Morning News

Aurora is listed in a Toronto Star article as one of 190 best places in Canada to live.

Toronto is 47th and it comes between Thunder Bay and Aurora.

I'm assuming its us. There's nothing else to identify. I know of two other towns named Aurora  but they 're in the U.S.

So I guess that makes us 48th. Doesn't feel  different.Our name will  probably still not appear on the weather map.Even though we have two exits off the 404.

Claiming to be the 48th best town in Canada to live doesn't sound like much without  accompaniment  but it's nice to know.
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George Smitherman is in the news this morning. He was Minister of Health when air ambulance system,Ornge was set up. The scandal is back in the news again and he was  asked to comment. 

Some general stuff about how easy it is to" throw politicians under the bus" .That's true.  But it's  just another one of those pesky hazards of the occupation.

“What did the ministry do? Let’s call them what they are — the funder. What did sugar daddy do?” he said, adding bureaucrats should have “tightened up their cash flow to get their attention.”


Instead, ORNGE paid $600,000 in taxpayer-funded MBA degrees for seven ORNGE executives and bought a $15.6 million Pearson airport-area headquarters that was renovated for $478,000.

While some senior Liberals have privately tried to blame Smitherman for the ORNGE imbroglio, Matthews wasn’t going there on Tuesday.

“We had a very serious lapse of leadership at ORNGE. I’m not going to second-guess the minister who was there at the time it was set up,” she said.

“I do believe that it was set up with all the right intentions, but what we have learned is we did not give ourselves enough oversight capacity and we’re going to rectify that.”

Last fall, McCarter was stonewalled by ORNGE officials and Matthews had to step in and tell them to cooperate.
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The Honorable Matthews is the current Minister of Health. Mr. Smitherman was  Minister of Health when the scandal erupted .
Because he is no longer a politician he is obviously less limited
in how he might respond. .

He no longer needs to fall upon his sword to save the government harmless.

In some respects, a  comparison between  the Ornge scandal  and the "imbroglio" we have  with the Church Street School building. can be made.

The town is "the sugar daddy that provided the funding"

The town "did not give itself enough oversight and we need to rectify  that."

There has been "stonewalling".

Funding should have been cut off to  get the attention desired.

The town is not the supplicant.

The role of "sugar daddy" doesn't fit  with most of us either.

And if it has anything to do with being 48th best town in Canada
to live, I would just as soon be 50th,