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Date Posted: August 31, 06:43:pm GMT-5
Author: Len
Subject: Double Standard

Double standards at Queen's Park
(Home of The Mike Harris'Ontario Provincial Government)

How double can a standard be? Let us count the ways.

This week, the Ontario integrity commissioner, as required by a law advanced by Premier Mike Harris and friends, turned being an MPP into a $100,000 job.

That's what the government was afraid to vote for when a commission recommended it. Now MPPs don't have to vote.

Harris will personally get a $50,000 raise if he's re-elected. That raise is more than twice what the average senior lives on, more than four times what you earn on the minimum wage.

And what does Harris have to say about his pay hike? "I think it's fair."

And what about raising the minimum wage, unchanged in six years? "It's not on the agenda."

That's one way a standard can be double.

Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty, it should be noted, voted for the process that produced the big raise for the Premier � a salary he'll get instead of Harris if his party wins the next election.

But McGuinty at least said an increase in the minimum wage is long overdue.

Here's another way a standard can be double.

Harris said it would be fair if nurses got a two per cent pay raise. He gave hospitals 1.1 per cent more funding to pay for it.
(do the math...Mike obviously didn't!)

Here's another. He cut $175 million from home care agencies � then accused them of a "shoddy ploy to get more money" when they said they had to cut services to save that much.

Here's another. His government passed a law in June ordering the Ontario College of Teachers to run the 14 courses teachers have to take every five years or lose their jobs.

But the college says the government made "no provision for the significant expenditure that will be required to make this program work."

Here's another. The government ordered school boards to negotiate three-year contracts with teachers. It gave no commitment there'll be money to pay for what's negotiated.

Not surprisingly, most teachers are without contracts as the school year nears and likely to remain so.

There are more ways but that's enough.

Isn't it wonderful, though, that a man of Harris' humble beginnings can so easily forget what it was like, how he sees $191,045 a year as "fair" for him but a tenth of that, a twentieth, as fair for everybody else?

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