Beating the Drummond Report At Queen’s Park

There’s already polling reaction to the Drummond Report. Less than a day after the TD Bank’s former Chief Economist offered his “common sense” solution to tackling Ontario’s runaway budget problems, the papers are publishing polling on whether Ontarians support the recommendations.

Really? I wonder how you calculate that margin or error. Far be it from me to pre-judge, but my anecdotal observation suggests most of us barely read the headlines on the news stories, never mind the 543 page report containing more than 300 recommendations. Nonetheless, according to Forum Research numbers, more than half of those asked DO NOT SUPPORT Drummond’s call to cancel all-day kindergarten.

Now think about that. We didn’t have all-day kindergarten until 2010. Even at that, it’s only offered in a limited number of schools. So the math suggests the “outrage” around all day kindergarten comes
from people who don’t have it now.

If you read beyond the third paragraph in most of the well written stories about the Drummond Report you may conclude that most of the “cuts” aren’t “cuts” at all. Plenty of it would be fairly painless.

The headline might scream:

Drummond Calls For Increased Class Sizes
Cue the complaining until you realize he’s talking about adding 2 more kids to each class. Two kids! It means class sizes grow from 22-24 students.

Drummond Says Teachers Should Retire Later.

But how bad is it when he’s really talking about raising average retirement age for teachers from 59??
(The Italians are ready to riot because they’re talking about increasing
retirement age from 62 to 65).

I loved Drummond’s example on Global Toronto’s “The Morning Show” of how we can save healthcare dollars. Doesn’t it make sense to pay for someone to
show up at your house to install a handrail in the bathroom rather than having
to send someone to a long term care facility?

Would it be such a hardship if GO Transit users had to pay more for parking at GO stations?

And we make fun of the Greeks who scream entitlement.