacrifices necessary to meet their commitments. To get under their limits, they relied on accounting gimmicks, such as artificially low emission benchmarks dating from the coal-belching Cold War period.
Environmentalists imagine that Kyoto was a sort of bonding moment for the world's nations. In fact, it was an exercise in multilateral cynicism, with each group of nations tying to extract advantage through green posturing. The developing countries, including China, were happy that the treaty would handcuff the industrialized world's economic expansion until they caught up. The Europeans wanted it set up in such a way that they could boast
about their environmental bona fides without doing anything. And the Russians wanted everyone else to be bound by CO 2 limits because they had plenty of unused emission credits they wanted to sell for billions to guilt-ridden Western governments. No one was willing to make the massive, economy crippling measures that would be required to actually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as replacing cheap carbon-based fuel en masse with more expensive renewable fuels.
Even if all the world's nations had somehow found some magical method for meeting their emission limits, the most the environmental treaty could have accomplished would have been to delay the total 21stcentury warming projected by scientists by a decade or less. The Earth would have warmed as much under Kyoto, just at a slightly slower rate.
All of which to say: We aren't distressed by rumours that Canada will soon withdraw from the protocol. Indeed, we hope those rumours are true. Since no Canadian government - either Liberal or Conservative - ever made any serious effort to cut emissions in compliance with our treaty obligations, there will be no effect in terms of actual energy policy in this country. And as noted above, even if there were, it wouldn't make much of a difference. The only effect of abandoning Kyoto would be that we would be striking a blow for intellectual honesty over cynical green flag-waving.
We would not be alone in effectively rejecting Kyoto. The Americans never ratified the treaty: Democrats and Republicans both refused in nearly equal numbers to hobble their economy with unrealistic emission reduction targets. The Australians followed suit in 2002, announcing that there was no way they would ratify, because doing so would hurt the economy. The Japanese voted to "accept" (but not ratify) Kyoto's reduction targets, then passed a law announcing those targets would not be legally binding either on companies or consumers.
Kyoto runs out next year. And the upcoming Durban summit has little hope of achieving a worldwide eco-treaty to succeed it. World leaders have lost all their 1997-era illusions about their ability to escape coal and oil, and about the motivations of the other members of the community of nations. Plus, a weak global economy (far weaker than it was in 1997) has destroyed any appetite for painful green initiatives among middle-class voters in countries such as Canada and the United States.
The hubristic idea that Canada has some critical role to play in saving the Kyoto process, which has been promoted in the Canadian media in recent days, is silly and naïve - a pathetic vestige of the 1990s-era soft-power fantasy that we could change the world through moral suasion. Kyoto will die whatever Canada does. No one in Washington or Beijing truly cares much whether we stay or go, whatever this or that press release may claim.
Many columnists in this newspaper have expressed skepticism regarding the scientific consensus that global warming is real, that it is caused in large part by the emission of green house gases by human economic activity, and that this presents a major problem that the world will have to deal with in coming generations. But even if one accepts the science behind Kyoto, the last 14 years demonstrate that top-down emission-reductions are not the answer. To the extent Prime Minister Stephen Harper has the courage to say this publicly, and formally withdraw from Kyoto, he should get credit for admitting a hard truth that other world leaders know, but will not admit."
*

Let's remember that Liberal Jean Chretien was Canada's chief federal kyodiot; and let's remember that Good Ole Greenshevist Liberal MPP Jim Bradley was happily spreading his GreenFear on the provincial level throughout Ontario - even though Bradley had never publicly revealed which specific "global-warming evidence" compelled him to believe that socialism will 'cure' AGW!
After several decades of GreenFear agitation, Liberal Jim Bradley is still keeping his "global warming" evidence secret!!
So, let's hear Dalton McGuinty's deceptive Liberal Environment Minister Jim Bradley now bitterly complain about Kyoto's obituary (...and no, that's not about Stephane Bumbledore Dion's dog...)
*

Isn't Ontario's Liberal Environment Minister Bradley flying to Durban, to Save The Planet?

2011-11-28T18:12:00.001-05:00

Further to my previous post...

...why haven't reporters such as Bolichowski - or any of the St.Catharines Standard's Metcalfian gaggle of self-appointed 'wrong-righters' - asked their local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley [...when they had the chance to...] whether or not Bradley will be flying to Durban this week for the annual UN GreenFear IPCC climate orgy? After all, Jim Bradley is McGuinty's Environment Minister!

