Free Our Hospital!!
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre has a private members bill coming up on Wednesday this week to have the Queensway-Carleton Hospital's annual rental fee dropped to $1.
Poilievre and Progressive Conservative MPP John Baird have got local Liberal MPPs Jim Watson (provincial health promotion minister) Madeleine Meilleur (culture minister), and Health Minister George Smitherman as well as the federal NDP on board.
The only ones against this are the Liberals and the Bloc!
Baird said NCC officials told him they have no authority to change the policy.
"The prime minister is the only one with the authority," Poilievre said. "He could do this in a cabinet meeting, but he won't."
It is completely ridiculous for the Queensway Carleton to be paying rent to the federal government through the NCC while municipal golf course get thei land rent free!
posted by pale @ 8:39 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Agreed 100%, maybe you should start an online petition, or maybe see if someone else has already...
Dazz, its a good idea, but Poilievre is my MP and he and Baird are making some pretty dishonest claims about this. He is actually lying and misleading people over this - the lease isn't up until 2013 and the hospital and the NCC are in active negotiations right now. And the reason the NCC doesn;t have the authority is that it follows a regulation passed by the Mulroney Conservatives in 1985.
I have a nice post on my site, which I'm sure you've seen.
Even the folks from other parties pale has listed here thing the shameless scandal mongering is wrong.
I'm all for eliminating the idea of market value rent, but you should know that its entirely possible that the land is worthless - its been declared greenspace and thus cannot be developed, so its not likely to have any buyers. So even the idea of $3.4 million per year is a wild guess at best.
Raising this as an issue to work with is great. Pretending its a scandal and lying to make yourself look good is both dishonest and unethical.
I checked your post - 3 points.
1) It's a press release - get over it! Check out the other parties press releases - they are written the same way! Two from the NDP here and here They are written that way to get attention fron the 70% of people that don't follow politics.
2) Pierre is a politician that blows his own horn and shifts his views to more closely match his constituents - oh what an evil man!
3) leave the Right Honorable Brian Mulroney alone - for the past 10 years Chretien or Martin could have changed the NCC dirention in this case but did not. Why? Well the riding was Liberal from 1988 to 2004 - I guess none of the previous Liberals thought to raise the issue - including Paul Martins Minister of Defence - Davis Pratt!
Which is pretty sad considering it is such a no-brainer set things up so that a hospital is not paying rent to the federal government through the NCC.
Joe Lemarde
Post a Comment
<< Home