Dear Editor,
I was just reading an article in last week’s NGT, entitled “Keeping energy and housing costs down”. There was no author attached to it, but it does read like a missive directly from the Ford government, printed verbatim. It is disingenuous, and deliberately avoids explaining why this government is trying to override an Ontario Energy Board decision that prevents us from being saddled with the cost of a stranded asset.
Ford’s proposal is to increase our natural gas bills in order to pay for Enbridge Gas to expand its gas distribution system into new subdivisions. The Ontario Energy Board rejected this, and Ford introduced Bill 165 to override this decision, again supporting multi-million dollar corporations, at our expense.
In this period of climate crisis, burning more fossil fuels is counterproductive, particularly as there are cheaper alternatives available like heat pumps and induction stoves which wouldn’t require massive pipelines, thereby speeding up the process of building new housing, while keeping energy costs down for homeowners.
However, this Ford government is only interested in keeping major corporations happy, as they are the ones that keep its coffers filled.
So now we have this to add to the list, which includes Ford trying to give his developer friends an $8 billion profit by attempting to release Greenbelt lands to them (breaking his promise not to do that, and which garnered so much opposition that Ford was forced to back down), building highways and jails that we don’t need or want, privatizing our health care system by starving our public system of funds (Ford withheld $2 billion in health care funding in 2023), slowly dismantling the Ontario Endangered Species Act so that mining companies have less restrictions when building their trails for new mines, and the list goes on.
We can all thank voter turnout for being so low that it gives this government the idea that they can do whatever they like, which is exactly what they have been doing from day 1. All the while, non-conservatives sit on their thumbs at election time because they believe the mantra that all politicians are corrupt (and who can blame them/ They see what is going on and want no part of it). Regrettably, that is just what those like this Ford government wants, which is why the hopes and desires of the rest of us are generally ignored.
We need Proportional Representation, the idea of which was recently voted down by Parliament, because both the Conservatives and the Liberals prefer our First Past the Post system, because it works for them. It is the only way that we will get a system where every vote counts, and strategic voting is no longer needed, which accounts, in no small part, for why the two main parties dominate our system. I don’t know what it is going to take to get through to those who “don’t do politics”, but they have the power to give us the chance to do things differently. There are more than two parties in the system, and I hear a lot of people saying that other parties align more with their views, but they won’t vote for them because they think that they won’t get into government. That, of course, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They won’t get in if you don’t vote for them. Our current system forces people to vote strategically by choosing one of the currently strong parties to avoid the other getting elected. And so we stay on this same old roundabout.
Colin Creasey,
Kemptville