Have we forgotten about the times, back in 2009, when:
- Bradley's Liberal leader, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, was spinning his Liberal climate-fear lies;
-when McGuinty was attacking Canada's federal gov't;
-when McGuinty was sending Liberal climate-fear agents such as eco-tax-fiasco goof John Gerretsen abroad to foment climate fear Kyodiotism, with the partisan intent to cause dissention and international embarrassment to Canada;
-when McGuinty was saying things like...

“I think it was a missed opportunity for us as a people, as a species, frankly” and “I think we failed to find a way to come together, and in a sincere and determined fashion come to grips with a global threat: climate change.”

... with a straight face?!!

We should remember the predictable and obligatory climate change / global warming GreenFear that was eagerly spread around Niagara by greenie propagandists at the St.Catharines Standard and Niagara This Week, often conveniently timed prior to the exotic GreenFear orgies which the UN or Rajendra Pachauri's climate cabalistas were hosting. Ahhhh... those good ole days... when Jim Bradley's Liberals, strutting not just around Ontario, but on the world stage, were able to get away with trumpeting their half-cocked climate non-truths, conveniently without question, with the fawning press gladly eating it up!

Gosh: now, in Nov.2011, we have Ontario's chief global warming propagandist - Good Ole Liberal MPP Jim Bradley - installed as Ontario's redux Environment Minister, so, why hasn't any Standard reporter bothered to ask Ole Jimmy about whether Ole Jimmy's gonna grace Durban's climate stage, and be lauded and feted with all the pomp and circumstantial-evidence which the forces of Global GreenFear can muster?!?

Isn't "climate change" (whatever that means - or ever meant - to Bradley's and McGuinty's unique Liberal sub-species) still a "global threat", as they had previously claimed??!!

If so, then WHY ISN'T LIBERAL PREMIER DALTON McGUINTY HIMSELF flying to Durban to fight for Jim Bradley's oh-so-beloved Kyoto Protocol??

Why aren't Ontario's climate-change GreenFear-peddling Liberals McGuinty or Bradley jetting off to Durban to 'Save The Planet', as surely David Suzuki must have wanted them to do?!

Why isn't the St.Catharines Standard now issuing the clarion call, demanding that Jim Bradley immediately attend the COP17 Climate Charade Fest, in order to 'Save The Planet'?

Where is the outrage from the Standard, at how Jim Bradley's and Dalton McGuinty's Liberals have Forsaken Mother Earth?

Where's all that promised 'wrong-righting' from Wendy Metcalfe's St.Catharines Standard?! [...or did she actually mean to say 'Jim Bradley Liberal-butt-protecting'...?]

Doesn't Jim Bradley care about The Planet anymore?!? Aren't Jim Bradley and Dalton McGuiity betraying humanity?!

It's amazing how the same media which trumpeted and bullhorned the doomsday climate deceptions peddled by the likes of Jim Bradley, still can't find the time to question and scrutinize Jim Bradley's discredited GreenFear deceptions - or examine their own hypocritical complicity in willingly spreading the GreenFear.

Ooooops... well... let's just forget about all those climate change / global warming GreenFear articles we've written over the years, championing without question the green bolshevism from the likes of Jim Bradley, Al Gore, and the IPCC!!!
*

Jim 'Liberal Douchebag' Bradley

2011-11-27T21:55:00.001-05:00

There was a nice, smug quote from Liberal scumbag MPP Jim Bradley in the Nov.26, 2011 St.Catharines Standard, where Douchebag Jim tells us that the new HST tax which his Liberals chose to impose on home-heating-fuel consumers "would cost the Treasury some $350 million".

Isn't that funny, how kyodiot Bradley now spins this?!

It's NOT "costing the Treasury", Jim, you lying Liberal scumbag: it's costing us, the people who use fuel to heat our homes!! We are paying 350 million dollars MORE for fuel - because of YOUR Suzukiite greenshevik energy rip-offs!!

Did reporter Jeff Bolichowski bother to look back, oh... say... over the last four years, to see whether MPP Jim Douchebag Bradley had ever once told Ontarians the real burden which Bradley's Liberal tax-rapists would place on us with their endless new tax-gouging schemes?

Bradley never once mentioned that he and his Liberal red bolsheviks would be gouging Ontarians to the tune of $350 million on heating! Bradley's lying Liberals were telling us that their Liberal taxes were going to be 'revenue neutral' - remember that McGuinty Liberal lie?!

