We have a provincial election coming up on October 10th, and I have started to notice some of Dalton’s ads on television. He is really stressing this whole ‘public schools’ nonsense of his. But, if you listen closely, you can see he is being an incredible hypocrite, and a liar.
Watch this ad if you have not seen it on TV already.
Dalton appears to be stressing the public nature of our schools, and he says that the thinks funding religious schools is a mistake. However, his wording of these comments is misleading. Yes, our entire school system is - technically - public. Now, I know people are already cocking an eyebrow or displaying surprise in their own way, because all of my readers are graduates of the Ontario Catholic School system. But, Dalton can be seen as telling a partial truth, because this system is still technically public. Publically funded. If you review their platform, they always refer to the schools as publically funded. In many ways, this ambigious wording is done to imply that we have only one school system that is religiously indifferent, so that he can better work against John Tory’s Let’s Split Funding Up Into Millions of Different Schools policy.
It is for this reason that I have so little respect for the Liberal Party of Ontario in this upcoming election. They have gained a reputation of lying to the public, and now they are doing it quite openly in their campaign ads. And I am not speaking of broken campaign promises. I mean actual lies. And frankly, I don’t think we should stand for it. So, I hope that - if you intend to vote - you will vote for someone who is not the Liberals.
Personally, I find the Conservative’s policy of splitting everyone up into many religious schools is a huge mistake. It may seem like the more fair option, but a matter like education should be decided based on what is best for the province. And frankly, splitting up funding into all these little schools which - geographically - may have to be constructed side by side is a mistake. All it will do is create reduncancy in thousands and thousands of positions around the province. If all of those teachers/aides/administrative staff/etc. were combined into one school board, class sizes would be at an all time low. We would have more teaching staff than we knew what to do with. But if you start fragmenting everything, then we run into problems. Moreover, the redundancy in facilities would also be diminished. There would not be any situations where a school like St. Michael Catholic Secondary School is attached to a nearby public high school because funding an individual library and technology facilities was too expensive. The money devoted to both schools would have been focused on a single school, so that our publically funded schools can be stronger, better, and more unified.
Because of the unimpressive platforms of the Conservatives and Liberals, and the difficult to find platform of the NDP, I feel that I will have to vote Green in this election. They are the only party that appears to want to do away with the Ontario Catholic School system and truly unify our school boards. The only problem that I have with this is that their platform on energy stresses solar energy far too much, whereas I feel more emphasis should be made on wind energy (and shutting up all those people who claim that wind turbines will lower their property values*).
It is disheartening though to know that I will be voting on principle in this election, but it will made no difference in the ruling party of this province. :(
*Tangent: I mean, really. What is more unappealing. A quite graceful wind turbine, or a smoggy coal plant. I would take the wind farms anyday. And, if you consider the environmental effects of manufacturing solar cells, you discover that they aren’t all that eco-friendly in the grand scheme of things.