Randy Hillier: Taking the Progressive Out of Progressifve Conservative

Randy Hillier, MPP for Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, congratulated new Premiers Andrea Horwath and Kathleen Wynne, over their tabling of the most fiscally progressive budget Ontario has seen since Premier Rae.

 

Others will focus on the partisan shots and hopefully, a bit of substantive talk about the content of the budget itself.

 

Me, I love Hillier's use of "fiscally progressive" as a pejorative.

 

In Hillier's world, progress is synonymous with waste and a loss of personal freedoms.  People should have their own land and be free to do whatever the hell they want with it.

 

Forget bemoaning the loss of horses and bayonets - Hillier is bemoaning the last 3,000 years of social evolutionary progress that has brought us such costly initiatives as roads, books, eye glasses, inoculations, hospitals, movie theatres and even Tim Hortons coffee (coffee originated in Ethiopia and is now a chief export of such diverse nations as Brazil and Indonesia).

 

Innovation is progress; innovation relies on creating things for which there is no practical need now, but might be, given a socially engineered change in public appetite.  That's what businesses do through marketing all the time.

 

Please tell me if there's another way to see this, but by being anti-progress, Hillier is essentially anti-society.  If Randy Hillier thinks we'd all be better off living the tribal live of independence, he's welcome to move to Northern Afghanistan.  I'm sure he'd fit in just fine.