Investment in small business, that’s where the jobs are created that start the engine of the economy. If everyone works and pays tax the system should ideally run smoothly and direct education towards these jobs.

Cuts in government spending, I’d really like the word BUDGET appolished from government services. It seems to promote mandatory spending or lose the funding next year? If you don’t need it don’t buy it. Government really needs to learn the difference between wants and needs, actually so does half of the consumers out there.

Once the two objectives above are accomplished I’d like to see tax cuts. 100 years ago we had very few taxes now half of my annual income is tax.
It’s my money, I’d like to keep it for my retirement.

Any chance Mike Harris will have his kids running in the next election? He was on the right path, his only mistake was selling highway 407. Maybe there was some COMMON SENSE in the gene pool?

Later
Kevin

I AGREE. We have no leadership. The Green Energy Act is an example of terrible legislation coming from McGuinty. There is no due democratic process in the legislation. $7 billion subsidies to Wind Farms destroying our rural communities is insane at a time when the rest of the world is terminating all government wind farm subsidies and locating new projects 5 kilometers off shore. This province is in big trouble under this government

The people of Ontario have let McGuinty lead with a dictatorship-like hand. Scandals such as e-Health and OLG that cost the taxpayers billions were never investigated and the people that filled their pockets with all our money were never brought to justice and forced to repay the money they did not deserve. But as the people who vote leaders in or out, we never did anything other than complain to one another while the people who got rich off these illegal activities are living happier.

It’s time for a change, people! Hudak needs to put a strong platform out there that the people can believe in. Now is his time - with all the new taxes that McGuinty is throwing at us (especially in the GTA) and the bitter taste of scandals still on our minds, Hudak needs to step in and take advantage of his opportunity to make a change.

I want to see LEADERSHIP. I want to see the Government lead by example. And I want to see the Government make Ontario a place for private sector growth and investment. Leading by example means a 5% salary cut for all elected officials; a 10% cut in the extra stipend for cabinet Ministers; a 50% cut in the bonus pool; and a 3-year WAGE FREEZE for ALL employees in the public sector. And yes, that means Teachers….and Health Care workers!
Simply put, the Province is in trouble; and the average citizen cannot afford to “borrow” to pay higher wages and benefits to already very well-piad individuals.

Unfortunately, the devastation absorbed by the private sector precludes any major push to reduce the civil service - there is already way too much unemployment - much of it structural - in the private sector! And we cannot afford to make the unemployment lines any longer. That said, it seems to me that the prudent approach is the aforementioned wage and benefit freeze within the civil service…..accompanied by a pledge to maintain (but not increase) the civil service at current levels. Giving the private sector time to “catch up” and perhaps even close the wage and benefit gap makes perfect sense to me. And the overall “dollar restraint” is just what the doctor ordered for the deficit.

I would like to see more money left in our pockets for those of us who live in this province and the City of Toronto. I believe McGuinty told Miller to collect his own taxes however he can from the city taxpayers. To even have fun, sports events, entertainment has gone out of sight if you need to park in the city for the evening.
I travel to the U.S. and when I drive through Ontario, it does not have the look of properity anymore like it used to do. There is a shabbyness about it and the urban sprawl without allowing for trees or pockets of trees does not help.
I also do not agree with all day kingergarten (daycare) Psycologists are beginning to study the effects on a child not being free to form thoughts for himself but be structured or stiumlated all the time. When does he develop his own thoughts, personality or interests. How can a child be drawn to his likes or dislikes if there are so many distractions and everything is there for him. Where are his challenges in free thinking? He/she might want to seek out other subjects of interest. You do not find much nature in classrooms and parents are too busy to introduce the wonder of nature to them. Where are the responsibilities he should be given at home to make a child feel important or worthwhile by helping around the home no matter how young. I feel the bond to his family will be weakened by going to all day Kindergarten.
Another thing, McGuinty gave himself a raise in pay and it seems everyone else when the rest of us are on a tight budget.

McGuinty has been re-elected a number of time so it is an error to underestimate him by merely observing that he stars in Wonderland. He stars in Ontario. Unfortunately he is a drain on all of Canada for his lack of understanding even basic economics. He does understand politics very well. That is why he is communicating with parents through their children. You could say that he is using safe venues. Children do not talk back to him, he gives mothers a warm feeling and not too many political analists would bother to follow him in the classroom. Clever.

Kudos to the writer… I absolutely agree with this - just a fancy wording…

So far McGuinty has not done anything to improve the job situation in Ontario. My son has been looking for a job for almost a year to no avail. Has completed an electrical college and no-one wants to hire due to “no experience”. How the heck is he going to get experience, when no-one is willing to hire him.

There should be a program in place for recent school graduate where they would be placed on a job and earn while you learn. Not this” go and find a company who is willing to hire you”. Where are these companies”? It is a fricking joke…..Young people like my son, have no future, no girl to take out, no money, no car. Government wonders why is the crime rate up. Create freaking jobs and stop bringing new immigrants to the country until you have jobs for existing citizens!!!!

Last fiscal year Ontario ran a $14.1-billion deficit. California, with three times the population, is running a $20-billion deficit. Yet we hear of the fiscal crisis in California — but little is said about Ontario. Why? The big corporate media (CBC, Star, Globe and Mail) like Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals.

This morning’s newspapers have articles on McGuinty spending billions on increasing post-secondary school capacity, in order to attract more foreign students. This, on top of more subsidized day care. McGuinty cares nothing about high deficits! The NCC should start a campaign attacking the crazy McGuinty spending. This guy has gone too far — and is irresponsible.
Prof. David Murrell
Economics, UNB

I agree that this is an excellent opportunity for Mr. Hudak to step up and inform Ontarians of his plans for this once-great-leader-in-Canada province.

