Re: "Clark revamps team, aims to help families," Sept. 6.
So, the deck has been reshuffled down at the legislature, minus a whole bunch of cards, and the old ones have folded corners and are starting to look tired.
I would like to offer some timely advice to the new finance minister Mike de Jong, on what the electorate would like to hear as an order of business.
Instead of the tokens and trinkets offered to promote the "Families First" agenda, how about a real showing of leadership, that is, to lead by example.
The auditor general reported in the past months the misspending of public money, just in the running of the show. Couple that with obscene pensions (e.g. Murray Coell, $89,000 per year, indexed with cost of living, for life), junkets to foreign countries with spousal accompaniment and a myriad of other instances of wrongful spending.
De Jong's challenge is to clean up the mess first, like the HST debacle, that he actually supported when his government brought that into legislation. I've decided to only charge him half of the consultants' fee that government likes to pay for good advice, say half of former legislature clerk George McMinn's $400,000, to supplement the $15,000-per-year pension I get for my 17 years of driving public transit around the capital region.
Tom Romanuk
Courtenay
