The Value of a Vote in Ontario? No Less Than $730

Ontario Liberals crassly trying to buy votes

Students in Ontario following the ongoing provincial election were recently alerted to a remarkable fact:

To the Liberal Party of Ontario, their vote is worth money. So much so that Dalton McGuinty and the Liberal Party are willing to blatantly buy their votes for anywhere from $730 to $1600 per year.

In a mass email sent out to University of Windsor students, someone working on behalf of the Liberal Party spammed in favour of the party's proposed education policy. The specific language of that email lays out in no uncertain terms how the Liberal Party is appealing to these students:

"So [the Liberal Party] are going to support all middle-class Ontario families with a 30% across-the-board post-secondary undergraduate tuition grant.That means - every year - the families of five out of six students will save $1600 per student in university and $730 per student in college.

Neither the NDP nor the Conservatives have an education plan - nothing! Shame on the NDP and the Conservatives for not caring about students, higher education, or the future of Ontario.

We are in battle for our future and you get to help make the choice on October 6th, 2011. As many of you may know, we are currently in a provincial election. On one side there are the NDP and the Conservatives who want to take Ontario off track - cutting healthcare, education, and destroying jobs.

On the other side, there is the Ontario Liberal Party, who is fighting to ensure that we continue to have the best education in Canada, the strongest healthcare, and that we create jobs for everyone. We need to stay on the right track because our future depends on it.

PS. If you are in 4th year and don’t think this amazing policy will apply to you - think again. By voting Liberal, every student will receive half the amount in January - that is $800!"

To describe a blatant vote-buying scheme as an education plan is beyond facetious. It lacks any kind of insight into what is continuously driving up the costs of post-secondary education across Canada and certainly lacks the foresight to address those issues.

Instead, it simply promises to send a government cheque to university students once a year, every year, until the next election. That means that the Liberal Party has offered to buy the vote of post-secondary students for anywhere ranging from $2,920 to $6,400.

And all of this without ever having addressed, or even attempted to solve, a single problem related to the cost of post-secondary education. Finding ways to reduce the costs of providing post-secondary education in the first place would solve this problem once and for all. The Liberals' proposed policy simply shifts the costs away from the student to the taxpayer.

Any political party that respects taxpayers and aims to spend tax dollars responsibly would be absolutely ashamed to have put such a crassly irresponsible and flagrantly self-interested policy forward.

It's political bribery at its finest, and desperation from a party for whom the poll numbers are not what they're telling people they are.