Cobourg Blog

What a surprise! As if we could not predict it - the County wide quote for OPP to do the same or better job is less than it currently costs. The same people doing the same job in the same buildings with better management and tools but different dispatchers. So if you are in favour of Cobourg (and Port Hope) keeping their own Police force, you are saying “Let’s spend $2M per year to have better local dispatcher knowledge”. What am I missing here? Don’t give me hidden costs - there are some up front costs - paid for in the first year by savings - and don’t give me it would really be inferior service - how can it be with mostly the same people and the same contracted level of service?

John Draper

Looks like Ontario voters did not agree that breaking promises was something that was unacceptable.  Maybe they think all politicians break promises!  And John Tory’s mistake of trying to be fair to minorities did not in the end do more than distract from the rest of his message.  But the Conservative’s mistake seems to have been to focus on why the Liberals were bad and not why the Conservatives were better. So we are stuck with the “same old” for another 4 years - anyone who voted Liberal should not complain in that time - they lost their chance.   One other notable change is the increase in Green party support - I would suspect they will gradually grow over the next period - mostly at the expense of the NDP.

And the other major thing to note is that the MMP system did not win support so we’ll continue with “First Past the Post” .  As Paul Macklin was recently quoted as saying “it needs more study” and “there are other alternatives”.  The consensus seems to be that MMP is too complicated, too likely to lead to minority Governments and too likely to elect unwanted party nominated candidates.  If you want to avoid wasting a vote - then the single transferrable vote works.  But it too has problems - notably an increase in spoiled ballots.

John Draper