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School boards are sharing money Home Newspaper of Halton Hills Established A Division of Canadian Newspapers Company Limited Guelph Street Georgetown 3Z6 Ontario DAVID A BEATTIE Publisher and General Manager BRIAN Editor Phone DAN TAYLOR Advertising Manager Page THE HERALD Wednesday i Its the law If youre not using your Blue Box now youd better start or you may find yourself hauling your garbage bags to bins in the back of your car Thats the word being sent out by the towns recycling Paul Sergent Even though Halton Hills residents are recycling more than many other towns in the province its important that everyone who can keep their recyclables out of the gar bage dump do just that Theres no reason why on garbage day people cant separate their reusables from other garbage Mr Sargent says When a new bylaw now in the works is passed sometime in spring well all have to recycle Its worth it Theres no use waiting for the provincial government to lay down the law even more than it already has Hills which has fancied itself as a leader in recycling since it first started the Divide and Conquor pro gram in the late 70s will set down fines for those who dont recycle Right now to per cent of Hills residents who canuse the Blue Boxes on their doorstep are using them Thats higher than the provincial average by about five per cent When the mandatory recycling idea was first introduced at Region early last year there were cries of gar bage police Call it what you will but town workers who regularly pick up garbage at the doorstep will be keeping their eyes open for Blue Boxes If they dont appear with the garbage bags several weeks in a row one bag will be left behind with a sticker attached as a notsosubtle message to start filling the boxes if Mr Sergents plan is put into effect The next message may come in the form of a hand- delivered letter from the town warning of an impending fine or the threat of losing garbage pickup altogether Mr Sergent who is modelling the proposed bylaw after Oakvilles policy says fines may reach up to for those who dont use the Blue Boxes That may seem like a stiff fine but when you put it in context you can argue in favor of a heavy penalty Theres no way a few people should be able to continue to abuse the environment when most of the residents are doing their part Next its rural homes and apartments that will be able to take part in the recycling program Although the market for recyclables is thin right now its probably better to have reusable materials sitting on shelves waiting than to have them deteriorating needless ly in a garbage dump Issue of the 90s Brian MacLeod Editors Notebook the to enforce recycling in Hills you can read what hes up to on Page of todays Herald will speak at the meeting Also Dawn Moffat the woman organizing recycling in the town of will speak at the meeting Its open to the public Analysts of the not-yet- happened 90s are saying the next years will bring us a greater focus on the environment And MP Garth Turners environment committee will kick off the new decade with a discus sion on recycling at the North Golf and Country Club in Georgetown at 730 pm Monday night Paul Sergent the man drafting Three stores opened their doors once again in Georgetown on Sun day despite being charged previously for opening on Sun day And one store Shoppers Drug Mart faces a charge not of opening on a Sunday but of hav ing too many people working on a Sunday Lets see give someone a job pay them take them off the unemployment line have them contribute to the economy by spending their paychecks sounds like a crime to me Derek Nelson ft gm- Park tm When former premier Bill Davis decided to extend separate school funding all three oldline parties in Ontario PC Liberal NDP pro mised that this action wouldnt financially hurt the public schools Hah That promise gives new definition to the word misleading In fact the cost to public schools began almost im mediately and continues to rise sharply The public school lobby group the Ontario Public Education Net work OPEN calculates that the transfer of residential and farm assessment from the public boards to the boards is already costing the public boards million annually Now comes the latest legislative initiative moving wealth from the public boards to the separate boards a pooling of some com mercial and industrial assessment that will take in revenue from the public boards In essence these bills and 65 will take that tax money and put it in one big pool that both boards will draw on It may be that the government originally intended to go further The bill initially spoke about swit ching the assessment of Roman Catholics rather than separate school supporters Ontario has always given Roman Catholics an option of which board to direct their taxes towards since the public boards are open to all It is the universal system Roman Catholic boards can exclude peo ple Even with full funding it is said about per cent of Roman Catholics remain in the public system As originally written Bills 04 and gave Roman Catholics with affected commercial and in dustrial property no choice in the matter but simply moved their taxes to the separate boards The Liberal government later said this was a mistake and million pamphlets announcing the change have had to be scrapped Mistake or not such a com pulsory division of revenue bet ween Roman Catholics and non- Roman Catholics would fit in nice ly with the philosophy that underlies the continuing expansion of separate school funding by the province This is that there are really two sections to the public school system that should be funded equally rather than one public system that Roman Catholics can opt out of or separate from at their own cost Forcing Roman Catholics to financially support the Roman Catholic portion of a dual system rather than giving them a choice would clearly fit with that philosophy The best way to look at the dual system theory is to see it as the taxation of nonRoman Catholics to sustain a Roman Catholic system something that probably leaves the nonRoman Catholic founders of Ontario public education spinning in their graves OPEN estimates that while only 29 per cent of studenf enrolment is in Roman Catholic schools billion in provincial grants flows to them Public boards which have 71 per cent of enrolment receive just billion in provincial grants Next year the value of separate grants will actually surpass that giverr public boards OPEN calculates Bill 64 and with their diver sion of a portion of the local com mercial and industrial property taxes that the public boards re quire adds to public board woes Moreover the Roman Catholic boards have made it clear they want access as well to the remain ing unaffected portion of the com mercial and industrial revenue Concurrently they are also con ducting an aggressive recruiting campaign to entice from the public system including in Wind sor offering board employees 20- bounties for getting people to switch their assessment It all bodes ill for public educa tion From Dr Wilson The 7 per cent solution Vic Parsons Hey come on folks Trust Dr Michael Wilson The sevenper cent solution is better medicine for you than the nine per cent he in- suggested new prescription for a goods and services tax GST may taste almost as bitter as the old one but the finance minister believes the sideeffects will be less painful to the Body Economic How do we know Why Dr Wilson used the word better at least six times when referring to the revised GST formula at his news conference Better also cropped up a cou ple of times along with easier balanced and fairness in his announcement and associated papers But speaking of fairness surely its fair to ask why Wilson tried so long and hard to foist a nineper cent GST rate on the public if seven per cent was better The finance minister stood his ground on the higher rate for mon ths At the end of October he was saying he thought the rate would hold barring unfore seen circumstances Its difficult to Imagine what unexpected events might possibly have inspired the rate reduction since then After all economists from across the spectrum were already predicting dire results for the country especially from tax- induced inflation if a nineper cent GST was introduced The experts were backed by a chorus of public opposition that though divided on alternatives was sure of one thing the GST as proposed was a rotten idea By November Wilson had begun talking daily about difficult trade offs There is no free ride to a lower rate he told a Toronto con ference on Nov There is no easy way to redesign the tax to get the rate down or dramatically alter the shortterm economic ad justment Difficult tradeoffs yes But now Wilson was at leastleaving open the possibility of change The Commons finance commit tee report urging seven per cent along with compensating measures gave Wilson room to move Several of the majority report recommendations were adopted and some new ones were added to get the rate down Among the new ideas announced were the increase in highincome surtaxes a higher tax on large companies the elimination of the smallbusiness administration fee and its replacement by a onetime credit arid a halving of the rebate that Ottawa is to pay back from the GST on new homes Other measures such as main taining the higher taxes on booze smokes and gasoline the reversal of a proposal to cut income taxes paid by middleincome earners and reducing the GST credits paid to lowerincome people were wide ly predicted Wilson sees the chief benefit of the rate reduction to be a smaller impact on inflation The govern ment feared that if the cost of liv ing rose by the 225 per cent higher by other estimates it had predicted with a tax demands for increased pay could have set off inflation