Today's corruption: "As a Ford government staffer, he helped get through permits for a controversial gold mine. Now he works for the company as a lobbyist"

Premier Drug Fraud and his buddies at work

Stories like this are now a dime a dozen. 

It's clear Doug Ford's Progressive Conservative government is corrupt, with a revolving door of staffers making their way into the private sector, selling their insider knowledge and connections made while working as "public servants" in ministers' offices.  Now putting that insider knowledge and those connections to work for private corporations who only have their own profits to care about, certainly not the public interest. Matters are now worse since the PCs changed Access to Information laws in Ontario this year, ensuring any ministerial office activities are completely beyond scrutiny of the public.

No wonder Ontario is a broken mess right now.  The public interest has long been destroyed in favour of corrupt private forces happy to undermine quality of life so they get richer and richer.   

Ontario voters need to wake up from their complacency and realize their provincial government is no longer on their side and hasn't been for decades.  At least, not when the current PCs are governing, who have always favoured powerful, ultra-rich private interests over ordinary people.   Doug Ford's claims to be a "man of the people" notwithstanding.  It's a demonstrable, objective truth that public education, public health, public transportation, and public services have collapsed under their rule.   

I've never voted for these grifters in the Ontario PC Party and never will.  Sadly, as I yearn for change, I've also come to the conclusion that much of the sleazy activity we're seeing under the PCs since 2018 is simply a repeat of the same sort of activity done by insider Ontario Liberals when they were in power.  

There were just as many revolving doors between Liberal insiders who then launched their own private clean energy companies, which then found themselves the beneficiaries of "ministerial directives" designed to circumvent due process and hand over millions in taxpayers' dollars to those Liberal insiders.

It's clear to me now this corrupt state of affairs will only continue should we make the false change of turfing out one centrist-do-nothing-corrupt government in favour of another one.  

The Ontario Liberals will never learn.   Even losing party status and struggling in the wilderness for almost 10 years has taught them nothing.  Their reflexive opposition to due process, decency, fairness, and genuine progressive ideas all remain steadfast.   

When I criticized horribly unqualified potential leadership candidate Mike Crawley earlier this year on this blog, my local Ontario Liberal riding president called me up to rake me over the coals for daring to "criticize another Liberal."  

Who cares that I was criticizing corruption in the hopes that such a person would not be able to take over the party?  Corruption gets a pass as long as it's done by a Liberal, it seems.   Liberals aren't allowed to constructively criticize their own past mistakes so that we may learn from them and correct them; no, Liberals are only expected to zip it and applaud anything and everything the party apparatus may cook up.  

The way it's been is the way it's going to be in the Ontario Liberal Party.  

I've seen nothing from any remaining OLP leadership candidates that makes me think the future will be any different.   

My affiliation with the Ontario Liberals - after the corrupt shenanigans that benefited a sleazy, amoral pizza store franchiser in the recent Scarborough Southwest nomination race, rubber stamped by a kangaroo internal party court tribunal designed to always support what the establishment wants - is in tatters and will be coming to an end soon enough.   

I'll give my support to parties that are genuinely fighting for better lives and a better society, and not privileging insider corruption looking to make a fast buck at the expense of the public interest.