Dreams of utopian nanny state have to go if Ottawa's to find fiscal sanity before we all die

Left wing members of Ottawa City Council (one in particular, but that councillor does have some support around the table most of the time) have been telling us to reduce, reuse and recycle for years, regardless of the cost to the City of Ottawa. Some of that plastic wasn't recyclable and had to be shipped to China, to go to landfills there, if memory serves.

They proclaimed that incandescent bulbs are evil, instructing city residents to use CFL bulbs, forgetting how much energy is spent manufacturing those bulbs and overlooking for a time the fact that these bulbs become hazardous waste when no longer in use. That costs money to dispose of them.

Further, they'll tell anyone who will listen that people should take public transportation instead of driving their own cars (regardless of the fact it can for some people significantly more time to get from A to B on the bus) because building roads is evil and costly. How much will the defunct light rail plan cost us? A quarter billion dollars, maybe?

Pesticides are soon going to be on their way out, smoking is illegal just about anywhere, and don't even think about letting your car idle...

Oh yes, and one member of the above-mentionned group's first item on the agenda (and if it wasn't, it was up there on his to-do list) after amalgamation was to try and get the traditional prayer erased from City Council meeting rituals.

It's almost been a decade since the provincial government forced area municipalities to amalgamate. One of the benefits to amalgamation was a cost savings to tax payers. Record tax hikes year after year after year have been the result. Sure, the city has grown - and we're told the City of Ottawa payroll has grown but at a lesser rate - but it hasn't been any cheaper to run.

A new mayoral candidate came around and promised 0% tax hikes. Maybe he can be excused for not really knowing what he was getting into, but much time has passed and the 2009 and 2010 budgets don't look good from the taxpayers' perspective.

Sure, I realize that nobody wants to pay higher taxes... and nobody wants service cut either. It's the conundrum faced by Council each year they debate each and every line that makes up the budget. Service for seniors? Growing population - cutting them would be irresponsible. Snow removal? Um, we saw what last year brought and can only pray it was an abnormal year (bring on global warming!) Make garbage pickups every two weeks. No, that idea stinks and nobody likes that one.

Here's a suggestion, to both the right-wing and left-wing members of Council - give up the freakin' need to head up a NANNY STATE. Govern, for pete's sake, and do your job. How many times have we heard we need to get back to "basics"? Few people can define what the "basics" are, but spending millions one one make work project after another rather than focusing on the big issues, none larger than our aging and decaying infrastructure, is bordering on being irresponsible.

Sure, some councillors believe that the City is some sort of board of health. It is if you make it be so... but who decided it must be so? Who says banning trans fats and handing out crack pipes and hypodermic needles to crack addicts is something a municipality MUST do? Shouldn't water mains and the sewer system take precedence?

I'm getting sick and tired of watching the same song and dance each year. Staff is given an objective. It comes back with some doom and gloom scenario that will cause all groups to come out of the woodwork and complain about the planned cuts to social services. The same scenario inevitably recommends closing a library branch (or six) and a fire station or two for good measure. Who would actually agree with that? Council can't vote for that, so they vote those cuts back into the budget and "settle" for some lame pre-determined number (remember that 2.9% or something along those lines, when councillors left the budget meeting with pre-printed signs held up for the media cameras) proclaiming some sort of victory.

It's all horse feathers. Get back to basics, stop making up things to spend money on when the real priority is making sure the 80-year old couple relying on Guaranteed Income Supplement (otherwise known as also being on a fixed income) can actually stay in the home they bought 55 years ago. Stop dreaming up utopian ideas and work on fixing things that have been allowed to decay despite staff reports desperately asking for dollars to replace sewers that are over 80-100 years old.

Sure, lots of this trouble really started in the early 1990's when a right-wing (of sorts) Mayor froze taxes for years and years. The bottom line is we were given an opportunity early on in this decade to make things right. Well, we're soon going to wrap the "new" decade and we're going to be worse off than we ever have been... with no light at the end of the tunnel.

It's simple folks... closing libraries and fire stations, cutting much-needed social services and slowing/stopping investment into infrastructure ("let's move money from the capital budget into operations") and thinking people are stupid enough to believe that a 2.9 or 3.9 or 4.5% tax increase is just that, all the while doubling and tripling user fees and hiking the water rate year after year (over and above the hikes targeted to go towards infrastructure this past year), hoping they don't realize this annual shell game is nothing but a scam.

Give up the nanny state utopian dream for a few years, Councillors Cullen and like-minded folk, and focus on fixing what is broken and arrive at a solution for once. Soon enough nobody with incomes under $100,000 will be able to afford to live in this city.

Is that what we want?