Two lottery winners emerged in London this week.
One, as you may have heard, split the big 6/49 prize. The grocery store clerk picked up more than $20 million and by all accounts she’s one of those people you hope would win: nice, kind, decent. A father and son won $50,000 on a $1 scratch ticket later in the week. This has people saying things like, maybe London is lucky. I truly hope they are joking and not stampeding toward the lottery kiosks.
London city councillors voted to reinstate the 5% paycut they took during tougher economic times. Some saw this as an opportunity to complain that they were giving themselves a raise. For once, can’t we give credit where it is due? They voluntarily took a cut when it was needed and now they’re going back to their regular salaries. Case closed!
I miss the days when pay was based on merit. If your work output was consistently excellent, you could expect to be rewarded for it. In the provincial budget yesterday, a wage freeze was put in place for more than one million government workers. Oh that’s going to go over well the next time I need a license renewed. Not to say that the hope of better compensation is the only reason people will do a good job but it sure helps. And the huge deficit? If I operated my personal budget the way the government operates theirs (or ours!) I would be promising to make filet mignon for supper and actually serving Kraft dinner. Every night. Going deeper and deeper into the red until we ended up in a homeless shelter.
Serial child killer Clifford Olsen is collecting federal pension while in prison. I don’t have to go into the many reasons why this is wrong. If we don’t already have it, we need to create a checklist for pension eligibility that denies the payments based on a single “yes”. Have you ever murdered anyone? Did you lure children for the purposes of anything illegal or immoral? And so on. It’s simple and it’s effective. Being born in Canada and reaching a certain age are clearly not enough criteria for qualification. Stupid, stupid government.