Birds do it, bees do it....
...and so do squirrels. Which is what's got John Tory's knickers in a knot. He'd rather not know the intricacies of squirrel sex, particularly that of the Northern Flying variety, and he'd prefer it if you, the tax payer, didn't have to hear about it either.
The aptly named leader of the provincial conservative party is ticked off over the granting of $150 000 of provincial money to an ecologist to study the mating habits of the northern flying squirrel in an effort to see how global warming might be affecting the population. The grant is part of an initiative to open up job opportunities to graduate students, and this sum is enough to buy you five for a year. Let's see... that breaks down to about $30 000 per scholar. Not a bad deal at all, really. But Mr. Tory would rather see that money go towards healthcare (the system his party pretty much destroyed in the late nineties) or paying down the deficit (also a grits' legacy). I am not sure if Mr Tory is still operating on the 1967 dollar. I'd be interested in knowing exactly how far he thinks $150 000 would go to cutting down waiting times, staffing MRI machines, or plugging the hole in the province's pockets. But conservatives are pretty handy with the creative accounting, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt for just a second. If we can solve so many problems by taking grants away from scientific research, imagine what we could do with a couple of cuts to MPs' salaries and expense accounts.
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