Ontario Liberal Party Videos

On June 12th the voters in Ontario will cast their ballots and either kick the Liberals to the curb, or re-elect them to another mandate.

Below are a few video's from the Ontario Liberal website. Do you believe that the Liberals are different under Premier Wynne or is it still the same as under McGuinty.

 

Gas Plant Scandal or not?

 

 A lot has been said during the campaign about the gas plant scandal and how the Liberals have been covering up everything under the sun. Hudak and Horwath have gone on record saying that had they won the 2011 election they would have cancelled the gas plants. Anyway I received a very interesting email this morning in my in-box, and I wanted to share it with you.


 Hudak Conservatives mislead with gas plant cancellation costs.

Wikipedia Ontario "Gas Plant Scandal” ays

It is now said that the final financial impact of the Liberal cancellations of the Oakville and Mississauga gas plants will approach $1.1 billion.^[18] That figure however is much larger than that stated by the Auditor General of $675 Million. The figure stated by the Auditor General in turn is disputed by Ontario Power Generation. Ontario Power Generation still maintains "Although the OPA’s and the Auditor General’s cost estimates are different, we continue to support our assumptions, as this difference, as set out in the report, is for the most part attributable to the assumptions used to calculate future costs."

However the discrepancy is a bit simpler to understand. The 'Costs incurred' of cancelling the gas plants is $253 Million according to the Auditor General's report. The 'Estimated future costs' include gas delivery and management services for a new Napanee plant, gas and hydro connections for that future Napanee plant, the cost of additional gas for potentially less efficient turbines, transmission system upgrades (which were already planned ^[19]), line losses for the distance power has to travel from Napanee, and for replacement power beginning in 2017. The Auditor General subtracts future savings from that figure to arrive at $675 Million. Opposition parties use the total cost of cancellation and include the cost of building the Napanee replacement plant while leaving out the cost savings.

Note that these numbers are from the Auditor General and OPG, not the Liberal Party.

Hudak would be wrong for Ontario.

I've been very vocal on why I think Hudak would make a lousy Premier. Yes he's a great father, great husband, and most likely a great guy, but when it comes to politics, and leadership he sucks.

The main plank of his platform is the creation of 1 million jobs in 8 years. On the surface it looks great with all the fancy signage, posters, and news bits, but when you look into his plan in greater detail it's a flop, and here's why.

He starts off his plan by saying that he will fire 100,000 public service employees over 2 years. 100,000 people being let go works our to about 934 people for every riding in Ontario. The severance packages that most of these people would receive could cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Not all of these laid off people will be able to find work which means that they will be collecting unemployment insurance, or go on social assistance which puts a further financial burden on the taxpayers.

A plan to create 1 million jobs, by firing 100,000 makes no sense and several well known economist from across Canada and the United States agree with me. Hudak's plan is to also lower corporate taxes so businesses will once again relocate to Ontario and boost our manufacturing sector which has lost about 300,000 jobs since the great recession. Our corporate tax rate is one of the lowest in Canada, and trickle down economics has proven to be a complete failure. Lowering corporate taxes does not create jobs, it just makes the corporations richer, and richer.

Hudak also blames our high energy costs as another reason why businesses won't relocate to Ontario. Yes our Hydro rates are high, but Hudak has not said how he intends to lower them, he has no plan, and if he does he needs to tell voters. Energy is not just Hydro it also includes, ground transportation like trucking. No Premier has control over the price of gas, as that's controlled on the open world market. Our high wages in Ontario is another factor in the cost of why businesses don't relocate to Ontario.

Again some of the world's leading economists have said that no matter who's Premier, the Ontario economy will create over 600,000 jobs in 8 years. Our economy works in cycles, and every decade we seem to hit a low, and then go back to where we were before the low hit. Just take a look at the United States. Back in 2007-08 the US Economy was losing about 750,000 jobs a month as a result of financial policies at the time. Since 2009 when unemployment hit a record high of 10%, the US Economy has added millions of jobs and the unemployment rate is about 6.6% and projected to go down to the 5% range in the next 8-12 months.

Hudak wants to cut, cut, cut, when cutting won't be required. Even former Premier, Mike Harris only cut 13,000 public service employees, and looked what happen, strikes, lock-outs, protests at Queens Park, larger class sizes, schools in need of repair, nurses and doctors leaving Ontario for the United States. What affect would 100,000 people being cut would do for our social services? It would be nightmare, and much worse than the Harris years.