Of, course, since Bradley's Liberals have to now pay back their union 'family' buddies for their 'coalition smear support' before the election, Jimmy's not bothering to find ways to save costs within his Liberal bloat: Jimmy's happy just taxing and spending!!

{Of couse, reporter Bolichowski didn't bother to ask Jimmy 'bout any o' that!! hahaha Ahh, yes... the St.Catharines Standard: 'righting all those Metcalfian wrongs'... except that whenever it's about Jim Bradley, there NEVER ARE any wrongs!!! hahahah}

And to top it off, Disgusting Douchebag Jim then goes ahead and links his Liberal tax gouge to health care!

Yep: healthcare-monopoly-enforcer Jim Bradley is now using veiled threats about health-care to justify keeping his tax-gouging energy policies in place!

As Bolichowski writes, removing the energy tax ""...means there's less revenue to go around" Bradley said, singling out health care as an area that could suffer".

So there you are:
Liberal scumbag healthcare-monopolist Jim Bradley is now threatening us with his healthcare fearmongering, if we don't play along with his Liberal tax-rape game.

Apparently, the HST is also a Bradley Health Tax in disguise.

Jim Bradley: definitely Niagara's Disgusting Douchebag.
*

It's a 'proven fact': the TD Bank wants more Green

2011-11-21T16:00:00.001-05:00

There was a nice bit of global warming GreenFear-mongering revealed in the National Post's Nov.17, 2011 story "Insurers link hikes to climate", where the TD Bank's chief insurance underwriter Henry Blumenthal claimed that "Not only do we {TD Bank} believe {in global warming}, it's a proven fact". The Post report didn't specify whether Blumenthal provided any specific studies to verify his Corporate GreenFear - the whole point of which is to justify, somehow, the raising of insurance rates; using GreenFear to make more profitable greenbacks.

Will Ontario's Liberal Consumer Minister be investigating the claims of this TD Bank official, to determine that this isn't just another corporate green-washing scheme designed to rip off TD Bank's customers?

Will Ontario's Liberal Environment minister (and David Suzuki's enviro-errand boy) Jim Bradley bother to publicly challenge and to demand seeing Blumenthal's scientific basis for TD's green-smokescreen "proven-fact" tactics - seeing as Liberal Jim Bradley himself hasn't provided any scientific basis for his Liberal global-warming/climate-change activism - and Bradley's been peddling the same greenshevism for several decades?!

Blumenthal's corporate green claims must be music to Jim Bradley's ears. (Let's not forget that back in 2008, Liberal MPP Jim Bradley, acting as Ontario's Transportation Minister, no less, actually blamed climate change for causing rust !!)

If Liberal Environment Minister Jim Bradley, on behalf of all Ontarians, doesn't publicly question and challenge Blumenthal's fearsome climate claims, then Jim Bradley cannot be trusted to stand up to BIG GREEN.

Let's remember, it was only in 2002 when Jim Bradley was insisting that the costs of meeting Bradley's cultish Liberal-advocated-kyoto-protocol activism would NOT be significant!

Then - before-ClimateGate - we had (see the Globe and Mail, Oct.9, 2009) Don Drummond (another TD Bank chief) commission a study which told us that Ottawa would likely have to impose some 72 billion dollars worth of emissions taxes in order to satisfy the demands of Jim Bradley and BIG GREEN.

Lawrence Solomon wrote a good response to this green climate-insurance sabre-rattling in "The insurance industry has been behind the global-warming fraud since the 1970's" (National Post, Nov.19, 2011)

Why isn't anyone examining which kind of political climate "fraud" Liberal MPP Jim Bradley has been peddling for years?

The Bradley Fan Clubs at the St.Catharines Standard and Niagara This Week sure aren't.
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...oh, by the way... TD Bank CEO Ed Clark announced on Dec.1, 2011 that the TD Bank's 2011 4th quarter profit was up 58% to $1.59 Billion!!

