Thursday, April 12, 2012

New Democratic Apathy

After the Liberals submitted their last budget to the Ontario legislature a few weeks ago, the NDP setup a toll-free hotline and a website to give Ontario's citizens voters taxpayers "everyday folks" a chance to let the party know their reaction to the budget. The NDP described the response to their hotline as a "flood" whereas I would describe it more as the democratic tap not being turned all the way off after the election and a few annoying drops landing on the porcelain (if we are stuck using hydrological metaphors).

Ontario's population is over 12,850,000 yet the NDP only got 10,000* people to contact them about the 2012 budget. That’s only one out of every 1,285 Ontarians. So less than 0.1% of Ontarians could be bothered to contribute to an important discussion about a watershed austerity budget with many long-term consequences. And of those who did get in touch with the NDP, I'm sure a lot of the complaints were about stupid little things like ending subsidies for the horse-racing industry because racetracks and horse breeders urged people to do so, which just seems weird to me.

But at least the NDP got a better understanding of what the 0.1% of Ontarians who contacted them thought of the budget, right? Wrong. The responses they did get it were, "all over the map," according to their leader, so the whole exercise was a waste of time.

Two weeks have gone by since the Liberal budget was tabled and the NDP's full list of proposals still has not been put forward. The NDP had 6 months after the last election to sort out their policy priorities; instead, they waited until the budget was already out before they started soliciting ideas from the public-at-large. Predictably, the public-at-large did not speak with a single voice and this got them nowhere. In other words, the NDP held an ostentatious focus-group that failed to provide any useful feedback and delayed important discussions about the future of the provincial government by at least a week.


I am most surprised that there wasn't more of a reaction from public-sector unions to the Liberal announcement that they are essentially doing away with collective bargaining in the public sector for the next two years and freezing pay. There are approximately one-million public-sector workers in Ontario who would be affected by those proposals and they have strong unions and trade associations to make their special interests heard. In the words of the OPSEU head, “We’ll give [the finance minister] a fight the likes of which he’s never seen and he won’t forget for a long, long time because unions are good at fighting.”

Yet behind this rhetoric, Ontario's public-sector unions could not get even 1% of their members to let the NDP know they would like more money. It makes me suspect that the unions colluded with the NDP to make sure the party was not pressured into forcing an election and now the unions will hammer the Liberals for freezing pay and collective bargaining without mentioning that the NDP supported the budget that contained those same measures in the first place.


*: Most sources I saw actually said it was half that, only 5,000. Maybe the numbers were inflated by repeat callers, prank calls, wrong numbers, and people outside Ontario.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Silver Lining

The Sabres season ended in a depressing fashion but the silver lining is, as always, gambling. I made a bet before the season that Brad Boyes would score less than 57.5 points and I was right by a mile. Boyes finished the season with only 23 points.

I only wish I bet more. With -115 odds, you only win 87 cents on a $1 bet. Still, I will cherish that 87 cents and be able to look back at least somewhat fondly on Brad Boyes going from point-producing NHL forward to someone who gets scratched for Corey Tropp in the biggest game of the year.