Tag Archives: Dalton McGuinty

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Fascism: Ontario education minister wants to stop Catholic schools from teaching pro-life view

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Political map of Canada
Political map of Canada

From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

In what pro-life leaders are calling a stunning and unprecedented attack on religious freedom, Ontario’s Education Minister has apparently declared that Catholic schools can no longer teach that abortion is wrong.

Laurel Broten, who serves under Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, said Wednesday that Catholic schools are barred from teaching this core moral belief because Bill 13, the government’s controversial “anti-bullying” law, prohibits “misogyny.”

“Taking away a woman’s right to choose could arguably be considered one of the most misogynistic actions that one could take,” she told the Canadian Press. “I don’t think there is a conflict between choosing Catholic education for your children and supporting a woman’s right to choose.”

Bill 13 had already been slammed by Ontario’s bishops as an attack on religious freedom because it forces Catholic schools to allow “gay-straight alliance” clubs.

And confirmation:

 An official transcript sent to LifeSiteNews by the Ontario government confirms that Dalton McGuinty’s Education Minister told media on Wednesday that Catholic schools should not be teaching that abortion is wrong because it is a violation of the government’s newly-enacted anti-bullying bill.

[…]In her press conference, Minister Broten went beyond saying that Catholic schools cannot teach their pro-life beliefs, insinuating that they must actually adopt a “pro-choice” position. “We must ensure that women, young girls in our schools, especially highlighted during the week of the first ever Day of the Girl tomorrow, that young girls can make the choices that they make. This is not about being pro-abortion, it is about being pro-choice,” she stated.

A reporter pointed out that in the debates around Bill 13 there was no mention of abortion, and so asked why she had brought up the controversial bill.

“Bill 13 has in it a clear indication of ensuring that our schools are safe, accepting places for all our students,” she explained. “That includes of LGBTQ students. That includes young girls in our school. Bill 13 is about tackling misogyny, taking away a woman’s right to choose could arguably be one of the most misogynistic actions that one could take.”

“There are many, many families that send their children to Catholic school and choose that education for their children that also support a woman’s right to choose,” she continued. “And as I said, I don’t think that there is a contrast or a conflict between choosing a Catholic education for your children and supporting a woman’s right to choose.”

And reactions from pro-lifers:

Since LifeSiteNews first published the shocking comments Wednesday, they have ignited a firestorm of criticism from pro-life and faith leaders in both Canada and the U.S. and across denominational lines.

Dr. Margaret Somerville, the founding director of McGill University’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, called it an “appalling” violation of religious freedom. “If Bill 13 were interpreted in the way the Minister suggests, in my opinion, it would be unconstitutional as offending freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and free speech, as well as contrary to parents’ obligations and rights with respect to their children, and so on,” she told LifeSiteNews.

[…]Steve Phelan, communications director for the Virginia-based Human Life International, called it “a case of radical, secular leftists trying to take away the most basic rights of those with whom they disagree.”

William Saunders, Senior Vice-President of Legal Affairs for Americans United for Life, said the comments show the “totalitarian instincts” of pro-abortion politicians, but also stressed that “it can’t be misogynistic to oppose something that is so harmful to women, as many recent studies show.”

“That’s the dirty secret about abortion – how harmful it is to women; and so to suggest it’s misogynist is to completely miss the point,” he explained.

[…]Somerville said the Minister’s comments are a sign of abortion advocates’ desperation, which she sees as hopeful.

“The fact that they can’t discuss abortion shows how frightened they are that they cannot support their case in an open public square and get others to support it,” she said. “And now, if we take the Minister’s comments as an indicator, that fear seems to have increased: They don’t want to let anyone even disagree with them, indeed, they want to go further and have everyone ‘preach what they preach’ about abortion. So much for their stance of adopting so-called “progressive” values which is supposed to include their ideology of tolerance for diversity and manifest this in practice.”

Now, I am not a Roman Catholic. I am an evangelical Protestant Christian, and proud of it. But I do defend religious liberty for all. There is nothing that I hold to more strongly than religious liberty, the first and most precious of our American liberties. I think it is important for us here to look around the world and to see which groups are opposed to religious liberty and freedom of conscience. It’s not the conservatives. It’s the progressives. And that’s why we must never vote for them, for any reason. We have to defend that right, as a matter of the first importance – not just for us, but for everyone else, too.

It’s important for social conservatives to understand never to make common cause with those who support big government and the restriction of basic liberties. We need to embrace small government and fiscal conservatism so that government never gets powerful enough to take away our freedoms. For a start, government should not be in control of education at the federal level. As social conservatives, we should be promoting state and local control of education, right to work laws and school vouchers. There is a connection between fiscal policy and social policy that both sides need to understand.

Must-see videos on education policy

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Conservative leader Tim Hudak to push right to work and secret ballots

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Political map of Canada
Political map of Canada

Wow, the Canadians are trying to imitate Scott Walker and John Kasich.

Excerpt:

In a move certain to upset the organized labour movement, Ontario workers would be able to opt out of collective agreements and union dues under dramatic changes to provincial workplace laws proposed by PC Leader Tim Hudak.

Employers would no longer be required to collect dues on behalf of unions and secret ballots would be restored in certification votes.

“The rules that are governing the workplace, they haven’t changed. And the way that many of our unions are run, particularly public sector unions, haven’t caught up with the times,” Hudak said. “No business would be caught today operating with a typewriter or a rotary phone, but our union laws and many union practices are still stuck in the 1940s.”

