Ontario government wastes a bunch of money

I was reading the Toronto Star about a month ago and I saw an article about Ontario’s new and improved trillium logo. It looks like shit. Here’s what the original Ontario trillium has looked like for the past 50 years:

It’s simple, clean and I’d say timeless as well. It’s been practically the same since it was introduced back in 1964. Over the years there were a few minor changes made, but obviously nothing drastic. Now all of a sudden, some wiseguy has decided it is time to “re-brand” Ontario. The new, updated trillium logo looks like this:

Uh… wtf? Oh, it’s clever. If you look closely, there are human-like figures in the design (those stupid dots are the people’s heads).

So how did our money-conscious government come up with this new design? I’ll give you a hint. It’s one of the four following options:
a) held a contest, offering prizes and/or bragging rights
b) held a contest for students, offering a scholarship for the chosen design
c) got a famous Canadian artist to donate their time to create the new logo
d) wasted $219,000 hiring a “Liberal-friendly” advertising agency

If you guessed option d, sadly, you are correct. Come on! Spending over two hundred grand on a shitty logo is an enormous waste of time and money. Spending that much on a good logo is still a waste of money. Furthermore, was there any advance notice of this logo change? Who was in charge of this? And how could they have spent that much money? I’m sure there were a lot of “hidden fees”. Like, I bet they had to do a couple of studies first before coming up with some design ideas. That was probably followed by some market research. Then there was probably some sort of approval process.

If this is the way the government is going to use MY money, then I’m not going to pay taxes anymore. Do the people in power even realize that the money they are spending is not theirs? Do they understand that there are numerous other places that money could have been spent?

Ugh. This kind of thing makes me mad.