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2014 Ontario General Election

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Yesterday, Moody's de facto consigned Kathleen Wynne's budget/platform to the trash bin with a warning about Canada provincial debt.

The Globe and Mail's Brian Gable gets it right in this cartoon:

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Source: The Globe and Mail

Much as I dislike Tim Hudak and much as I consider him a lightweight, I believe that no responsible Ontarian can vote for either the Liberals or the NDP.

 
Jeffrey Simpson provides some good sense in a column in the Globe and Mail but he doesn't go quite far enough back.

Ontario began to go 'wrong' - and it is near heresy for a Conservative to say this - about 40 years ago, when Bill Davis, Brampton Billy, good ol' "bland works" Bill Davis began to overspend circa 1975. At first Davis' overspending wasn't obvious - Ontario still had balanced budgets based on good, solid industrial growth. The 1977 "Bramalea Charter" which promised more and more social spending, including lower cost, lower middle class housing support was very much in line with Pierre Trudeau's thinking in Ottawa. Both were "short term gain" type politicians who thought that growth was a natural state of affairs. Anyway, except for a short interregnum (Mike Harris' first term (1995-99)) Ontario has remained poorly, often badly, governed by Conservatives, Liberals and NDP governments alike. Ontario needs to recover from 40 years of less than adequate, too often downright poor leadership and management.

Here are some of the key elements of Jeffrey Simpson's column:

    "Attached to the last budget, the provincial Ministry of Finance added a 191-page door-stopper about the long-term economic challenges. Of course, the document was gilded with political gloss, but fighting through it
    did offer a sobering portrait, one almost entirely absent from the campaign.

    Start with economic growth after inflation. From 1982 to 2013, it averaged 2.6 per cent. From 2014 to 2035, it will be 2.1 per cent. Roughly speaking, therefore, growth will be about 20 per cent slower.

    The labour force will grow more slowly largely because of an aging population, a change being felt throughout Canada. Labour productivity will be flat at best, and quite likely lower than from 1985 to 2000.
    In the meantime, global competition will intensify.

    Manufacturing has been declining as a share of the economy in North America and Western Europe. Ontario’s decline was halted temporarily back when the Canadian dollar plunged to nearly 60 cents,
    but those days are long gone.

    The province’s cost competitiveness – this is one of the two or three central challenges – has been poor. Unit labour costs have gone up by a little over 5 per cent per year over the last 13 years, compared with just
    over 2 per cent in the United States.

    When a province’s unit labour costs rise more than twice as fast as the country where it does 78 per cent of its trade, the results are obvious: plant shutdowns, unemployment and not enough new capacity added.
    Automobiles are the classic case: plant openings in Mexico and the U.S., but none recently in Ontario.

    Business investment in machinery and equipment has lagged the Canadian average and is far below the United States. Research and development, a pathway to innovation, also lags. It’s better than the very poor
    Canadian average, but far below the U.S. Take away the healthy financial sector and the Toronto’s overheated housing market, and what do you have?

    In Toronto and Ottawa, where prosperity is sustained, it’s easy to forget the swaths of the province in the southwest, north and east, where very little new economic activity has been taking place. The old industrial cities –
    Hamilton, Windsor, St. Catharines, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie – and smaller cities, such as Leamington, are nearly all suffering in one form or another.

    For most of the past quarter-century, Ontario provincial governments have run deficits. Slowly, the debt has risen. Such is the situation that Ontario now receives yearly small payments from the country’s
    equalization scheme. (And such is the absurdity of the scheme that Ontario taxpayers remain net contributors to Ottawa, which then turns around and gives a small portion of the revenues back in equalization.)

    The Ontario government has reached far, but failed to execute: clean energy, gas plants, e-health, Ornge air ambulance, nuclear cost overruns. No wonder trust in government is low. For almost a decade,
    the Liberal government let health-care spending rip – 7-per-cent yearly increases without commensurate improvements in the system.

    Very, very powerful – and very, very conservative – public-sector unions and associations in schools, universities, health care, policing, firefighting and municipal government make change very, very difficult.
    Taking on these interest groups has frightened governments, which have preferred to buy peace instead.

    Ontario’s domestic raw-material or hydro energy sources are just about tapped out. An important boost could come with exploitation of the Ring of Fire chromite deposits in the province’s far north, but this project
    and others will be tied up for years, even decades, by aboriginal claims."

Those are sobering facts, and they are facts, not guesses, and the situation needs to be reversed.
 
Crispy Bacon said:
There will still be a Liberal platform for this election ....
Sure enough, here it is.

Crispy Bacon said:
It will be interesting to see where the Liberals reverse themselves advance in the opposite direction in their actual platform.
I've only scanned it really, really quickly, and they say they'll reintroduce this budget if they win.  We'll see, on both counts ....
 
