AUSTERITY FOR THE WELL OFF

Wage rollbacks, benefit cuts and and heaven forbid messing with union contract negotiations are dynamite politically. Two Waterloo Region Record writers are approaching the same issue from vastly different directions. Today's paper has the following article from Luisa D'Amato "Police and firefighters are next in line". In her article she advises that we haven't seen anything yet. If we the taxpayers think that the teachers' are sympathetic targets for provincial austerity she is warning us that there is a whole lot more sympathy, respect and need to go after the police and firefighters budgets. They get paid more, probably appropriately so, and despite being municipal employees, it is provincial legislation around the arbitration process that will be changed and changed to lower the burden on taxpayers.

Mr Thomas Walkom in his Record article takes a fundamentally different tack. He suggests that the McGuinty government is taking a run not just at teachers but at the whole trade union movement. Mr. Walkom feels the Liberals are sneaky and duplicitous in their self interested attack on the middle class (teachers) and that it is motivated by their lust to win a majority government. He calls the Conservatives up front honest troglodytes on this matter.

So what do I think? I think both writers are accurate in their assessments. I also think the three sets of employees are all overpaid and that we the taxpayers are going broke paying public service employees so much more than we ourselves are able to earn. So what is the solution? Ideally the Liberals wouldn't have given the farm away for so many years to public service workers. Ideally our economy wouldn't be in the toilet. Reality says that public expenses and taxes have to come down, not forever keep going up. This could have been accomplished by the current system of negotiations and arbitration if reasonable and honest people, on both sides, thinking of the public interest had been involved. Unfortunately that has never been the case. So now we have a politically motivated cut and slash agenda. I still can't feel a lot of sympathy for any of them.