This Thursday, the province of Ontario is holding an election and I don’t know who to vote for. There are five parties running my home riding of Kitchener-Waterloo.
The Liberal Party of Ontario appears to be leading the polls. The party and their candidate, Sean Strickland, promise to raise taxes and throw it into education and health care. As I understand it, both of these systems are fundamentally broken. There is no reason to believe that more money will alleviate their problems.
The Ontario PC Party and their candidate Elizabeth Witmer want to ban work-to-rule campaigns and strikes by public school teachers. In an otherwise sensible campaign, this just strikes me as ludicrous. As much as I hate unions, this is just asking for trouble. Nothing good can come from people losing their ability to negotiate with their employers for better work conditions and compensation.
The Ontario NDP Party I can dismiss out-of-hand. They are running on a platform called “publicpower”, that is, everything should be run by the government: public health care, public education, public water, public hydro, government-controlled tuition, government-controlled housing, government-controlled pensions, public transportation, and public child care. No thanks.
The Family Coalition Party is also fielding a candidate in this riding, promising persecution to anybody that doesn’t share their “pro-family values”. Ick.
Then there is the Green Party of Ontario. I went to their website looking for something to criticize. I couldn’t find anything I fundamentally disagreed with. It looks like I’ve found my candidate.
Ken Dyck 