Isn't that nice, eh, Henry?!
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Remembering Filip Konowal, Ukrainian Canadian WW I veteran, and recipient of the Victoria Cross

2011-11-11T01:21:00.001-05:00

above: A memorial to Canadian war hero Filip Konowal is located in Dauphin, Manitoba.
Konowal was a corporal serving with the 47th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
(Click on photos to enlarge)
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This story by Mitch Potter, Europe Bureau, (Toronto Star, Oct.13, 2007):

"Ukrainian village honours Filip Konowal, recipient of Canada's Victoria Cross

"Victoria Cross winner in WWI, Filip Konowal, never learned Ukrainian wife, child survived Lenin's and Stalin's purges

KUDKIV, Ukraine – An impoverished village in deep rural Ukraine seems a strange place to go looking for Canada's greatest soldier. But Filip Konowal is here. A legend, a monument, a memory in granite and steel, casting shadows more tragic than previously known.

Chances are you have never heard of Konowal. Then again, who among us can name a single soldier from the Great War of 1914-1918. Canada is good at building monuments to its military past. We are not so good at reading them.

Born in 1888, Konowal left Ukraine at age 26 searching for work just as the world was about to turn upside down, presumably with every intention of returning to his wife and young daughter here. He made his way via Vladivostok to Vancouver, arriving in Canada at precisely the moment the government began rounding up and imprisoning Ukrainian Canadians as "enemy aliens." The war could easily have conquered him as well. Instead, he enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Konowal's exploits over the next three years and 357 days included combat at the 1916 Battle of the Somme and the offensive at Vimy Ridge the following spring.

But it was in August 1917, during a 48-hour stand off known as the battle for Hill 70 in Lens, France, that Konowal astonished all, rushing forward and single-handedly taking out German machine-gun emplacements that were ravaging the Canadian lines. His sleepless frenzy ended when he fell to injury that left his face disfigured for life. Two months later, Konowal found himself in London, standing before King George V, who pinned on this peripatetic Ukrainian the rarely awarded Victoria Cross: "Your exploit is one of the most daring and heroic in the history of my army. For this, accept my thanks."

Ukraine was no longer in reach by war's end, and here in Kudkiv, it is easy to see why. Across the town square, opposite the statue to Konowal, amounted bust of Vladimir Ilich Lenin can still be found. Now, Lenin's nose has been chiselled away, perhaps to spite his face. Kudkiv Mayor Konstantin Dukunets says the Lenin statue will soon be gone. "There are a handful of Communist supporters left. I invited them to pay to repair Lenin's statue. But they declined, so we are tearing it down," says Dukunets, 46. "Ukraine lost 80 years to dictatorship and we are still crawling out of this legacy. But we will leave some of the memory of what happened. We need to remember so we do not make the same mistakes again."

Dukunets' predecessor would not have been able to speak to a foreign journalist. He would have reported us to the secret police. But on this night, in a village with no hotel, the mayor opens his home, offering spare beds, old-world home cooking and, inevitably, vodka. At dusk he takes us on a walkabout and everywhere we see babushkas –ubiquitous Ukrainian grandmothers – busy in their black-dirt gardens, pulling in the last of the harvest. The Internet has yet to arrive in Kudkiv. In fact, it was only this month that the last of the area villages were hooked up to the national gas line, a feat that means no more chopping wood to stay warm in winter. Half the village has running water; the other half relies on a community well.

We bump into a smiling pensioner, Olexandre Guslyakov, 67, who proudly displays the "Guslyakov One" – a working tractor, replete with hydraulic steering, that he has cobbled together from parts salvaged from six rusting trucks, tractors and cars. It took three years of ingenuity to get the thing running. Asked if he will make another, Guslyakov shrugs: "Maybe, if necessary. This is how Ukraine survives."

As we move deeper along a footpath into the waterless side of Kudkiv, Dukunets leads us to a single-storey dwelling that was Konowal's ancestral home. We have no expectations here, as it is widely understood among Canadian-Ukrainians that Konowal's wife and child perished in the Stalin reign of terror.

The loss of his original family was a wound that Konowal eventually overcame: he remarried in Canada and became a janitor on Parliament Hill. He was sanguine about his employment status in later life, once telling the Ottawa Citizen: "I mopped up overseas with a rifle and here I must mop up with a mop."

But as Konowal's door swings open in Kudkiv, a shock awaits. Here before us stands Ganna Vasylyivna Motsna, 71, granddaughter of Filip Konowal. Konowal died in 1959, never living long enough to know his original family survived Stalin's purges. His wife Anna, lived well into the 1940s. Daughter Maria, whom he last saw at age 3, lived until 1986, to age 75. Ganna, now a grandmother herself, bursts into tears as we revisit the story of the grandfather she knows only by legend. "It was a difficult time in history," she says. "Filip had to go away to earn money. Just like today, the young people go away to earn."

