08.15.2011 05:52 AM

When the ballot question is health

Can a Conservative win?

Particularly a Conservative who, as junior health minister, oversaw the firing of 6,000 nurses, the closing of 7,000 hospital beds – and even the closure of 28 hospitals?

If that’s the question – and voters say it is – then the Conservative in question is in big trouble.

5 Comments

  1. Attack! says:

    Having trouble with the “Ontarians concerned about health, economy: poll” story’s mobile link; so the main one is:

    http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20110814/110814_poll_issues_trust/20110815/?hub=CP24Home

    Related to this: re: Hudak’s claiming to be able to do something about the relative lack of doctors outside the cities,

    I’ve already posted on that issue in two threads here:

    http://warrenkinsella.com/2011/08/in-todays-sun-he-hasnt-done-as-horrible-a-job-as-i-expected/#comment-48617

    http://warrenkinsella.com/2011/08/harper-ford-and-hudak-bad-things-come-in-threes/#comment-48476

  2. What people find important is rarely the stuff of elections. Polls continually say health care, education, the economy/jobs…or, in an economic boom, you might get “the environment” to squeak onto the radar. However, during an election, the issues that dominate are things like…whether or not there should be a bridge built to the island airport; whether or not somebody should have called Dalton McGuinty a “reptilian kitten eater from Mars”; and the fact that the leader of the opposition was absent from Parliament more than any other MP…70% of the time.

    Moreover, even were health, education, and the budget to be held up as the big issues, there’d be little to get passionate about: Hudak’s played the “me too” card to ever substantive policy position of the current Liberal government, promising to change nothing substantively in any of those files.

    Nope, the top candidate for this election: Tim Hudak’s quiet plan to introduce religious public schools via each board’s authority to make “alternative public schools” out of mainstream ones (that authority is how, for example, the Toronto Board was able to open a phenotype-and-culture focused Africentric School in Toronto). Hudak’s on the record wanting to offer parents – parents who currently pay to send their children to *private* religious schools – “choice, but *within* the *public* school system”. Here’s the video, in case you doubt me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOG0SaZeSN4

    I give it about three weeks. Then: boom. Sorry Mr. Hudak, but most Ontarians are vehemently opposed to the idea of taxpayer funded, organized religion in Ontario’s public schools. They’re not about to give you the power to segregate children according to religion, via the public school system. Take that idea back to the Orange Lodge, where you got it.

  3. Qualifier of that last sentence, for those who aren’t aware of the history of the PC party: I don’t literally mean that Tim Hudak attended an Orange Lodge, or got the idea from one. I mean that, for decades in Ontario (the PCs governed the province for 42 consecutive years, most of them prior to the time of the Civil Rights Amendment in the USA), the Progressive Conservative Party was the sock puppet of anti-Catholics, anti-immigrants, anti-French, anti pretty much anyone who wasn’t white, Anglo Saxon, and Protestant. Changing demographics – an Ontario that now is more diverse and cosmopolitan – reduced the statistical advantage previously held by the Orangemen and their ilk, who supported the PCs. Those folks – most of whom are no longer living (hence the disappearance of the Big Blue Machine) – would just loved Hudak’s idea, which would, in effect, separate their children from the children of those they opposed. It’s a sad and disgusting history, but it is history…except, apparently, among some PC supporters to this day who want religious segregation within the public school system.

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