When I read news articles praising the Hudak plan, it's very upsetting that these people don't see what a Hudak government would do to Ontario, and hopefully voters will see Hudak for what he is, a complete failure.

A Green of an idea!

 Mike Schreiner the leader of the Ontario Green Party, has a very bold idea. His idea is to merge the Catholic and Public School boards into one Public School board.

The savings to the Province of Ontario could exceed 1.2 billion a year, which is the cost of a couple of gas plants. All joking aside, I've always asked that question, why do we have and need 2 publicly funded school systems in Ontario. Other Provinces have merged their school systems to great success, and it's about time Ontario does the same thing.
 
Schreiner says Ontario's having two publicly funded school systems --- one for Catholics and one for everyone else --- is intellectually unsustainable in the year 2014. He’d move to end an education model that has existed in Ontario for a century and a half, by creating a unified school system.
You know the long history on this issue. Back in 1867, Protestants in Quebec and Catholics in Ontario agreed to the Confederation deal on the condition that their minority rights be protected with publicly funded schools. Initially, governments in Ontario funded the separate school system up to grade 8. Then the John Robarts government extended it to grade 10 in the mid-1960s. Then in 1984, William Davis announced he’d fully fund the Catholic school system right through to the end of high school. Davis retired before actually doing it, and it was left to David Peterson’s Liberal government, with an assist from Bob Rae’s NDP, to complete the task as part of their “Accord.”
 
Most politicians who have weighed into the toxic mix of politics, religion, and education have been punished for it. Davis’ successor, Frank Miller, saw the PC  seat and vote totals drop precipitously in the 1985 election because the Tory base never accepted the policy of fully funding Catholic schools. Six weeks after that 1985 election, the 42-year-long PC dynasty came to an end.
John Tory lost the 2007 election in large part because of the issue. Tory, to his credit, felt the unfairness of only one religion’s schools receiving public funding was unsustainable. Regrettably for him, he chose to offer some public funding to all religions --- a solution the public overwhelmingly rejected.

It's a shame that this bold idea will never take off in a divided Ontario. Hopefully the people of Guelph will vote to elect Mike, and send the first Green MPP to Queens Park.

The Man Behind Hudak's 1 million Jobs Plan.

Behind every great economic plan is the idiot who created it. I would like you to meet Mr. Benjamin Zycher.
Mr. Zycher has a long history as being an economist, having worked for many far right wing groups in the United States. Yes folks, Tim Hudak, the leader of the PC Party hired a well known Tea Party Republican to help him put together his 1 million jobs plan.

Given all the unemployment in Canada, which by the way is still higher than the United States, you would think that Hudak could have found someone in Ontario to help him come up with his dud of a jobs plan. What really bugs me, and it should bug you is what Mr. Zycher has to say on a number of other topics.

Here are just a very examples of his writings:

“The heat is on. The environmental Left is on the attack, and the target now is not ExxonMobil, or the Kochs, or the Keystone XL pipeline, or fossil fuels, or the efforts of the world’s desperately poor to escape grinding poverty, or plastics, or indoor plumbing, or those who fail to worship Gaia, or any of the other usual suspects. Instead, it is President Obama, urged last month in an open letter by 16 environmental groups to prevent the exportation of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and to make a commitment to keep ‘most of our nation’s fossil fuel reserves in the ground, in line with the recommendations of most of the world’s leading climate scientists’ … The letter obviously is far more a political than an analytical document, and as a reflection of scientific understanding it is deeply disingenuous. That the authors have defined their policy prescriptions as a ‘good-faith test’ for Mr. Obama is amusing in that the letter is a blatant exercise in disinformation. Thus have the environmental groups chosen to pollute the political process in pursuit of a massive suppression of technological advance and enhanced wealth for ordinary working people, an appalling exercise in bad faith. For them it is also business as usual.” American Enterprise Institute online magazine, April 8, 2014

