Crossing A Line

Took some time recently to catch up on what was going on in my home province, Ontario, and saw instantly that this was a Bad Decision. A new budget has been proposed by the Liberals, and likely supported by the socialists of the New Democratic Party,  that will continue the death spiral of over-spending financed by a slew of new "revenue tools", or, as any normal person would call them, taxes. And nary a word about any cost saving measures. Greece, here we come. Poor Ontario.

This got me to thinking. What is it that happens when a normally sane individual gets elected to political office, and immediately forgets all about household frugality and sound budgeting and starts spending as if there's no tomorrow? Is it something in the air? Tainted water at the Legislature? Or is it the fact that they are not spending THEIR money, but OURS. Whatever the reason, it occurs.

Now I exempt from this little diatribe those who are under the sway of ideology (or worse, religion) or are deeply into fraud and sleaze. If the electorate sees fit to elect such creatures, then it is the electorate that will duly pay a price. In Ontario, that price is massive -- think e-health, medical helicopters, or the two gas plants that "moved". All this bothered the ideologues or sleaze artists not one whit.

Not so for at least one other individual, although here I must speculate a little bit. I am thinking, of course, about our former Premier, Dalton McGuinty.

Now Mr. McGuinty strikes me as being what my late husband, Lord Strunsky, would call "a good bloke" and one who truly fell among thieves. As time went on, and things went from bad to worse, with Ontario's debt rising ferociously, poor Dalton finally became overwhelmed, and acted as did W.H. Auden's figure in his poem "The Average":

So here he was without maps or supplies,
A hundred miles from any decent town:
The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes;

The silence roared displeasure: looking down,
He saw the shadow of an Average Man
Attempting the exceptional, and ran.

He sure did.