Yet another McGuinty assault on seniors

 News item: "Ontario may crack down on drivers with dimentia" 

[see: http://autos.sympatico.ca/auto-news/13170/ontario-may-crack-down-on-drivers-with-dementia]


The following is a letter that I sent to an Ontario newspaper expressing my views. It needs no further explanation.

I swear that if Dalton McGuinty could he would confiscate all seniors’ money, use their properties as daycare centres for unwed mothers, and ship us (seniors) to Baffin Island.

The first thing he did when coming to office was to rescind Ernie Eves’ property tax rebate for seniors—legislation that had already been passed. The second thing was to remove the ceiling from hydro so that my energy costs are now almost equal to my mortgage payments.
Then he enacted a ‘health premium tax’ so that my generation of seniors became the first to pay for health services after sixty-five.

And now he is proposing a graduated driving license for seniors, claiming seniors are subject to dementia.

Whether or not this is true, all doctors in Ontario are required to recommend to the Ministry of Transportation that an individual’s license be revoked for medical reasons. This suggests there is a secondary reason behind such a heavy-handed proposal, and given McGuinty’s record I suspect it has a lot to do with all those administrative dollars it would generate.

Besides being an insidious erosion of civil liberties, there is also a question of priorities here. At a time when the major oil companies are poised to price some Ontarians out of their cars anyway, it appears the only concern Bob Chiarelli and Dalton McGuinty have is restricting seniors.

As a seventy-six year old writer working on my fourth novel, I am willing to test my mental capacity against McGuinty’s anytime, and if this proposed legislation passes I am going to prove my intelligence by removing myself and my money out of Orillia; out of Ontario; and out of Canada. Let McGuinty ponderously ponder that one.

Gerry Burnie,