JUNE 2, 2009

       Do you have trouble making up your mind about things? Maybe now is a good time to enter politics.

       The whole political game – and lately it’s seemed more like a circus than the usual game – has become very weird with flip-flopping politicians that change their mind and create new rules and change their mind again.

       What does this do to Manitobans? Well, for one, it annoys us. Two, it confuses us. And, three, it sort of makes you wonder who they’re really looking out for.

       OK, I haven’t been living under a rock for decades. I know the jokes about greedy and crooked people in office. But, while overturned speeding tickets and cancelled birth certificates haven’t affected me, it certainly makes me wonder why, when and how things change and why the public it affects isn’t told.

       The other week in this column I blamed the speeders for breaking the law and not taking responsibility for getting tickets. I’m not flip flopping on that opinion, but it is an example of how the government said it wouldn’t cancel speeding tickets issued in construction zones where signage was in question, then saying it might look into it, then looking into it, then saying the tickets stand. And then… well, what’s the status of that now? I’ve already lost track.

       A couple weeks later we saw it with birth certificates being invalid because the province decided to make a change and not tell the public. People would be forced to get another one, pay for it and the government wouldn’t help out, then it would, but only to a certain extent.

       What’s next? Are we soon going to find out our graduation diplomas aren’t official and we need to go back to high school? Or are we going to get a letter saying, “We’ve changed our mind about public health care, here’s a bill for the past 20 years”?

       Let’s see what happens in the next couple weeks.