Personality clash

The furor over our very accomplished governor general, Julie Payette, because of ideas she publicly spoke out about, points out that her role could be too controlling to suit an independent high achiever like Julie Payette.

The traditional role of governor general in Canada is to represent the Queen of England. As Queen Elizabeth II knows, she has to control her personal views when in public.

Expecting a determined person, like our new governor general, to avoid speaking her mind in public might be like thinking our prime minister would want to wear a niqab in public to avoid selfies. Lost in many of the comments and letters concerning the recent speech of Governor General Julie Payette is the fact that as the representative of the queen she should not be making any statements which can cause division.

Our sovereign has reigned for over 65 years and has been circumspect in all her duties and the way she has conducted herself as a constitutional monarch. Surely we can expect that her representative should act in the same manner.

The office is above politics and should be seen as such by our citizens. If she does not wish to conduct herself properly she should resign immediately so that the office is not further tarnished. lawmakers must rectify. I fully agree with Conrad Black’s diagnosis of the math crisis in Ontario, and his suggestion to de-bureaucratize the Ontario education system sounds really nice.

In the meantime, I’m not sacrificing my children’s intellects or their futures while I wait around for the government to solve (or exacerbate) the problem and have chosen to educate my children at home, where merely 20 minutes of math and phonics drill per day for my five-year-old puts her a grade ahead and leaves hours upon hours of truly investigative, discovery-based, child-led play.

If the Ontario Homeschoolers Facebook group, which is over 3,200 strong and growing by the dozen many days, is any indication, more and more parents are becoming dissatisfied with government education and have opted to take their children’s futures into their own hands. Yikes, the CBC is down the tube. Canadians are sick of the constant advertising on the news channel, especially when their hard-earned cash has been squandered on the CBC for years. The advertising is taking precedence over the news. The main fix of course is get rid of the ads. The announcer should represent the majority of Canadians, have an appealing voice, be well-groomed and middle-aged. Listeners will then turn to our news and not the BBC. Long live the CBC. I agree 100 per cent with Terence Corcoran on this matter. Why should employee pension contributions and accrued assets be commingled with the employer general assets and thus used to increase that employers borrowing power as collateral? Such activity of course exposes the pension funds to lenders at the expense of the employees. A better solution would be to require that all pension contributions and assets be segregated from general assets of the employer, thus removing the “pensioners” from exposure.