McGuinty's mistakes
faults
by Eric Dowd
Toronto -- Premier Dalton McGuinty has let flattery by news media go to his head and failed to recognize there are times when government needs to slow down.
These failings are partly responsible for the Liberal premier racking up the longest list of successive mistakes of any premier in recent memory. If his government manufactured automobiles, it would be in for a recall.
Ontarians will need little reminder of the more recent and blatant mishaps. They include, consecutively, funding children’s aid society officials to drive expensive, gas-guzzling SUVs and relieve the stress of their jobs with $2,000-a-year health club memberships, while they were unable to pay for programs children needed.
The Liberals spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to compile an electronic record of the health of residents, valuable but still not finished, and paid huge fees to consultants often linked to their party.
They failed to protect buyers of lottery tickets from being ripped off by ticket retailers who consistently won prizes, although news media handed them examples on a platter.
McGuinty announced a plan to have schools teach more liberalized sex education, but dropped it when he found too many objecting.
McGuinty seemed dazed during the summit of world leaders, when Toronto’s police chief said the premier changed a law enabling police to arrest anyone approaching within five metres of the outside of the security fence surrounding the site and the premier seemed to agree.
McGuinty’s revised version a month later is there never was such a rule change, but his governent “failed to move as quickly as we should to clean up the confusion," which suggests the premier was willing to accept anything police said rather than rock their boat.
McGuinty has got in most trouble with his ambition to create a greener Ontario. He planned to force owners selling their homes to provide audits showing how much energy they consume, which would have helped conserve but deterred buyers, and abandoned this because of protests.
The premier permitted a government-regulated agency to allow retailers of products that provide some harm to the environment, including aerosol containers, fluorescent bulbs and fire extinguishers, to charge purchasers fees to help pay for their recycling, the now notorious eco fees, but no-one informed them in advance and he has shelved the tax temporarily while he looks for more palatable solutions.
The province offered attractive subsidies to lure people to invest in solar panels to provide electricity, but so many joined in it quickly slashed its rate, leaving many with investments they cannot recoup.
No premier has apologized as much as McGuinty. He said sex education “is a very sensitive isue and I decided we had not properly consulted Ontario parents on it. We failed to do our job.”
McGuinty said the Liberals “came up short and obviously didn’t get it right” on the eco-taxes and “we dropped the ball" after a Crown attorney withdrew a charge against a night prowler of criminally harassing neighbors.
In his latest summation of his mistakes, McGuinty has conceded he has been “a little less than successful when it comes to executing our problems,” which is the understatement of many years.
McGuinty kept on making mistakes first because he was let off too easily after his early blunders, held on to his lead in polls and continued to win byelections.
Most news media kept predicting he was on track to win the next election in October 2011 and failed to emphasize this was less because of his own achievements and more because the Progresssive Conservatives under relatively new leader Tim Hudak were having difficulty making an impression.
McGuinty has been lulled into feeling he could do no wrong and it helped make him careless.
McGuinty also kept churning out new programs during the summer, failed to recognize people like a rest from government at times and put providing a multitude of laws ahead of making sure they worked properly.
