Two full weeks of daycare for my toddler. That’s what I’m going to get from my $200 rebate cheque from the province. That’s a pretty damn good deal.
How each of us chooses to spend that sweet, sweet $200 rebate is up to us, of course. So while I plan to score two weeks of free daycare for my kid, I can only assume that St. Catharines City Councillor Caleb Ratzlaff plans to donate his to charity. I’m basing this on the fact that he recently took to social media to deride the rebate as, “a measly $200 cheque.” Measly!
Being the helpful guy that I am, I pointed out to him that $200 is, depending on your situation, definitely not “measly.”
Are you billionaire Elon Musk? Then sure, $200 is definitely measly. Are you a City Hall Sunshine List CAO making $400,000? Then sure, $200 can probably be safely described as “measly” to you also.
But for the rest of us, $200 is a good chunk of change. And for someone on the poverty line, struggling to pay the hydro bill, $200 could very well be the difference between keeping the lights on and sitting in the dark.
Alas, my helpful suggestion to rethink the framing of the $200 as “measly” was immediately dismissed by Ratzlaff, who doubled down on his assertion that $200 was naught more than piddly little chump change, pocket money, barely even worth going to the bank to deposit.
Except it isn’t. Ratzlaff, and a buncha other social media lefties, chirped back at me about homeless people needing more than $200, which, sure that’s true, but the fact that they went straight to homeless people says a lot about the kind of thinking of the elitists.
You don’t have to be living on the streets to appreciate $200. Due to inflation (thanks Obama!) and housing costs (thanks Trudeau!) and gas prices (thanks Putin!) there are tons of working poor, people who have a steady job, work hard, but still barely scrape by. To those folks, $200 is going to be a big deal.
It’s easy to write a column about how $200 won’t even get you a ticket to see the Leafs game, and blah blah blah, but do the people talking like that have any self awareness about how out of touch they are? A huge portion of this country cannot afford to go watch the Leafs, never will, $200 rebate or not.
If your first thought when you hear about a $200 rebate cheque is to yammer about how it won’t even cover dinner with the wife at The Keg, then congratulations, you are part of the slim minority of people for whom this $200 is “measly” and you are welcome to donate that money to a local charity.
Or, continue to talk about $200 like it ain’t nothing and fall into the very clever trap set for you by the provincial government. You are doing exactly what they want. The plan all along has been to hand out $200 rebate cheques, then sit back and watch as clueless elites look a gift horse in the mouth, so that the government (and me) can then point at them and say, “Look at this guy, he doesn’t get it, he’s not like us, he’s turning up his nose at $200.”
But hey, I’m not here to tell you how to live your life. By all means, feel free to ignore my helpful advice. Continue to refer to $200 as “measly” and alienate all the normal folks out there in a misguided attempt to impress your cool rich friends.
Meanwhile, I’m taking that $200 straight to the daycare. Oh wait, actually it says here that kids get $200 also. Okay forget all that, my kid can put her own damn $200 towards daycare costs, it’s about time she started contributing financially around here, because I’m now taking my $200 straight to the local country club pro shop to buy myself a new 3-iron.
James Culic needs much more than a new 3-iron to fix his awful golf game. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or send us your unneeded $200 wrapped in a letter to the editor.
