...if they voted for McGoonty THREE TIMES!
Openness? The buck stops with Wynne 72
If Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne was truly interested, as she claims, in running a transparent and open government, she wouldn’t need to appoint a panel of paid experts to tell her how to do it.
At Queen’s Park, it is the premier alone who sets the standards of conduct for the government, on everything from transparency to ethics.
It is the premier alone who decides who should be in cabinet and who should be dismissed for incompetence, negligence or political corruption.
It is the premier alone who decides what is ethical in terms of the conduct of political staff, parliamentary assistants and government MPPs.
Appointed officers of the Legislature — the auditor general, the ombudsman, the information and privacy commissioner, the integrity commissioner — already exist to advise the government on how to be open, transparent, ethical, honest and efficient with the public’s money.
But, just like the latest panel of “experts” Wynne has appointed to advise her on openness, they are not elected by the public. They have no legislative power to force the government to do what is right. The only power they have is moral suasion and if the government they are advising lacks political morality, then nothing ever changes.
Wynne’s Liberals, and, before her, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals, have had a decade to put their stamp on the provincial government.
If they were going to be open and transparent — through the eHealth scandal, and the Ornge scandal, and the gas plants scandal, and the Green Energy Act scandal — in which billions upon billions of public dollars have been wasted — they would have done it long before now.
They would have independently put safeguards in place to make sure such scandals never happen again.
They would not have had to have the truth dragged out of them time after time by the opposition parties and the media. And Wynne would not now be making what sounds like a death-bed repentance, for whatever short period of time her minority government has left before it falls and is judged by voters in an election.
When it comes to openness, the Liberals, at the eleventh hour, are talking the talk about being transparent and accessible to taxpayers.
The problem is, for 10 years, they’ve never walked the walk
At Queen’s Park, it is the premier alone who sets the standards of conduct for the government, on everything from transparency to ethics.
It is the premier alone who decides who should be in cabinet and who should be dismissed for incompetence, negligence or political corruption.
It is the premier alone who decides what is ethical in terms of the conduct of political staff, parliamentary assistants and government MPPs.
Appointed officers of the Legislature — the auditor general, the ombudsman, the information and privacy commissioner, the integrity commissioner — already exist to advise the government on how to be open, transparent, ethical, honest and efficient with the public’s money.
But, just like the latest panel of “experts” Wynne has appointed to advise her on openness, they are not elected by the public. They have no legislative power to force the government to do what is right. The only power they have is moral suasion and if the government they are advising lacks political morality, then nothing ever changes.
Wynne’s Liberals, and, before her, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals, have had a decade to put their stamp on the provincial government.
If they were going to be open and transparent — through the eHealth scandal, and the Ornge scandal, and the gas plants scandal, and the Green Energy Act scandal — in which billions upon billions of public dollars have been wasted — they would have done it long before now.
They would have independently put safeguards in place to make sure such scandals never happen again.
They would not have had to have the truth dragged out of them time after time by the opposition parties and the media. And Wynne would not now be making what sounds like a death-bed repentance, for whatever short period of time her minority government has left before it falls and is judged by voters in an election.
When it comes to openness, the Liberals, at the eleventh hour, are talking the talk about being transparent and accessible to taxpayers.
The problem is, for 10 years, they’ve never walked the walk
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