Pubdate: Thu, 14 Sep 2017
Source: Delhi News-Record, The (CN ON)
Copyright: 2017 Sun Media
Contact: http://www.delhinewsrecord.com/letters
Website: http://delhinewsrecord.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2391
Author: Jim Merriam
Page: A4

ONTARIO'S POT-SELLING PLAN PUFFS UP BUREAUCRACY

The Ontario Liberals, who couldn't organize a pee parade at a beer
festival, are going into the retail marijuana business.

This means another increase in the size of the already bloated
bureaucracy. It also means the province will steamroll over
entrepreneurs ready and able to do this right.

In addition, Queen's Park is taking a mealy-mouth approach to sales of
a legal product.

A distribution strategy is not about whether the "Mary Jane" we were
warned about in grainy scare films in school in the mid 1900s should
or should not be legalized.

That debate has passed, but the brain surgeons at Queen's Park seem
displeased with legalization and have come up with a plan that will
make it awkward, if not difficult, for many Ontarians to obtain the
weed they need.

Let's back up a minute and look at some of the reasons this government
is not qualified to increase its footprint on the foreheads of Ontario
residents.

Here are just some examples of poor management from Queen's Park: the 
Ornge ambulance fiasco; green energy that enriched offshore companies 
while driving Ontario residents into power poverty; the gas plant 
boondoggle; endless scandals; eHealth; puffing up the health-care 
bureaucracy while making life more difficult for patients; the economic 
pressure on rural boards of education to close schools.

The first step of the new plan for pot sales will see 80 stores opened
to serve all of Ontario. Obviously most of them will be in Toronto.

Although operated by the LCBO, these will be different locations,
since Ontarians might be tempted to buy both liquor and marijuana in
the same place. Heaven forbid.

But here's the rub. The government says the pot sales are expected to
cover the costs of setting up sales locations, etc.

In other words, hard-pressed Ontario taxpayers will get no relief from
pot profits. The new money will go into new stores and more
bureaucrats to run them.

All this in a province where overgovernment abounds.

We'll use my area, about 30 kilometres from Owen Sound, as an
example.

Almost all of the new construction in the more than the past decade
has had a major taxpayer component.

This includes courthouses, grand health unit headquarters on the best
office land in the city, county and city government buildings under
reconstruction, schools, a museum and more.

This level of government involvement in the economy is not
sustainable. Private enterprise needs to flourish in this or any other
first-world country to ensure a solid future.

But the Ontario government is busy driving private enterprise out of
the province because of sky -high power costs, endless taxation,
enough red tape to stop a buffalo stampede and more.

By the way, Premier Kathleen Wynne's kissin' cousin Justin Trudeau is
now in the business of making life even tougher for small business
with a new tax plan.

That plan complicates the lives of small business owners to the point
many of them are likely to wash their hands of the headaches and look
for cushy jobs in the bureaucracy. And who could blame them? The
tax-and-spend Liberals in both Toronto and Ottawa need to change their
ways.

Government has got to be reduced, free enterprise must be encouraged
and citizens have to be allowed to succeed without having to fork over
most of their earnings in taxation.
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MAP posted-by: Matt