According to a report in the Globe and Mail a few Liberal Party workers in Chatham, Ontario played "let's pretend' and posed as NDP supporters holding up signs accusing Andrea Horwath of deviating from core NDP values.

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The "give aways" were the Ontario Liberal Party lanyards and a (Finance Minister) Charles Sousa button they wore. According to the article two Liberal Party staffers from "head office" were there and "One staffer approached the men with signs and, after exchanging words, they promptly hid their Liberal buttons."

It's a bit revealing, isn't it? The head office staffer didn't say, "don't lie," instead he said, "hide your true party affiliation and then lie."  ::)  (By the way, I'm sure the Conservatives and the Greens and the NDP are equally immoral.)

(Maybe this should be in the We get the governments we deserve, don't we? thread.)  :facepalm:
 
E.R. Campbell said:
According to a report in the Globe and Mail a few Liberal Party workers in Chatham, Ontario played "let's pretend' and posed as NDP supporters holding up signs accusing Andrea Horwath of deviating from core NDP values.

BoawZZ8IEAAGvP4.jpg


The "give aways" were the Ontario Liberal Party lanyards and a (Finance Minister) Charles Sousa button they wore. According to the article two Liberal Party staffers from "head office" were there and "One staffer approached the men with signs and, after exchanging words, they promptly hid their Liberal buttons."

It's a bit revealing, isn't it? The head office staffer didn't say, "don't lie," instead he said, "hide your true party affiliation and then lie."  ::)  (By the way, I'm sure the Conservatives and the Greens and the NDP are equally immoral.)

(Maybe this should be in the We get the governments we deserve, don't we? thread.)  :facepalm:

I wonder what the media coverage of this would be if it were the conservatives instead of the liberals?
 
With more than two weeks to go the polling, like this one from tooclosetocall.ca ...

   
100103143


          ... is starting (continuing?) to favour the Liberals.

Of course, as others have mentioned, the federal Conservative Party of Canada may well not be too unhappy with another Liberal government in Ontario.

I am about 99% sure that Kathleen Wynne cannot keep most of her promises because of the message in that Gable cartoon for the Globe and Mail ...

   
web-Satedcar24co1.jpg

    Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/no-wifi-in-the-garden-of-eden/article18348706/#dashboard/follows/

The bond market will, if she tries to borrow more and more, turn Ontario into Portugal. (Ontario's most recent bond sale (€1.75 Billion) has a yield of 1.972%; Portugal's bonds yield 3.64%.) Voter dissatisfaction with higher taxes and continuously high hydro rates and nothing 'new' and shiny will drive them towards the CPC in the federal election ... so many analysts suggest, anyway.



 
Some more numbers for your Friday viewing pleasure/cud chewing - sources here and here.

- edited to add second polling summary & links to sources -
 
milnews.ca said:
Voted this weekend
Voted yesterday; I didn't want to risk not being able to vote on the chance I was hospitalized/killed in one of the neighbourhood anti-tank ditches potholes.  >:(

You don't vote, you can't complain.  :nod:




......although I seldom complain anyway....about anything  ;)
 
This question may belong in the general Canadian Politics forum.

At what point could Union election advertising be considered unofficial party advertising? I mean there are limits to the amount that the parties can advertise. Would partisan 3rd party advertising be a way to circumvent these limitations?
 
ModlrMike said:
This question may belong in the general Canadian Politics forum.

Would partisan 3rd party advertising be a way to circumvent these limitations?

You betch'ya!
 
ModlrMike said:
This question may belong in the general Canadian Politics forum.

At what point could Union election advertising be considered unofficial party advertising? I mean there are limits to the amount that the parties can advertise. Would partisan 3rd party advertising be a way to circumvent these limitations?

In Ontario we've seen that time and time again with the Working Families Coalition.  They're an anti-conservative lobby group bought with union money and staffed with current and former Liberal staffers.  However, Elections Ontario ruled that since Working Families wasn't being outright controlled by the Liberal Party, and because they were an anti-conservative attack group more than a pro-party lobby group, that their third party advertising (which exceeded the spending of the NDP and Conservatives combined) was acceptable.

And now we have the OPP - who are investigating the Liberals in two criminal investigations - supporting that same party for continued government  :facepalm:

Ontario needs to abolish third party advertising in a fashion similar to the way the federal Conservatives did with the Accountability Act.
 
If I would credit who came out on top I would give it to Mr. Hudak but i wouldn't characterise him as the clear winner.  I didn't see any knock out punches.

Ms. Wynn however was the clear loser.
 
Crispy Bacon said:
Ontario needs to abolish third party advertising in a fashion similar to the way the federal Conservatives did with the Accountability Act.

And that's not likely to happen unless Wynne loses.
 
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