Letters to the Editor

Hiding behind locked doors

February 27, 2025   ·   1 Comments

I’ve lived here more than 10 years and I have yet to be given the courtesy of a meeting with my MPP, Sylvia Jones, despite repeated requests. And, well, after a while, one just gives up. Both of our members are now hiding behind locked doors and plexiglass. Emailed letters are answered with an automatic note, phone calls are rarely returned, meeting requests are ignored. And it seems that Tories are now excused from all-candidates’ meetings.

‘All-candidates meetings are a foundational component of the election process and essential to enable citizens to ask questions and provide information to the candidates about voters’ major concerns,’ writes Russ Coles in a letter to the editor of Newmarket Today. That letter is echoed in local newspapers across Ontario. Shame.

We, the electorate who doggedly get involved and exercise our franchise — despite a system that means the Tories get in when the opposition parties win the popular vote — know that a healthy democracy is more than one day of engagement, alone in a cardboard box.

As Canadians in the bleachers of the horror show going on to the south of us, it is essential that we do not follow them into the morass of unaccountable governors. 

The arrogance of the member, of the party, is intolerable when you add to bad manners and disrespect a very long list of gobsmackingly ill-advised decisions, conducted and arrived at through the fog of Queen’s Park obfuscation.

Some examples? Green Belt. 413. A phantasmagoric and over-the-top proposal of a tunnel under 401?! Buck-a-beer. Green Belt. The ignorant and death-dealing closing of Safe Injection Sites. A $612 million gift to the Trump Administration because Doug Ford wants people to have their beer faster. Green Belt. Therme’s enrichment of foreign investors in a spa on Ontario Place land. The abandonment of Ontario Place. Education, K-12, and Universities are falling apart, infrastructure (particularly transit) is criminally underfunded. The unasked-for $200 cheque (as if…) alongside the relieving of the $120/year licence sticker renewal — which cost us $1.1 billion dollars two years ago — and every year until we get a government who will reinstate a cost equal to a couple of fill-ups for my little Cruze.  

Our Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, continues to repeat Ford’s insistence that his government has poured tons and tons of money into healthcare.  (Remember, you don’t pay with your credit card, but your health card; that coy obfuscation of the facts about health care spending in this province.) An increasingly larger percentage of all that money is going into private pockets, privatized for-profit health care with all the bells and whistles — as well as sneaky fees. Sylvia shows up to announce operating money for a non-existent, fingers-crossed, MRI; that’s social policy by plutocracy. Hospitals are becoming from one end to the other beggars. 

Our premier, our local member, do not deserve our vote.

It is to our shame that in education and health care, Ontario is at the bottom of the barrel in funding across this country. Shame.

Doug Ford called this election for two reasons: trying to get ahead of the complete and ugly story of the Green Belt Buddies; and he knows enough history to notice that a Tory in power in Ottawa will be balanced by Ontario voters with a Liberal in Toronto, or vice versa. NOT to showcase your ‘Art of the Deal’ skills. This is Canada; Ford is an admirer of Trump, would have voted for him ‘100 percent’.

Our governments need to take due notice of the American mess and decide; little of it should be a surprise had enough Americans paid attention. We are NOT going there. BUY Canadian! BE Canadian. Care for one another. Welcome. Heal. Educate. House. Feed. Build infrastructure that works. Care for our earthly home. 

Sincerely,

(Rev’d) LeeAnn McKenna 

Mono

Readers Comments (1)