GOVERNMENT SPENDING ON EYE CATCHING, VOTE GETTING MEGA PROJECTS OR ON UNDERGROUND,OUT OF SIGHT INFRASTRUCTURE

Yesterday's post regarding lead in our drinking water and especially in highly vulnerable children's drinking water has pointed out a few things to me. Firstly tap water is not inherently safe despite our most wishful and hopeful thinking. Vigilance has never been more important.Secondly it may well be time that we revisit the purposes of having governments collecting our tax money and then spending it as they see fit. There is also a third issue. Trust. We are supposed to be able to trust our democratically elected representatives to be honest and straightforward with us. The number of people interviewed during the testing and studies of lead in tap water in schools in particular has been an eye opener. So many of these people have stated that school boards, municipalities, and health departments all knew about lead exceedances in school drinking water and still refused to make that information readily available to students and parents attending those schools. What the hell!

The second issue is one of ideology. Conservatives are for smaller governments. They do not believe that every issue is necessarily one that governments should be involved in. I could go along with that if only they didn't also decide to save taxpayers dollars by making cuts on the big dollar items such as health care, environmental protections (O.K. that is my wishful thinking), education. Hmm... maybe I have seen the occasional school board opulence and or recent dollar amounts paid to in particular, top of the scale, teachers. More basically perhaps things like culture, multiculturalism expenditures, new opulent courthouses, ION trains etc. should not be top of the list spending as they seem to be. How about fixing (removing) the damn lead pipes in the ground first.

Tap water, especially in Ontario, is better protected than it has ever been. So how has this lead issue not been fixed? Two reasons namely : 1) cost- very few votes gained by spending tax money underground as previously mentioned and 2) transparency- our authorities really, really like to hide bad news from us. Out of sight, out of mind. Poison our children now and let the next government pay the piper when it gets out. The current Annual (Drinking) Water Reports are marginally being improved. More needs to be done including simple things like increasing the number of compounds being tested for. There are far too may ubiquitous industrial chemicals and compounds being ignored. Also cut out the gamesmanship in some of the testing. Numerous municipalities advised their citizens to run their tap water for five minutes BEFORE taking a sample of their tap water for testing. The lead that leached into the water in the pipes is removed temporarily by five minutes of flushing thus artificially lowering the concentration of lead found via this means of testing.