Hudak released a white paper Tuesday, entitled Paths to Prosperity: Flexible Labour Markets, which calls for significant rewrites to the labour laws in Ontario which he says would make the province’s business environment more competitive and create jobs.

[…]Hudak’s real goal is to strip unions of their funding, in particular the Working Families Coalition that actively campaigns against Conservatives, he said.

[…]The white paper says the provincial government should lead the way by ending automatic paycheque deductions for dues and give private sector employers the same option.

The monopoly that union shops enjoy in bidding for public contracts across Ontario’s municipal and broader public sectors would also likely end under the Tories.

Unions should be required to reveal how they spend the dues they collect, that workers have a right to know when their dues are spent on political causes, like anti-Israel campaigns and Quebec student protests, Hudak said.

While it’s true that many (or even most) of the people who are stuck in unions are good, patriotic, hard-working people, union leaders are generally secular socialists. They support all kinds of nasty leftist groups. The best way to defund them is to allow workers to not have to have union dues automatically deducted from their pay checks. I would expect that most union workers in Ontario would elect not to pay dues to their unions – at least if they are anything like the workers in Wisconsin.

News

Even in Canada, green energy socialism closes businesses and kills jobs

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A story from CANOE about the socialist premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty.

Excerpt:

Dalton McGuinty constantly extols the virtues of so-called green energy.

One North Bay company, however, is sounding the alarm that the costs of this expensive program are forcing companies to lay off staff — and will eventually force many of them to leave the province.

John Spencer is an executive with Fabrene Inc., a company that makes industrial fabrics.

The Liberal government’s green energy plan has added $1 million a year to his hydro bill — an amount he says will eventually force his company out of this province.

There’s a line on corporate energy bills called the “Global Adjustment.” It’s that line that pays for renewable energy projects.

Spencer’s seen the GA soar over the past few years — from 5% of his bill to 42%.

In his most recent report, provincial auditor general Jim McCarter warned by 2014, the Global Adjustment is expected to be six cents per kilowatt hour — nearly two-thirds of the total electricity charge

The GA is expected to increase tenfold province-wide, from about $700 million in 2006 to $8.1 billion in 2014, when the last of the province’s coal-fired plants is phased out.

Almost one-third of this $8.1 billion is attributable to costly green energy contracts.

That will sound the death knell for his company in this province, Spencer said.

“My company won’t make it that far.”

The cost of hydro itself is competitive, he said. It’s the GA — and the $1 million it’s adding to his bill that’s killing jobs.

Electricity is now his third biggest cost — after raw materials and labour.

He has to explain that non-competitive rate to plants in the U.S., South America, China and Europe.

“It’s a very bleak outlook,” he says.

“It’s a runaway freight train. We’ve got to stop it in its tracks or we’re going to kill a great majority of small and medium sized companies,” Pearson said.

Ironically, at least 42 of the largest companies in the province are exempt from the GA.

It’s important to learn from other countries what works and what doesn’t work.

Green energy and the Ontario economy

The National Post wrote about how the Ontario government wastes taxpayer money to subsidize big corporations who experiment with unproven, expensive energy programs, like solar power.

Excerpt:

The Swedish retail giant IKEA announced yesterday it will invest $4.6-million to install 3,790 solar panels on three Toronto area stores, giving IKEA the electric-power-producing capacity of 960,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. According to IKEA, that’s enough electricity to power 100 homes. Amazing development. Even more amazing is the economics of this project. Under the Ontario government’s feed-in-tariff solar power scheme, IKEA will receive 71.3¢ for each kilowatt of power produced, which works out to about $6,800 a year for each of the 100 hypothetical homes. Since the average Toronto home currently pays about $1,200 for the same quantity of electricity, that implies that IKEA is being overpaid by $5,400 per home equivalent.

Welcome to the wonderful world of green economics and the magical business of carbon emission reduction. Each year, IKEA will receive $684,408 under Premier Dalton McGuinty’s green energy monster — for power that today retails for about $115,000. At that rate, IKEA will recoup $4.6-million in less than seven years — not bad for an investment that can be amortized over 20.

No wonder solar power is such a hot industry. No wonder, too, that the province of Ontario is in a headlong rush into a likely economic crisis brought on by skyrocketing electricity prices. To make up the money paid to IKEA to promote itself as a carbon-free zone, Ontario consumers and industries are on their way to experiencing the highest electricity rates in North America, if not most of the world.

The government’s regulator, the Ontario Energy Board, has prepared secret forecasts of how much Ontario consumers are going to have to pay for electricity over the next five years. The government won’t allow the report to be released. The next best estimate comes from Aegent Energy Advisors Inc., in a study it did for the Canadian Manufactures and Exporters group. Residential rates are expected to jump by 60% between 2010 and 2015. Industrial customers will be looking at a 55% increase.

Going back to 2003, based on numbers dug up by consultant Tom Adams, the price of residential electricity in Ontario hovered around 8.5¢ a kWh in 2003 — the first year of the McGuinty Liberal regime. By 2015, Aegent Energy estimates the price will be up to 21¢, an increase of 135%. Doubling the price of electricity in a decade is no way to spur growth and investment.

Messing around with green energy doesn’t just hurt businesses – it hurts consumers, too.