A video at TheStar.com has the following caption: 
The screen grab is in case they change it. The text states:
“Census data shows that for the first time legally unmarried couples out-number legally married partners, and couples without children are more common that couples with children.”
The bolded text is mine. I’m just curious what an illegally unmarried couple would be.
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In other news, Ontario is having an election1. I’m torn. I’m a Liberal at heart, but I don’t feel that the current provincial leadership of the party is doing much of a job. Of course, on the other side, there’s John Tory, who (conveniently enough) is a Conservative2, who’s really good at saying what he would have done differently from the current Liberal government, but isn’t so good at saying what he will do. At least his advertisements don’t seem to concerned about saying about the future. I’m not even going to talk about the NDP in Ontario, because with the leadership they have right now, they aren’t even an issue. So, what’s the problem? I don’t feel like my conscience will let me vote liberal. There’s been too much disappointment there. Too many broken promises, and irresponsibility. However, I cannot bring myself to vote Conservative. I (like many others) was hurt badly by the so-called “Common Sense Revolution” and I won’t be a party to that happening again. As well, the Conservative Agenda is one that I cannot support.
Here’s something for party leaders to consider though. The city of Toronto was a prosperous city before Mike Harris buggered it. At one time, the now “mega-city” of Toronto was made up of a group of Municipalities that shared responsibility for certain services (Fire, Police, EMS & TTC, for example). Each city funded its own School Board, which was paid for out of property taxes. When Harris’ “Common Sense” dictated that the municipalities should be amalgamated into once “mega-city”, at the same time the funding of the school board was taken over by the province, while the costs of welfare was downloaded to the city (though control of the policies remained with the province). Suddenly, the city of Toronto was a huge monstrosity, and the cost of running it rose higher and higher (this is obviously a simplified recap), plunging the city into financial trouble.3 Now to the point: if there’s a provincial politician that will take some responsibility and help Toronto come up with a solution, I would vote for them. Hands down. No question. If there was a politician who was willing to say “I admit that amalgamation was simply an attempt by a conservative government to limit the voting influence of a Liberal-leaning city, with a powerful voter base, and downloading did no good and must be reversed”, that politician would have my vote. Right now, helping Toronto only seems to mean “Throwing money at Toronto” which is not the solution. Partially because it doesn’t fix anything, and partially because that just looks bad to the municipalities that aren’t Toronto. There needs to be a solution that fixes what ails the city.
So, here’s a challenge: is there a party that has the balls to solve a problem that was created by their predecessor? To roll back the mistake of amalgamation and reverse the downloading of Provincial services to the city? I’ll be surprised if there is. But I’m willing to be surprised. So, please: surprise me.
1. Hey Americans! Did you know Canadian elections only last for 4 weeks? I’ll be you’re jealous now!
2. The term Tory derives from the Tory Party, the ancestor of the modern UK Conservative Party. To this day it is often used as a shortened alternative for Conservative. A similar usage for Tory exists in Canada to describe the Conservative Party.
3. There are certain newspapers that will try to claim that the current trouble is the fault of the current municipal government. However, this is an out and out lie, since the same issues existed when there was a mayor in power that the certain paper liked. They just conveniently ignore that fact.
Note: I don’t usually talk politics in this blog, but I really needed to make an exception here. For those who don’t agree with me, or those who hate politics, don’t worry… I’ll talk about something else soon enough.
