Submitted to NAL by the Office of Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak
March 12, 2013,
Dear Premier, I write to express my mounting concern that, after a third of a year since Prorogation, no progress has been made in the Legislative Session to confront the biggest jobs and spending crisis of our lifetimes. Not a single Liberal Bill has been tabled to deal with these challenges.
Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak
Nor have you targeted even one of Dalton McGuinty’s unaffordable spending items for postponement or reversal. On the contrary, backed by the NDP, you repealed the only wagenfreeze legislation ever tabled by your govemment, keeping Ontario on a path that your own hand-picked economic advisor, Don Drummond, wamed would take Ontario off the deficit cliff. Ontarians are watching, and they rightly expect a renewed sense of confidence in our economy and our future. They too know that Ontario is on the wrong path. I therefore feel it is my responsibility to lay out a series of emergency steps required to set Ontario onto a positive path toward balanced budgets, sustainable spending and renewed job creation. So if you refuse to lead on these challenges, we will.
Over the course of the next several weeks, we will table legislative measures of our own to get our fiscal house in order and strengthen our economy, while reversing some of Dalton McGuinty’s most damaging policies:
- Stopping unsustainable growth in spending on public sector salaries – with Peter Shurman’s Broader Public Sector Wage Freeze Act (whrch has already passed Second Reading) to enact an immediate, across-the-board public sector wage freeze and save $2 billion a year.
- Containing the underlying cost drivers of public sector salaries – with Jim Wilson’s Capacity to Pay Act to ensure that arbitrated public sector salary and benefit awards reflect the taxpayers’ ability to pay and local economic circumstances such as unemployment levels.
- Ensuring the government leads by example when it comes to fiscal responsibility -through Rob Leone’s Living Within Your Means Act, which would limit future govemment spending to growth in the economy.
- Ending public sector benefits that don’t exist in the private sector – with John O’Toole’s Sick Days Are For Sick People Act to end the practice of banking sick days like so many poker chips to be cashed in retirement – allowing this benefit only when people are actually sick.
- Making energy more affordable for businesses and consumers again – by ending the Feeding Tariff Program through legislation to be tabled by Lisa Thompson, that pays wind and solar power producers between double and 10 times the cost of traditional sources, driving up the cost of conventional sources of electricity; and immediately halting all new projects still in the approval queue.
- Creating 200,000 new skilled trades jobs – through Garfield Dunlop’s soon-to-be-tabled legislation that would modernize the ratio of journeymen to apprentices to one-to-one, creating more opportunities in the skilled trades, while eliminating the College of Trades, created only as a new layer of bureaucracy and an excuse to further taxjob creators
Premier, understand that my Party and I are taking this course because we know our province can do better.
These are bold, positive, constructive ideas that together will help Ontario attain its true potential as a place of opportunity for its people and a magnet for investment and job creation. Your government has failed to recognize the depth of the hole you have dug. As you appear either unwilling or unable to do what needs to be done – we will take the lead.
Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition Tim Hudak
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Niagara At Large 
I’ve been wanting to ask Mr. Hudak this question for some time now:
If you’re so gung-ho on the Liberals sticking to their austerity agenda, how can you also say that you’re in favour of Kevin Smith’s proposal to build a new hospital in Niagara Falls? Do we gather by this that you WANT the government to make a real commitment to a large infrastructure investment at the same time as they are attempting to slay the deficit dragon? Am I missing something here?
Much was made of the fact that Tim Hudak was the first provincial leader to support Smith’s proposal. This is what he said last month —
“I want to make sure we have the most modern facilities with the best health-care treatment possible to give folks in south Niagara the top-notch health care they deserve,” said Hudak.
“And quite frankly, I think we should build new hospitals instead of holding on to old ones that were built 60, 70 years ago. That’s where health-care is going and Niagara deserves their share of that in south Niagara.” (BulletNews Niagara, February, 2013)
And can we assume from your statement that a PC government would commit to replacing OTHER hospitals in south Niagara, such as the Welland General, for instance? Can you tell me how a PC government would be for that?
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Tim Hudak is so quick to make statements, pronouncements and news releases that he and his staff don’t seem to have time to find all the disconnects in them!
Just last week, Hudak toured a steel plant in Hamilton and immediately afterward announced that he wanted to proceed with a new highway (the old Mid-Pen) to encourage economic growth. This, despite the fact such a highway is not needed! As many regular readers here are well aware, I am a retired MTO employee who actually was part of the Mid-Peninsula / Niagara-GTA corridor study team.
The government employees and the private sector consultants involved spent thousands of hours studying, consulting and researching to determine if a new highway between the Toronto area and Fort Erie was needed. The answer, in a nutshell, was “not now.” It did determine that a new link between Welland and Fort Erie was needed and the study on that is proceeding. It also determined that additional capacity was needed in the Hamilton area, between Burlington and Ancaster. Further study has been done on that and it was determined (as announced a Public Information Centres last month) that widening of existing highways would be sufficient – no new highway across the Niagara Escarpment is needed in the foreseeable future. But there is no need for a new highway between Hamilton and Fort Erie!
Yet, here is Hudak, who was a part of the Harris government that began this process all those years ago, ignoring the results of the study and saying he wants a new highway.
In the same article in the Hamilton Spectator Hudak said a new highway would help generate high-paying skilled-worker jobs in the Hamilton area. But just a few days before that, Hudak was called for government to squash unions because they were responsible for high wages that were hurting business.
Back when I was a kid in the 1950s, cowboy and Indian movies were very popular. In almost every one of those movies, an Indian (nowadays called a First Nations person) would at some point say “white man speak with forked tongue!” It would appear Tim Hudak is “speaking with forked tongue.”
Regular readers of N-A-L also are probably aware that I consider myself a small-c conservative. As such, I have no political party that I can vote for with a clear conscience. I don’t think I am alone in feeling this way. There are probably many others who feel disenfranchised because the once-strong Progressive Conservative Party has been taken over by regressive conservatives at the federal and provincial level.
I hope there are at least one or two strong independent candidates in my riding in the next election.
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