“Now, let me be blunt: Michelle Obama, the product of lifelong affirmative-action coddling, is an intellectual lightweight who fancies herself a serious thinker. Just read her Princeton senior thesis, an intermittently coherent stream-of-consciousness pile of leftist jargon, campus pseudo-seriousness, and racial-identity babble. Can there be any doubt that the Princeton administrators accepted it only because of her skin colour?” National Review Online, Aug. 17, 2009

“I simply cannot remember an Oval Office quite so devoid of economic thinking. The latest example is the pending regulatory change, announced yesterday, which would raise the salary level above which certain classes of workers would be exempt from receiving overtime pay. Accordingly, the overtime pay requirement would be extended to vastly more workers … Suppose that the market-determined competitive salary for such workers putting in 50-60 hours per week is say, $750 per week, or $39,000 per year … Assume now that such work were to require only 40 hours per week; does President Obama actually believe that there would be no change in the competitive market salary? In other words, it is rather obvious that the market-determined salary reflects the long hours that some workers must devote to their jobs: a requirement for harder work, other factors held constant, reduces the supply of workers willing to provide it, thus raising the market salary … But until we have some ‘objective’ measure of ‘fairness’ - a mirage if ever there was one - only market competition can tell us the value of extra-hard work, in the form of prices determined by millions of individual choices made freely.”AEI blog, March 14, 2014

Mr. Zycher, president of his own research firm, has a long CV that includes his current role as resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and earlier stints at everywhere from the Milken Institute and UCLA to RAND Corp. and the U.S. State Department.

And in the wouldn’t-you-know-it category, he was senior staff economist on Ronald Reagan’s President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

What the CV doesn’t tell you – but his writings do – is that he hates government bureaucracy and positively loathes the “environmental Left.” He has thoughts on greenhouse gas, affirmative action, and working people.

As The Globe and Mail’s Adrian Morrow reports, the Ontario Conservatives chose Mr. Zycher to analyze their program in the run-up to the June 12 provincial election.

The program – the Million Jobs Plan – pledges to create that many jobs over eight years by cutting corporate taxes, killing subsidies for alternative energy, joining the trade agreement of the western provinces, slashing red tape and ending the endless traffic jams in Toronto. Oh, and it assumes that about half those jobs would have been created anyway.

“These economic benefits of the proposed reforms are substantial, and the rationales offered in defense of the status quo are dubious,” Mr. Zycher said in his 18-page study.

Hudak's job plan is a dud.

Hudak's plan to create 1 million new jobs over 8 years is a dud. Economic forecasts are saying that over the next several years over 500,000 jobs will be added to the economy, regardless of who wins the provincial election.

Here's a great piece regarding the latest polling numbers and Hudak's 1 million jobs plan.

Nearly two-thirds of Ontarians disapprove of Tim Hudak’s plan to cut 100,000 public servants to streamline government, a new poll suggests.

The Forum Research survey also found‎ 63 per cent do not think the Progressive Conservative leader will be able to create his promised 1 million new jobs, while 26 per cent feel he can deliver and 11 per cent don’t know.

‎Similarly, 26 per cent approve of cutting 100,000 public-sector workers — such as teachers and bureaucrats — while 62 per cent do not and‎ 11 per cent aren’t sure.

“The number is just shocking people. One hundred thousand is a lot,” Forum president Lorne Bozinoff said Tuesday.

“‎They may be too far out there,” Bozinoff said of the Conservatives’ controversial platform pledge to reduce the broader public sector over four years to spur the creation of what the PCs calculate will be 1,030,688 private-sector jobs by 2022.

Indeed, Hudak’s restraint proposal has taken a toll on the party’s popularity as the June 12 election campaign heats up.

Kathleen Wynne’s governing Liberals now lead with 38 per cent support to 35 per cent for the Conservatives, 21 per cent for Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats, and 5 per cent for Mike Schreiner’s Greens.

In the May 2 Forum poll, the Tories were at 38 per cent, the Liberals 33 per cent, the NDP 22 per cent, and the Greens at 6 per cent.

Using interactive voice-response phone calls, Forum surveyed 996 people across Ontario on Monday and results are considered accurate to within three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Extrapolating the polling results suggests the Liberals would secure 68 seats in the 107-member legislature, the Conservatives 26, and the NDP 13, said Bozinoff.

“It’s not a huge change in the standings, but it makes a major difference in the seats,” the pollster said of the movement since last week. He noted the Liberals tend to win urban seats by narrow margins while the Tories pile up huge pluralities in rural ridings.

