This election has prompted more exaggeration, obfuscation and confusion than all others in recent memory.

Ms Betsy Hall (Liberal) claims in an advertisement that John Tory would "tak(e) $500 billion away from our schools." The way I heard it, the Progressive Conservatives would add $400 Million (not Billion) to the school budget from general revenue to add all religion-based schools to the publicly funded systems.

Ms Sylvia Jones (Progressive Conservative) now assures us that the PC plan to fund faithbased schools would require new religious schools to join either the public or the separate school boards for administration. One must ask how much support a Sikh school would receive from a separate school board, how many Catholic teachers and administrators they would be obliged to hire and what proportion of the board's funds would be devoted to Sikh teaching.

Almost total depletion of the Innisfil Creek subwatershed of water, and the absence of provincial concern over bulk water removals (whether officially approved or not), have not been explicitly addressed, although the Green Party policy base would surely rectify that problem.

I see that Mr Wes Keller thinks the referendum requires "60% of all votes cast, plus a majority of votes in'50 percent plus 1' of all 107 ridings. That is false; the rules established by the McGuinty government require a 60% majority of all referendum votes cast, plus 60% of all ridings, which must attain a 50%- plus-one majority in favour to be counted.

That double standard requires a very high minimum vote - probably on the order of 70% overall. The McGuinty government never said they would make it easy to change the voting system.

Your editorial ("A few good reasons for a strong 'no' vote") votes against the MMP alternative election system because it would add MPPs responsible to the party and not to the ridings (no different, in my view, from the current situation). Then you add "some representation for a (minority) party" can be achieved by "having 10 or 20 'at large' MPPs." The only difference in the two approaches is that MMP would elect 39 "at large" MPPs.

Let us hope for more clarity as the election approaches.

Charles Hooker

Orangeville