Trashy's World

Over at Cowboys for Social Responsibility, the author has commented on how a local council has reacted to Federal and Provincial interference in the planning of an important local infrastructure project.

Folks in Lanark County are well known in Eastern Ontario for their Back Off Government signs dotting farms and villages throughout the area. They aren’t too keen on politicians of any stripe – most of all, outsiders. In general, they find a home under the vermin-infested ReformCon tent hearkening to the small government rallying cry that is popular among their adherents.

Conservative MPP and former Ontario Tory leadership candidate Randy Hillier and his pal Tory MP Scott Reid have found themselves in some political difficulty at home by interfering in a Council decision on how to upgrade the local sewer and water system.

Hillier and Reid are proposing a make-shift and cheaper plan.

It’s an option doesn’t satisfy the township council or the district health unit. They say it doesn’t not address the sewage half of the problem or guarantee all residents potable water.

The Randy and Scott Show want to install filters on the pipes of affected households water pipes. Really? Why not just buy each household a jug of Javex?

Furthermore, they are calling for a community referendum to force the duly elected Council into changing their plans.

Whatever happened to Big Government butting out, Randy?

This is a really good example of how political this whole infrastructure thing has become.  It really hits the fan at the local level where the local councillors, by and large, honestly do want the best for their constituents and don’t try to play a partisan game. Yeah, yeah, I know that pork-barreling is part of the game regardless of the party in power.  But interfering in the local decision-making process has not been part of this dance in the past with other parties.

Remember how John Baird interfered in Ottawa’s transit plan?

I can relate to all of this.  While a municipal councillor in Ontario during the Harris years, I and my fellow Councillors were quite worried about saying anything that would piss off our PC MPP.  Don’t upset the apple cart or else that funding promised to upgrade the boards in the hockey rink? Well, that may just not happen.

Wink, wink.

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I haven’t been active on the posting front lately. My excuses are the following:

1) Been freakin‘ bust work-wise with this.

2) Busy at home with subunits, gardening and general home stuff.

3) Parliament isn’t in session, and the BBQ circuit ain’t generating a lot of controversy.

Oh wait, there’s something! I see it!

Warren , Warren, Warren. You should know better than to blog when drunk. One tends to miss that line where humour blends into something-that-someone-may-find-offensive.

Never mind that if the thought bubble were over one of the guy’s heads and read “I wish very much I was somewhere else, at this very moment. Watching baseball perhaps. Oh my.”

Now I would most certainly be offended by THAT!

OK,OK,OK, I shouldn’t make fun of this. It WAS a bonehead move by WK and yes, stereotypes suck and should be stamped out with the vigour of a tattoo artist at a Marilyn Manson concert.

But back to the point that Kinsella was trying to make. What the frick were those three doing on the same stage as that wacko Randy Hillier. This is a guy who is best know for his anti-government stances on EVERYTHING! I mean, this guy musta been beaten with a brick wrapped in a tax form or something else government-related as a child.

Check this out – from his “rural revolution website:

“Join the rural landowners, farmers and small business – to fight for democracy’s return and a Canadian Bill of Rights – not Government Wrongs. All these intolerable acts are the result of our lost property rights. The Landowners are resolved to make Parliament restore “Our right to own, use, enjoy and earn a living on our private property” – free from the unnecessary and intrusive urban regulations that have closed our sawmills, slaughtered our abattoirs, broken the back of our family farms, threatened our maple syrup producers and clear-cut personal freedom and liberty from our woodlots and lands.”

Yeah – gotta save them abattoirs, Randy.

And here is what is even crazier – this guy has been nominated as the PC candidate in Frontenac, Lennox and Addington for this fall’s provincial election. The slogan on the site is “Rural Rights, Conservative values – there’s more to Ontario than just Toronto.”

Mr. Tory – shouldn’t this have beeen one of the ridings that you should have parachuted someone into? Someone perhaps a bit less, uh, conspiratorial? If your party forms the next government, do you really want this guy on YOUR side of the House?

OK – as someone living in Ottawa, I agree with the last part of the phrase. But what’s with the whole “rural rights” thing that Randy’s whole persona has been built upon for a number of years? This is a guy who has inconvenienced tens of thousands of Ontarians with those asinine tractor motorcades on express highways in and around Ontario cities like Ottawa. With only a very small proportion (15.3% according to 2001 data – this will have dropped when the 2006 numbers are released) of Ontarians living in rural areas, his appeal is (thankfully) rather limited to an even smaller number of confirmed red-necks.

All in all, hopefully Randy and his rural roughnecks are just a flash in the pan that will fade quietly into the soft night and quit annoying the 84.7% of Ontarians who can relate to nary a thing he says.

Nice going, Warren! Now my blood pressure is rocketing again!

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