...there is damn little we can do about it. At present the ballot box seems to be our only recourse but when you look at the turnout on election day, at all levels, apathy is a disgrace. Promise are made and not kept but there is little we can do and this highlights the need for recall legislation.It must be a sense of entitlement |
Another day, another sign our elected representatives just don't get it. They don't understand who they are representing and what their responsibility is with our tax dollars.
The Toronto Catholic District School Board trustees, even while under fire from the Toronto Sun over questionable expenses, continued to spend and spend and spend.
As the Sun's Don Peat revealed yesterday, the school trustees' penchant for spending didn't run into any Catholic guilt, as trustees added iPods, an iPod Touch, paid $1,000 for a Parade of Tenors concert, and one even spent $219 buying a picture of himself and his wife. How is that a reasonable expense for a school trustee?
These expenses came after repeated staff warnings and well into the Sun investigation, stopping when supervisor Norbert Hartmann took over the board in 2008.
We're just plain exhausted with the untethered spending. Why, knowing this, should the trustees continue to earn salaries while Hartmann has control of the board?
At City Hall, expenses were also under the spotlight. After a series of Sun articles about councillors expensing everything from limo rides to liquor-filled lunches on council days, the city moved to bring in new, tighter rules to clear up any misunderstanding and add transparency to the $53,100 office budgets.
The changes proposed by the clerk's office were reasonable. Some didn't go far enough, but it was an appropriate saw-off. Hopefully enforcement will follow.
Still, councillors couldn't stop themselves. They insisted money to sponsor local teams be included. Staff rejected it saying the money appears to be an attempt to curry favour.
"It's not done anywhere else," city clerk Ulli Watkiss told councillors.
Too bad. Council voted 24-15 to allow sponsorships up to $500 per group.
No doubt all those sponsored teams won't have the councillors' names, right? The shirts will say "Taxpayers sponsored my kid" or just have a city logo on it, right?
If it's so important to sponsor teams, councillors should be using part of their salary to do so, not taxpayer money.
But the real question is why do councillors and trustees get to make their own rules anyway?
1 comment:
but no one mentions the ones in Ottawa who have been spending like drunken sailors, offering no real tax relief to hard working Canadians.
Funny enough, no conservatives seem to counter this.
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