We've heard a lot of complaints about Dalton Mcguinty on Friendly Fire lately. Yes ... what else is new?
The chorus is generally sung along the same lines.
“Dalton McGunity is taking my money. Dalton McGuinty is wasting my money. Taxes are a waste of my money.”
That conclusion is a bit of a leap. But let's take a closer look at this frustration, with a template as our guide.
Say what you want about Wikipedia, but I challenge every reader of this blog to have a look at the entry on positive psychology and not come away with a deeper understanding of what really matters in life.
The article states that almost all people agree that there is value in the following virtues and strengths:
Wisdom and knowledge: creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, perspective, innovation
Courage: bravery, persistence, integrity, vitality
Humanity: love, kindness, social intelligence
Justice: citizenship, fairness, leadership
Temperance: forgiveness and mercy, humility, prudence, self-control
Transcendence: appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, spirituality
Now, let’s look at those initial statements of frustration, and discuss which are true and which are perceptions drawn out of our own sense of injustice. (Don't worry, we'll also look at where the Premier is falling well short of the above mentioned values and strengths.)
Yes, the government is taking your hard-earned cash with the purpose of paying our collective bills and redistributing the money with a goal of us collectively achieving some of the above-mentioned virtues and strengths – say, kindness, fairness, prudence and mercy.
Is Dalton McGuinty wasting our money? This talk-show host will declare that, without question, under McGuinty's leadership we have seen several examples of money being abused, wasted and misused for the purposes of re-election.
Any way you want to say it, McGuinty's leadership has lacked most of the virtues we have come to expect from a leader.
His job is to govern first and worry about re-election later. If he believed it to be other way around, he should have been more CREATIVE. He clearly has no PERSPECTIVE about what his role is. Because he lacked BRAVERY going into the last election, he took a route of little INTEGRITY by reversing a decision to kill a power plant mid-construction after originally telling us that building the plant was the right thing to do.
It was display of a lack of KINDNESS to the electorate, displaying little SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE on his part. It was also an UNFAIR strategy to win office again, as well as an abuse of his power as LEADER of the province.
One could argue that we should allow the Premier an opportunity for FORGIVENESS and MERCY. But that argument would surely fall on deaf ears, as we Ontarians can no longer hear, having been beaten repeatedly over the head with McGuinty's pathetic excuses for his misdoings. (The power plant is just one example.)
All that being said, there is no good argument that taxes as a whole are a waste of your money. When collected and spent properly, they get us closer to living in a society where all the goals and virtues we've talked about here can be met. Finding a leader who can execute that vision is up to us.