Last Updated on: 4th September 2019, 03:39 pm
That’s my suggestion assuming Doug Ford actually does the right thing and puts this licence plate nonsense to a proper vote instead of sticking to grand Ford tradition and just doing whatever the hell he wants regardless of its impact on the lives of anyone he doesn’t count as a personal friend. Given what he’s been doing to the province since taking office, it seems appropriate.
And it really is nonsense all the way around.
Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives are defending their plan to change the slogan on Ontario’s licence plates as a signal that a new government is running the province.
As if all the programs he’s gutting and lives he’s ruining haven’t already made us keenly aware.
Ford faced questions in the Legislature on Tuesday about his admission that he intends to replace the “Yours To Discover” slogan on licence plates.
“I can tell you that people across this province want change. They voted for change, and they’re getting change,” Ford responded.
Please, guy who won a majority with 40 percent popular support, tell me more.
Ford claimed changing the licence plates won’t cost taxpayers anything.
Now this…this is just a flat out lie. The only way it’s not a flat out lie is if people are doing the design, consulting and focus testing work for free or if Ford is literally passing a hat around caucus and having Dean French intimidate everyone into filling it with cash.
The PCs are considering putting “Open For Business” on commercial plates and a different slogan for the plates on passenger vehicles, government officials have confirmed. Ford said this week that the new slogans will be revealed in the budget on April 11.
That shouldn’t even be legal, assuming of course that it is. Ford and company don’t exactly have the best relationship with the law, after all. But in any event, turning thousands upon thousands of vehicles into rolling advertisements for his government is obscenely unethical if it’s nothing else.
Licence plate design falls under the portfolio of Government Services Minister Bill Walker and he too is indicating there’s a political reason behind changing the slogan.
“What we want to do is turn the channel; we want to turn the page on a dire economic situation that the Liberal government after 15 years of mismanagement left us in,” Walker said Tuesday in response to reporters’ questions about the licence plate slogan.
Fine, except that…
“Yours to Discover” has been on Ontario plates for 37 years. The PC government of Bill Davis brought in the slogan in 1982, replacing “Keep It Beautiful.”
I’m just going to let that one hang there.
The Ford government wants to “ensure that Ontario says to the world, ‘We are back on stage,'” Walker said. “We’re looking at all kinds of different options to brand our province as open for business, open for jobs.”
Why do I get the overwhelming sense that this government won’t be satisfied until every single one of us is wearing a mandatory “government for the people” bumper sticker regardless of whether or not we own a car?
This announcement, as I said up top, is complete nonsense. But even complete nonsense can be frightening when its wielded by a guy who really does think he’s king of the damn province. Today it’s licence plates, but where does it stop?