A Con Job Can Be Really Challenging

But this is only true when it is done by professionals and is well orchestrated. The fiberals and Dullton McGoonty don't meet this criteria but the sad thing is that this is becoming a defining issue in this election.

Education becomes the defining issue

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

Good God, you should pardon the expression, Premier Pinocchio has morphed into Humpty Dumpty.

After the 2003 election, Dalton McGuinty achieved infamy as a serial fibber for broken promises.

Now he's turned into Humpty Dumpty, who, in Alice Through the Looking Glass, scornfully tells the bewildered Alice: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

Take the word "fairness." For years in opposition, McGuinty expressed sympathy for public funding for Jewish, Muslim, Christian and other faith-based schools as a matter of "fairness," since Ontario funds Catholic ones.

He told the Canadian Jewish Congress he favoured it over time. Ditto the Ottawa Citizen. Many of his present cabinet ministers -- Monte Kwinter, Michael Bryant, Kathleen Wynne (the education minister!) expressed support. Gerard Kennedy, his former education minister, told NOW magazine in 2001 funding religious schools, done responsibly, wouldn't necessarily take money from public schools, the opposite of what McGuinty says today.

The premier has done a complete about-face, now arguing it would not only be unfair, but wrong to fund these schools. He isn't just saying it would be nice to fund them but we can't afford it, or that fixing public education must be addressed first, which would at least be somewhat consistent with his past statements.