BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). This is a follow-up letter from city resident Peter Bursztyn, after BarrieToday published an initial letter last week, which can be seen here.
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Clearly, some of us are not yet ready for an adult conversation about taxes.
First, a couple of loose ends. The Walkerton deaths and many others in that town who suffer from permanent kidney damage following their acute illness are the headline grabbers. However, in the week the Walkerton tragedy unfolded, 150 other Ontario communities were under “boil-water” advisories because their water was not safe.
That is an astonishing number, considering it happened in one of the richest provinces in one of the world’s most prosperous countries! I can tell you that this Canadian was truly ashamed.
Second, “Phoebe” says: “I am not really sure that I want my taxes helping someone make bail."
Two days of incarceration at over $200 per day should be more than enough to pay for one hour of a lawyers’ time to argue in favour of bail. It is typical for an accused to spend at least a year awaiting trial.
Phoebe should consider whether she prefers paying a lawyer (say) $400 to argue for bail, or whether society is better served spending $70,000 for that person to languish in jail in pre-trial detention. (Jail costs $50,000 to $100,000 per year.) That amount of money could house and feed two seniors for a year. I would much prefer my tax money spent that way!
One thing a politician can be certain of is that a promise to lower taxes gets the voters’ attention. That doesn’t make it smart policy. Starving government of the money it needs to provide services will do absolutely nothing to root out corruption.
In fact, government might actually abandon investigating questionable practices simply because they may notfind sufficient evidence to prosecute. In addition, there is no guarantee that reducing government revenues will reduce spending on wasteful programs. Lack of funding is just as likely to delay infrastructure repairs – consider the state of Barrie’s streets.
At the moment, we have a government in Queen's Park which has, on the one hand, promised to end “hallway medicine” and on the other hand cancelled the previous government’s scheme to reduce carbon emissions by major emitters, thus turning its back on $2 to $3 billion of annual revenue.
Last Wednesday night, I attended an evening at Barrie’s Royal Victoria hospital thanking us for donating money to RVH and telling us about their expansion plans (to deal with overcrowding).
Of course, RVH was also preparing us for another major fundraising campaign.
Why should I and many others donate our hard-earned money to our local hospital? It is partly because “Phoebe," “John Cooper III," “Regor1," “Real705” and a great many others reliably vote for tax cutters without connecting the dots. People who hate paying taxes rely on other, more generous citizens to pick up the slack.
RVH isn’t the only organization out there relying on volunteers to do work the government probably should be doing, but it is the one I know best. I contribute time (and sweat) by volunteering to carry tissue samples to the lab, bags of blood to various departments, late lunches to people just waking after surgery, push people around in wheelchairs and beds, etc.
Who knows, I may have helped one of you.
For the record, I cover eight to 14 kilometres in a four-hour shift! You can recognize me because I am always smiling. No matter how tired I feel, I always have a kind word for patients. Oops, that really doesn’t identify me. All of us blue jacket volunteers are like that. Our time saves the province money. Since there are over 800 of us, it is a lot of money.
Despite being 77 years old, I have needed very little from OHIP and hope to keep it that way. I also hope some of the complainers out there join us as the hospital expands. We get a great deal of job satisfaction, despite enjoying a $0.00 paycheque at the end of every month.
And you know what? We are not particularly political. At least one of the chaps I work with votes Conservative, but when it comes to helping people, he votes with his feet.
Peter Bursztyn
Barrie
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