Bill 16 - ALL citizens should beware the McGuinty Liberals

UPDATE:  Many Liberal MPPs are ignoring their constituents' requests for meetings.  Nice to know the Liberals represent only some of the citizens in this province, hmmm?



UPDATE:  The Liberals are sending out a canned response recycled from 2005 to requests to call Bill 16 for a third reading.  Even MPP Laurel Broten, who owns a `substantially similar`dog that is NOT exempted from the Bill 132 provisions and does not obey the law she voted for and her party passed.  Can you say `hypocrite`?

UPDATE:  A private citizen took out a full-page ad in a Toronto newspaper castigating McSquinty Corp. for cancelling its slot machine business arrangement (NOT a subsidy) with racing tracks.  Read it here.  This is an angry citizen, angry at 60,000 Ontario jobs being ditched and 30,000+ horses to go to slaughter.  First dogs, now horses, McSquinty Corp. is good at killing.

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Chicobandido has done a fabulous, objective timeline with links of the progress of Bill 16, the private members' bill to remove "breed" specific provisions from the Ontario Dog Owners' Liability Act.  Read Chicobandido's take here.

Now, here's my take.

The Ontario Liberals called committee hearings in 2005 but didn't listen.  They called a committee hearing in 2012 and aren't listening.  Why?

Because this was never about the dogs.  This was about the McSquinty Liberals panicking at low public approval ratings and deciding to make people second-class citizens and kill dogs for the equivalent of television show ratings.  This was about a former MPP's not-well-disguised political ambitions.  This was about creating an excuse for warrantless entry and search.  This was never about public safety.  It was all about ego and ulterior motives.

I remember the 2005 committee hearings.  I remember the Liberal committee members showing complete disrespect to and disregard for the honest, naive people who came to testify for their beloved dogs.  I remember the Liberal MPPs playing with their Blackberries during people's testimonies, sniggering at honest people with accents, being completely disrespectful and in fact downright dishonourable since they had no intention of listening, let alone learning.  Those committee "hearings" were all sham and show.

Looks like those Liberal committee members got paid off with lame assignments, really low-level fetch-and-carry stuff in my eyes.  Overpaid Labrador retrievers.  Gee, guys, hope you enjoy your low-level yes-man rewards, earned with blood on your hands. 

And now?

All of the committee members are low-level backbenchers circling the McSquinty inner circle hoping to get in and maybe get a cabinet post.  It's all about perceived power and gaining power.

You'd think that MPPs Dhillon and Coteau in particular would be more sensitive to entrenching profiling and discrimination on the basis of appearance in legislation.  Guess not.

Because they're good little robots, these foot soldiers parrot the party line.  Not a functioning synapse, a spine or a pair on any of them.  Circling the inner sanctum, hoping to break into the inner circle and get up on the ladder.  No matter how many dead dogs they step on in the process.  No matter how many people they harm in the process.  Their ambition is all they care about.

Public safety was never even on their radar.  The Liberal MPPs voted against the very sensible and workable amendments that would have improved public safety vis-a-vis dogs.  UPDATE:  Apparently one of the amendments was originally suggested by the Fibs, they voted down what was basically their own suggestion.  Duh?


Once a good foot soldier, always a good foot soldier (read - foot soldier = cannon fodder).  McSquinty needs cannon fodder that does what it's told.  If you aren't bringing connections, power and money to the table (there's a former high-level MPP who's a prime example of this), you aren't of interest to McSquinty other than as cannon fodder. They'll get paid off with more lame low-level retriever assignments, for which they'll genuflect and accept with their bloody hands.

The female Liberal MPPs are worse.  I expect better of women but they profoundly disappoint me.  Talk about unthinking foot soldiers.  They keep getting sucked in with "soft" portfolios instead of arguing to be one of the power portfolios - Attorney General or Minister of Finance - or wind up taking the fall for the gross mistakes of a previous (male) MPP.  They vote the party line despite the fact that it displays their personal hypocrisy.  They'll stay barefoot and pregnant, politically speaking, under the good Catholic McSquinty and seem oblivious to it.

There are intelligent, honourable Liberal MPPs; Kim Craitor, Grant Crack and Mike Colle.  They're the exception to the goose stepping rule.

So the foot soldiers keep marching along the party line and McSquinty Corp. keeps killing dogs and leaving law-abiding people as second-class citizens.

No honour, no morals, no ethics, no care for constituents.  It's all about power.  To me, the misuse of power.

We are living under a totalitarian regime masquerading as a democracy.

"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.” - Gandhi