Not a good day for freedom in my neck of the woods. First, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered a huge blow to freedom of speech in this country with its asinine ruling on the Liberal gag law. This legislation forbids individuals or third-party groups from spending more than $3,000 in a riding during an election, or $150,000 nationally. This is a travesty. You can't do anything with that little money. Today's ruling essentially guarantees that elections will now be fought only between formal political parties with little to no input or activity from lobby and interest groups. This will only help incumbents, and that's bad for democracy and debate.
Secondly, the Ontario Liberals have delivered their first budget. There's no good news, except maybe for the fact that more MRI scanners will be bought. It's big government liberalism's revenge. The McGuinty Liberals are imposing new health care premiums, on top of the taxes already paid to healthcare and on top of the surtax paid on top of that tax for high income earners. The Grits are even imposing the levies on low income earners: people earning as low as $20,000/year will have to pony up $300. Spending is going way up on education and healthcare, they are removing items such as eye doctor visits and physiotherapy from public health insurance and they're even raising the cost of filing a statement of defense in small claims court!
McGuinty is also going to break the Tories' Balanced Budget Act (thus incurring a pay cut) and they are going to actually repeal that law to replace it with a watered-down new version so they can run deficits for the next four years at least!
It's been a long, bad day.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 5:02 PM