At dissolution, there were 48 Liberal MPPs, including Speaker Dave Levac, 37 Tories, 21 New Democrats, and one vacancy.

In terms of personal approval, Wynne was at 38 per cent (up from 34 per cent on May 2), Horwath was at 35 per cent (36 per cent in the previous poll), and Hudak was 23 per cent (down from 26 per cent).

Hudak told the Star he is not surprised his popularity has taken a hit over his “bold” plan to rein in government spending to eliminate the deficit by 2016-17 — one year ahead of Wynne’s target for balancing the books.

“Listen, this is why I engaged in straight talk early on,” he said, conceding the cutting will be “a tough slog . . . that has to be done.”

A senior Liberal strategist said Hudak’s austerity proposal is “definitely resonating in a negative way.”

“People don’t understand starting a ‘million jobs plan’ with 100,000 cuts,” the Grit said on background.

“It’s a much clearer choice than voters often get.”

Wynne said Hudak’s scheme, which also includes corporate tax cuts, is a “backwards step” that has landed with a thud, allowing her to focus on a “stark” contrast facing voters.

“If you think it’s right to give billions more to already profitable corporations while putting 100,000 of our friends and neighbours out of work, then vote for Tim Hudak,” she said in Toronto.

Horwath insisted her campaign “is doing well” despite her main rivals receiving the lion’s share of media attention.

The NDP chief said she is the only leader putting forward solutions to the problems faced by ordinary Ontarians.

“We are going to continue over the next little while to lay out a number of priorities,” she said Tuesday in Toronto. “People will have a choice on June 12 in terms of what kind of Ontario they want.”

Forum’s poll is statistically weighted by age, region, and other variables to ensure the sample reflects the actual population according to the latest census data. The weighting formula has been shared with the Star and raw polling results are housed at the University of Toronto’s political science department’s data library.

Liberal Candidate Screws Up.

What on earth was this guy thinking? The golden rule when you are a candidate for public office is not to make stupid mistakes, be very careful of what you say in public, and don't post comments on social media sites for everyone to see.

This guy has no chance in winning, so if I was Wynne, I would dump him as a candidate as he's not only making himself look like an idiot, he's making the party look like idiots.

Here's a copy of the news report from CTV...

CTVNews.ca Staff
Published Sunday, May 11, 2014 1:05PM EDT 

An Ontario Liberal candidate has apologized after drawing outrage for sharing a Facebook post on the differences between men and women.

“I received and re-shared a Facebook posting that, if taken literally, is without question offensive to both women and men,” Jack Uppal said in a statement sent out by Ontario’s Liberal Party. “It was certainly not my intent that the post be taken literally or to offend anyone. I apologize unreservedly.”

In a statement sent out by the Liberal Party on Sunday, Kathleen Wynne’s office said the remarks posted on Facebook were “not acceptable,” but that they “understand Mr. Uppal has apologized, which was the right thing to do.”

Uppal, a real estate agent and Liberal candidate for the riding of Nepean-Carleton, landed in hot water on Saturday after the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party circulated screen-grabs of a post he had shared on Facebook earlier this year.

On Jan. 30, Uppal posted an “analysis” on the differences between men and women, and how they differ in: multi-tasking, language, analytical skills, driving, lying, problem solving, among other things.

The text, which appears to have since been deleted from Uppal’s Facebook page, said “men’s brains have a lot of space for handling the analytical process. They can analyze and find the solution for a process and design a map of a building easily. But if a complex map is viewed by a woman, they cannot understand it. Women cannot understand the details of a map easily, for them it is just a dump of lines on a paper.”

Another section states: “Men want status, success, solutions, big process, etc…but women want relationships, friends, family, etc...”

The remarks drew a rebuke from Progressive Conservative Laurie Scott, who is running in the riding of Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock.

“Mr. Uppal’s statements have no place in Nepean-Carleton, in politics, or in our society,” she said, adding, “it is upsetting that Kathleen Wynne would appoint a candidate in Nepean-Carleton who would spread such sexist, close-minded views.”

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ontario-liberal-candidate-apologizes-for-man-vs-woman-facebook-post-1.1816573#ixzz31bT8LEiX