Ganna says the Konowal genes served the family well through the Soviet years. "We were survivors. Even my mother. She was very brave, not afraid of anything. Through all those years, we knew nothing of my grandfather. There was no information on people abroad. "Not until the Soviet collapse did we learn anything. And now here I am crying for a man I never met. I don't know why. I am just touched that people come from so far away to pay respects."

The next morning, as we take our leave of Kudkiv, fresh flowers can be seen on the monument to Konowal. Across the square, Lenin is still missing his nose."
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Дякую.
Thank you.

... and here we thought the hospital ER's in Fort Erie and Port Colborne were closed!

2011-11-10T23:49:00.001-05:00

Nice to see the St.Catharines Standard can't even bring itself to accurately report who appointed the NHS's hospital Supervisor, Kevin Smith.
The Standard's Grant Lafleche in his Nov.10, 2011 front page story wrote of "the NHS's Queen's Park-appointed supervisor Kevin Smith" - as if Liberal health minister Deb Matthews HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH APPOINTING KEVIN SMITH!!
Yah: "Queen's Park" appointed the guy!!!! ...Blame those two maple trees over there - and that one, that sneaky chestnut: they did it!...
Oh, and, get this: we are now being admonished for thinking that the hospital emergency rooms in Fort Erie and Port Colborne were "closed", when they were simply "repurposed"!! Did you get that nice piece of spin ?!?
We are now told that it was "misinformation" and dastardly "political rhetoric" which led us astray, to foolishly mis-perceive that Liberal-forced "restructuring" closed two Niagara ER's; we are supposed to now believe that they WEREN'T closed, depending on what "closed" means, that is...
WTF?!?
Look who's spouting the rhetoric!
So now, an Urgent Care Centre = Emergency Room/ Emergency Department to the bait-and-switch Liberal monopolists?
Lafleche, naturally, couldn't be bothered to report that this "restructuring" was called the HIP - and that the HIP was forced upon the NHS by, and approved for implementation by, McGuinty's Liberals, through George Smitherman and his LHIN. To whose "political advantage" is it for the Standard to deliberately omit that?!!
Yep: Fort Erie's ER was NOT "closed" - and apparently, then, Port Colborne's ER is still "open" as well - they never were "closed" (we dummies just mistakenly thought so..!); they've been open since the Liberals closed them, doncha know!!
The 'reputation of the NHS is damaged' - yet, amazingly, the reputation of the Liberals who FLICKED it up, is beyond reproach.
So there ya go: there's no need to interview Niagara's Liberal hacks Jim Bradley or Kim Craitor about any of Terry Flynn's report... and dutifully, that's exactly what the Standard did.
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...and that's exactly what the St.Catharines Standard did again the next day, on Nov.11, 2011: carried another story regarding Terry Flynn's NHS report, a story which miraculously did not contain a single mention of, or reaction from, Liberal hacks Kim Craitor, Jim Bradley, or Deb Matthews!
Now, that's some kind o' wrong-rightin' by Wendy Metcalfe's Liberal Shoeshine Club!
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Liberal Jim Bradley's green linebackers

2011-11-08T21:47:00.000-05:00

Christina Blizzard wrote in "Blizzard takes on David Suzuki" (Toronto Sun, Sept.21, 2011):

"Tell us, David Suzuki.

Are you an environmental guru?

Or simply a political hack — kissing the right butts at the right time?

Because if it’s the latter, it brings into question the integrity of your charitable foundation.

A video showing Suzuki and Premier Dalton McGuinty strolling through a Vancouver park was removed from the Liberal website recently, following complaints from a group opposed to wind turbines. Under Canada Revenue Agency rules, registered charities are not permitted to dabble in partisan politics.

In the video, Suzuki praises McGuinty for his green initiatives.

Clearly, Suzuki hasn’t talked to the residents of rural Ontario I’ve spoken to, who are outraged at the turbine monstrosities springing up there. They say they’re a blight on the landscape.

Near the small town of Zurich, on Lake Huron, for example, there are plans to build 260 turbines, some of which are 49-storeys high, with blades the size of a Boeing 747 wing span.

Each turbine consumes 1.6 hectares of prime farmland — that’s about 405 hectares of land that could be used to grow crops.

How green is that, Dr. S?

A spokesperson for Suzuki’s charitable foundation told Toronto Sun reporter Terry Davidson that Suzuki had, “stepped down” from the board of the charitable foundation some time in the summer.

