The Runaways, Or A Brief Look At Premier Wynne and (ex) Premier McGuinty.

I don't watch a great deal of television, but one program caught my eye, a scientific exploration of electronic entanglement and Bell's Theorem, dealing with what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". In another post, I might get into just what that's all about, but for this week's topic, I was quite taken with one of the commercials.

The advertisement shows the Premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, clad in jogging gear and running, running, running in the countryside, the message being to show she is fit and able.  Then something else struck me. I could barely make out, towards the edge of the screen, the leading edge of a horde of enraged Ontario taxpayers, pitchforks and torches in hand, in hot pursuit.

Now the ad made sense.

Yet Kathleen's running was not the whole story. The ghastly deficit position of Ontario was partly her fault -- she signed off on stuff she shouldn't have -- but it was her superior at the time, Dalton McGuinty, who must shoulder most of the blame. This did not come about because he was evil or unscrupulous, but rather that he had put his faith in those who (and I am being kind here) didn't repay that faith with sound projects and good policy.*

McGuinty in this context is an almost too perfect example of W. H. Auden's The Average Man. There the subject of the poem, raised to be a Number One, finds himself in the following position:

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.

And run he did.

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* Here one thinks of the e-Health fiasco, the Ornge helicopter fraud, and the horrific expenses incurred in the gas plant removal in order to retain Liberal seats. Costs to taxpayers have amounted to some billion and a half dollars. No wonder there's so much running away. Poor Ontario.