Environment Canada reports that this has been the driest summer in fifty years for Toronto, with the city only receiving around half of its usual rainfall. Short-term predictions suggest that fall will be equally dry, with the the long-range forecast calling for global warming followed by drought, famine, plague and societal collapse. Sounds like great picnic weather!
Provincial NDP leader Howard Hampton has said that, if elected, he will roll back college and university tuition fees. The plan would cost about $200 million in the first year, but will be covered by the NDP's "Let Somebody Else Pay For It" strategy.
It looks like Tony Rosato's long legal ordeal may be almost over. The actor and comedian has been in prison for more than two years on charges of criminal harrassment, in spite of universal agreement that he is mentally ill. Assistant Crown Attorney took less than a minute to announce that she would prosecute Rosato summarily rather than by the more serious indictment, basically saying that everybody wants to get this whole embarassing thing over with.
Other nations have a more progressive attitude towards mental illness. In the US, a new book reveals that President George W. Bush admits he experiences crying fits and claims to have seen ghosts coming out of a wall in the White House.
Photo by Patrick Metzger from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
email this
add to facebook
add to del.icio.us
Ontario ran a $2.3 billion surplus last year, so spending $200 million on higher education is entirely plausible.
But hey, great snark! Too bad it wasn't based on any actual knowledge of politics or provincial finances. Better luck next time.
Hey, guest - Your concept of "surplus" goes about as deep as Howard Hamptons.
Government doesn't grow cash on a magic money tree; they get it by taxing just plain folks like you and me. If they have a surplus, it's because they're over-taxing, not because they're financial geniuses. It's precisely because Torontonians are already taxed so heavily that we get our collective panties in a bunch when the city tries to raise taxes to cover its outstanding budget deficit.
Apart from that, Ontario has outstanding debt of over $100 billion on which we pay a whole whack of interest, so the surplus is essentially a budgetary fiction anyway.
Glad you liked the snark, though.
"If they have a surplus, it's because they're over-taxing,"
over-taxing is the wrong word I think. people are not over taxed but under-serviced.
similarly, 2 billion in surplus is really really small if you consider the total revenues of the province.
having a 2 billion surplus would be like you expecting to have a dollar in your pocket and finding a dollar and 2 cents. The 2 cents really isn't that much more.
What is this, the Toronto Sun? I think backing away from the facile, populist knee-jerk reaction and injecting a little moderate economic literacy here would be helpful.
I think that the debt angle as casually presented here is a red herring. It's like saying your personal savings are illusory because you have debt... which is not necessarily the case.
If that debt was incurred in order to make a productive investment (e.g. a mortgage in the personal case, or something like infrastructure in the public case) then there's no reason to count it against savings and insist that all savings be used to maximally pay down debt rather than continue investing part of a surplus in capital of one form or another.
Like, say, human capital in the form of higher education.
The post-boomer generations will require an awful lot of education in order to hold down high value-added jobs and bring productivity up to a level sufficient to support the boomers in their post-employment life stages, and one of the best ways to achieve that is to ensure a highly skilled workforce. We can hope that individuals will decide that further education (especially graduate and/or technical education) is worth the high personal cost, or we can urge them along by reducing that personal cost by sharing it across society through taxes.
As for the snark, then, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the NDP has a "let's all pay for more of it together" strategy? That would be as opposed to the current, "student - you pay for half of it yourself so that society can ultimately benefit from your productivity" strategy. Right now, society (through government) pays for half of PSE. Tipping the burden a little further towards the public from the individual is not altogether unreasonable. Disagreeing with this is fine, but dismissing it as fiscal lunacy really is just snark.
I'm really disappointed to see Torontoist resorting to shallow NDP bashing. All parties are making promises - why is the NDP being singled out in this way? I hope that future election coverage will be more mature.
Firstly, this post doesn't represent Torontoist's opinion but my own. Secondly, if you read regularly you'd know that I'm happy to mock all parties because all politicians are essentially useless. I will say that NDP enthusiasts seem particularly thin-skinned.
Greg, if you want to debate the relative utility of funding higher education through lower tuition fees, well, I've already done that in a long-forgotten Torontoist vs Torontoist. The gist of the thing is that the data show that low tuition fees do not provide greater access to education for low income groups, but rather disproporionately subsidize those who already have the means to pay. Even Bob Rae, turncoat NDPer, came to that conclusion when he did a report on it a couple of years ago. Hampton is just grandstanding for votes, like everyone else.
I think of all three primary parties, the NDP probably get the most leeway from Torontoist if you go over past posts. I'm a big fan of the NDP, but they're often the first to whip-out the mock outrage.
Greg Smith - good point on debt. In Europe they concentrate on debt/GDP ratio rather than absolute numbers because any government which is making prudent investment carries some debt but a strong economy means they can easily repay each tranche borrowed.
If their debt/GDP ratio is low and thus their debt rating is high they pay the lowest interest rates on that debt. Ontario's is pretty good - at AA1 it is only one level between BC and AB's AAA. This shows confidence by the market that Ontario's debt load is not onerous. Repaying the debt should be weighed against re-investing in new infrastructure such as renewing and extending the transit networks, since congestion has an impact on the economy.
However, it's worth remembering that Quebec has the lowest fees and very low participation. Arbitrary fee freezes holds tend to restrain university investments in both their infrastructure and their people, since they are usually not accompanied by an ongoing, guaranteed increment in central funding. Funding universities is as complex in some ways as funding municipalities. I would rather Hampton bring clarity to the additional fees universities are sneaking in before freezing the headline number, since doing the latter without the former is just hitting the student in a different pocket.
"Even Bob Rae, turncoat NDPer, came to that conclusion when he did a report on it a couple of years ago."
If there's one man in Ontario who everyone agrees has never come to an ill-considered conclusion...
"Hampton is just grandstanding for votes, like everyone else."
Alright. So will every platform plank from all of the candidates earn the same nose-thumbing raspberry treatment from you? If your cynicism runs that deep, what's the point of even reporting?
My apologies if I somehow presented myself as a reporter. I just link to news stories and make fun of them.
Given that the principal criteria for selecting a given story are a) suitability for mockery and b) relevance, in that order, you won't see me complimenting too many politicians.
I have been known to say nice things in private conversation.