James Boothroyd also insisted that the foundation didn’t break any rules.

A Toronto Star article, July 21, quoted Suzuki not only endorsing McGuinty, but slamming PC leader Tim Hudak. Here’s the Star quote:

“‘I’m offering an endorsement of what Mr. McGuinty has done, absolutely. This is a great plan. Any party would be foolish to talk about abandoning it,’ he (Suzuki) said, noting the David Suzuki Foundation works closely with the government on promoting energy conservation.”

It quotes Suzuki saying it would be, “absolute insanity,” for Hudak to scrap renewable energy projects such as wind and solar.

Suzuki has also appeared in Ontario ads promoting conservation.

Remember the ad where he sanctimoniously tells us to change our lightbulbs to energy efficient ones? In another, he sticks his head through a basketball-sized hole in a wall to lecture homeowners in their living room on how they should wrap themselves in blankets and caulk windows when there’s a draft.

I asked a Liberal spokesman how much the Great Green God was paid for those ads, and was directed to a Suzuki blog in which he said people are so sick of air pollution and climate change: “I volunteered for an energy-conservation ad campaign for Powerwise, a partnership between local Ontario electrical utilities and the Government of Ontario. We’ve completed two television commercials and some print and outdoor advertising, all of which folks in Ontario can expect to see plenty of this summer,” said the posting.

I don’t know if that means he did it for free, or he volunteered his expertise and was reimbursed.

I asked for clarification. I’m still waiting. I’ll get back to you.

Whatever the response, Suzuki has shown a remarkable propensity for meddling in partisan politics. And as long as the David Suzuki Foundation calls itself just that, it calls into question their charitable status.

Most Canadians are just sick of the soaring electricity rates the Liberals are foisting on us.

And we’ve had it up to here with creepy ads where a pompous ass lectures us on how to live our lives.

Go caulk yourself, Dr. Suzuki.

We’re doing our best."

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David Suzuki (apparently a big Liberal Jim Bradley fan, according to Doug Draper and Peter Conradi) has been spewing his greenshevism regularly as of late in the St.Catharines Standard, which, at the end of Suzuki's scary sermons, gives a link back to Suzuki's greenfear organization. There was another Suzuki pile-o'crap on Sept.14, 2011, and more since then.
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The Cost of Saving Sousa

2011-11-08T21:25:00.002-05:00

Further to this CBC story from Nov.9, 2011...

...let's go back to just two weeks before the Oct. 2011 Ontario election (when McGuinty was spewing his now-trademarked usual pre-election lies); were there any stories in the the Sept.28, 2011 St.Catharines Standard regarding local Liberal Jim Bradley's comments regarding his Liberal government's sudden cancellation of the Mississauga power plant in Liberal Charles Sousa's riding? hahaha! Was the Standard's Metcalfian doctrine of wrong-righting applied here; or was it the same old Jim Bradley ass-kissing-doctrine as usual?

We've got disastrous Liberal by-the-seat-of-their-pants energy policy, based on underlying Liberal GreenFear climate lies, yet the Metcalfian wrong-righters haven't (conveniently!!!!!) um... been able to ask their Liberal buddy Jim Bradley anything about the millions wasted on his Liberals' latest energy fiasco?!! [All together now: "What's Good Ole Jimmy gots ta do wid it; wid any o' it??" hahahahah. Yep: can't get Ole Jimmer involved, what with the climate lies and Suzuki ass-kissin' and last-minute politically-convenient plant-cancellation in a bid to to save some local grit's ass - this has nuttin' ta do wid' GoldenBoyJimmy!!!

Hey Jimmy: tell us that Liberal story which Liar McGuinty blabbered on about during the televised election-debate - you know, about how those condominiums just suddenly got built - in like, two weeks (!!!) - so, that's why the Liberals cancelled the power plant!! Unbelievable!! Don't ask Jimmy 'bout how much health-care the lawsuits stemming from this latest Liberal fiasco could have provided!! (...and the St.Catharines Standard won't ask!!!!! ... there: done!!)

It's so sadly funny, it's FLICKING pathetic.

This Liberal piece of crap McGuinty was lying to Ontarians, right there in full view, at the televised debate - and the sob actually believes his own lying stories!! Is this Liberal snake incompetent or a psycho?
And a lot of JimmyBoyFanClub sycophants just look the other way.
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