...my big decision...

Despite my internal promise to, for the most part, keep this blog from returning to the political, there is a current issue I want to address. I had a visit from Peter Shurman last night, he is campaigning in Thornhill for the Ontario PC. For a small-ish quaint village in Vaughan, Thornhill is actually a rather visible and important riding; and having Peter Shurman, a visible media personality, as the PC candidate seems fairly apt.

As many of you know, one of the big ticket issues on the Ontario PC platform under John Tory is the funding of faith-based schools. Tory intends to divert $500 million from the public education system to the funding of private religious schools. It's expected that in the culturally diverse Thornhill community, this issue and the profile strength of Peter Shurman will take this recently Liberal riding back to the PC.

When his campaign team were at my house last night, I was asked if I or any in my home would be voting PC in the next election, to which I answered a hesitant "Noooo...". "Oh, are you still deciding?", Shurman asked. To which I responded that no, we were fairly certain and no, we were absolutely not PC. Which isn't entirely true; my family has been traditionally evenly divided between Liberal and PC. However in this provincial election, we have a tricky situation ahead of us. I definately was not intending to vote for Mario Racco, he having been fairly useless as far as representatives go. But neither am I going to vote for Shurman. The faith-based schools issue is what the Ontario PC expects will win them the Thornhill riding, which has more private religious schools than any other in the province. However, it is exactly this issue that lost the PC the support of any in my family, including my previously near-always PC-voting father. Frankly, if we wanted equal support for religious schools in a public education system, we would have stayed in Iran. Diverting money from an already strapped Ontario public school system to fund religious schools, who for the most part deliberately choose to remove themselves from the standard education system, is not something we will support. Not to mention the fact that one of the conditions for funding is adherence to the problematic Ontario curriculum guidelines and standardized testing, and we all know how I feel about that.

Let me know your thoughts.