In my mailbox today I found this flyer from the Ontario PC party. At the upper right is a quote, attributed to The Trentonian, May 13, 2011: “[Tim Hudak] said a PC government will give families, seniors and small business owners relief on hydro bills and by pulling the plug on mandatory smart meters.” Yes, read it again. And again. Clearly there’s a rogue “and” in there. Fine, The Trentonian needs to hire a proofreader…there are a lot of words in a newspaper. But for the PC party to quote this, verbatim, on a flyer with about 75 words on it, is appalling. These losers want to manage our energy systems, our hospitals, our education system? If you can’t handle the language on a flyer, how are you going to manage a province of thirteen million people?
Oh, but it’s just one little error, Bri. Don’t be so hard on these folks. Okay, wait, there’s more. Sure, they’re quibbles, but look how it ads up. This is one piece of paper, and these dweebs can’t get it right:
- I looked up the article in The Trentonian. It’s from May 12th, not May 13th. Details, details.
- One of the bullet points reads: Remove the ‘Debt Retirement Charge”. That’s right; Tim is saving money by making the first quotation mark a single, while showing his extravagance by closing with a double.
(An interesting editorial conundrum: how to present that quote in text? Enclosed in single quotes, I would’ve used doubles; if it ran with doubles, I’d use singles. But one of each? Agh!) - And how about that zinger in the upper left: “Unplug smart meters, [Tim] Hudak says.” It’s a quote from the Toronto Sun, nothing more than a paraphrase of what Hudak said. There’s no value judgment here, no endorsement by the paper, nothing at all remarkable about it. Just a thing Tim said, and the Sun mentioned. Thanks for showing up, Tim, here’s your prize!
Putting aside an unreasonable expectation that my government be smart enough to write a sentence, all these promises to reduce the cost of electricity are perilous. If you look at this page from the Ministry of Energy, some of the debt that charge is paying accumulated because the Harris PC government kept electricity rates artificially low. Maybe it’s just me, but if something like electricity is expensive to produce, it should be expensive to consume…it’s the only way to get people to conserve. And isn’t that what Conservatives should be advocating?