Cripes!

There, it's done. Done and over. For another four years. Four years of living with the premiership in Ontario of Dalton McGuinty. That peerless, self-satisfied exemplar of the status quo. The province needs more than that. It needs a steady hand to guide it through a period of exhausted economic conditions geared to become worse. It needs more than the hypocrisy of one who sets himself forward as a traditional family man, ardently religious.

The poor, the indigent and homeless need social support they just are not getting enough of. We need more subsidized housing for low-wage families, we need housing for the homeless. We need assurances that the growing number of children dependent on food banks to keep hunger at bay is an anomaly we fully intend to make history of. We need decent hourly wages for low-wage workers.

We need attention to our faltering health care system. We're deficient in the number of nurses we staff our hospitals with. We urgently require a greater number of primary care doctors; too many Ontarians are without family doctors. Our hospitals have a dearth of required diagnostic equipment. We need our provincial government to adjust the health care formulary to cover vital services they've removed.

We need smaller classes for primary and elementary-grade students so children can receive the benefits of more teacher time and attention. We need more funding for our schools so that basic equipment will be assured, and schoolchildren will no longer be sent out on fundraising missions going from door to door, begging for support for school programmes.

We need some attention paid to the enormous number of manufacturing jobs lost in the past few years, placing Ontario, once the engine of Canada's economy, well behind its Western provincial partners. We need more assured sources of energy, along with a greater investment in research into newer technologies, rather than having to fall back on reliance on cheaper, more plentiful, dirty coal.

But the election is over, the die has been cast, and we've got good old Dalton McGuinty again. That unabashed promoter of self. The family man beyond reproach. When what we need is a good leader. Wait, as a reward to his faithful followers who have granted him another majority government, and just incidentally inclusive of the rest of us, the reward was swift: a provincial holiday in February, titled "Family Day".

Thank you, thank you so much, Mr. Premier. Alas, not all families in this great province live the ideal, assured lives that your family and those of your siblings, acquaintances and fellow Members of Provincial Parliament do. The many families who struggle to make ends meet, who are frustrated by inadequate schooling, medical treatment, may not feel like celebrating about another day off.

And for all this you have to thank not the voters of Ontario who have so gladly handed you another kick at the Ontario legislature, but your erstwhile Progressive Conservative rival for the throne. As capricious fate would have it, this seasoned back-room good old boy who fashioned his politics after an earlier incarnation of a Red Tory bloopered exquisitely to your great advantage.

Why, your handlers and your own backroom boys must have thought they'd died and gone to heaven. Fund religious-based private schools in recognition that the province already funds the Catholic school system - in the interests of fairness? What a grand opportunity you were given - to stand tall and declare unequivocally that you would not be a party to anything that would divide the people of this great province.

Of course your experience was slightly different, based on historical perspectives and social obligations of the time. Of course such entitlements must be preserved in frozen-in-time observation of our heritage. Of course your sterling qualities as a legislator, an upright Roman Catholic, a reliable and trustworthy public servant has placed you where you are.

Of course a slothfully indolent, gormless electorate has dolefully accepted there is little other choice for now.