Ontario's Attorney General Jim Flaherty was recently quoted in the Ottawa Citizen as having said "we want to clean Squeegee people off our streets and end aggressive panhandling."

It scares me to think we are investing our hard earned dollar in a government that is so clearly misguided.

As a student who lives in the heart of downtown Ottawa, I find myself constantly being asked for spare change.

What I’ve learned from panhandlers is that most are fairly pleasant in demeanour, and I’ve come to accept panhandling as part of urban life.

I’ve grown up in both Northwestern Ontario and in Ottawa. Never have I come across a case of "aggressive panhandling". Moreover, when I travel by a group of squeegee kids on a street corner who offer their services to passersby, I wonder why panhandling is even questioned.

Here we have a provincial government with deep investments in a failing Workfare system, trying to get people to provide a service to the community in turn for welfare support.

These youth are not merely loitering on street corners shooting heroin, hiding from society in alleyways, begging for coin and collecting government cheques.

Much like the workfare agenda, they are providing a service, regardless of how big or small. And providing their service with a smile, which is more than I can say for many retail services.

Whether people consider their service necessary or not, they still stand out on that corner for hours working for every cent.

Some make as much as twenty dollars an hour providing that service, yet it is always up to the driver to decide what the service is worth; indeed, whether it is worth anything at all. This is, in fact how capitalism works.

Did it ever cross the minds of Jim Flaherty or Mike Harris that these people are, in their own right, harmless small-time entrepreneurial spirits?

Squeegee kids are definitely no more invasive than Shinerama, a fund-raiser in which local universities approach vehicles on the city streets in Ottawa asking drivers to donate to Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. I wonder, does Jim Flaherty consider door-to-door campaigning an aggressive way to panhandle for votes?

Throughout history people have actively sought to sell their stock and trade by approaching people on the street. Take for instance the newspaper criers of the early part of the century.

The bottom line is that no matter what you may think of their garb, the piercings in unfathomable places and the way in which they do business, they are exercising their fundamental democratic rights in a public forum.

Here is a province dealing with deficits, tuition hikes and a collapsing health care system, to name only a few deficiencies, and those issues are put on the back-burner and replaced by an attack on squeegee kids.