It is time for some common sense to return to Ontario. Is it safe to say “common sense” in Ontario again? “Revolution” or not, common sense in Ontario ended on October 2, 2003 - over six years ago. We will be paying for that for way more than six years.

We do not want, let alone cannot afford, to be a nanny state, like Britain has become, in Ontario.

One thing I would like to see, since the HST is a “given”, is the rate adjusted so that the HST is REVENUE NEUTRAL (words not yet heard out of Queen’s Park) in the first year. That would require a rate somewhere in between 6% and 7%, depending on the economist one wishes to follow. At 8% and with “rebate cheques”, we have a simple tax grab on Ontarians and non-Ontarians with more bureaucracy to process it all. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Non-Ontarians paying HST will come from the provincial government’s decision to apply HST to managed portfolio fees, including retail mutual funds, one of the top choices of Canadians for investing for their retirement. This is wrong on so many levels. If Federal Finance Minister Flaherty can zero-rate the GST on management fees, this becomes a non-issue, but I do not think we will see that in his budget, either.

I totally agree. This guy cant talk to adults because he still has not matured enough to be able to speak properly. Either that or the fact if he prefers to talk to children it is because the kids don’t ask questions that he does not understand. Also he most likely finds it a safe place to talk without being picked on.
I hope in the next election he is booted OUT!!

I am going to be blunt and to the point. McGuinty has got to be stopped before he puts the Province of Ontario completely under. He has dithered, and blundered enough, with the E Health and OLG. that alone is enough to get him fired. He seems to like being in school so get out of our Government and go back to learning.

Dalton who?

McGuinty is either seen surrounded by nurses or school chrildren as if he was the great saviour of the education and health care system in Ontario of course nothing could be further from the truth. All he has shown is a propensity to toady up to the public sector unions. He has no vision for this province and certainly is no leader as he has proved time and again.

Gentlemen: How about McGuinty showing some real spunk. He could freeze all of the Ontario government’s wages for three years. He could outsource, with competitive transparent bidding, all sorts of work now done by government workers. He might ask all his top department heads to cut back by 5% the spending for their departments. He might even consider lowering Ontario income taxes. He might ask the people living in Ontario how their provincial government could go about doing all the things, the people of Ontario seem to want, cheaper and better. I have only spent three minutes on this but I’m sure that much smarter people then myself coulod come up with buckets of ideas.

Too many people in Ontario (and many jurisdictions) are intellectually lazy and so, get the government they deserve. The right-wing side of the voting spectrum is too busy working, generating wealth and meeting payrolls (and, it can be lazy too) to spend the time necessary to engage in the political battles that would be needed to change the commonly-held views & left-leaning biases of the majority of Ontario voters.

Why do these views dominate the spectrum? Because the vast majority of the MSM (print & electronic) are clearly left-leaning, led, for example, by the Liberal Daily Bugle, aka the Toronto Star, which doesn’t deliver the news so much as it delivers its stylized, leftist (and Liberal) views of the news, often headed by phrases such as: “Critics are saying………”

Intellectually lazy Ontarians read this stuff & accept it as fact: (”…it must be true, Ethyl: it’s in the NEWSpaper!”). Ergo: we have a Left-leaning, Liberal-voting populace, most of which, incredibly, still believes that not only did Mike Harris ruin Ontario’s economy and its social justice systems, but that none of this could have been changed by Premier Dad’s two majority governments. Yes, many people actually believe this because the “Education Premier” says it is so.

The Right may be right, but it can’t crack the Left’s dominance of the media. Every day, hundreds of articles, op-eds and talking heads drip-feed the populace like a proverbial Chinese Water Torture, outnumbering the plaintive voices of the Right, 10-1. McGuinty just utters another tranquilizing platitude and the tired, preoccupied masses thank him because they don’t have to hurt their brains by thinking for another second about the import of the real issues. (”Hmmm: memo to caucus from D. McG: time to ban the Ontario PC Party.”)

Communist Soviet Union, fascist Germany and Italy, socialist Québec and now Ontario. What do they have in common? They all take children from their families at a very young age in order to indoctrinate them (they use the word socialize) to support and love the state. Children love whomever takes care of them, in this case, state employed caregivers. Hence, they grow to love the state, rather than their families. They also become, by necessity, compliant to the wishes of authority figures, since they must do so if they want to fit in to a daycare situation.
If you think I am being extreme, just look at the state of the family in Québec. It has been degraded by state intervention. We are second in the country in terms of single parenthood. There is a 50% drop out or failure rate in high school, these children are sent to daycare from babyhood and raised by strangers. Look out Ontarians, this is what you are in for if you don’t stop the socialization of your economy.

I agree with you Warren. Accept on the issue of conservative people. Small “c” conservatives have had no place to go. The John Tory OPCP was anything but conservative. The frustration on the part of conservatives with little or no representation keeps voters at home and discouraged. The Party seems to be incapable of understanding that. In the end the progressive liberal faction of the Party always appears to be in control and set to deliver liberal lite. All the while demonizing or ignoring what should be and could be a large grassroots base. Instead most of those people feel unrepresented and frustrated. This leads to comments like “they’re all the same”, “there’s not a dimes worth of difference between them”. Make the contrast and be unrepentant and proud conservatives and watch the success. There’s a whole constituency out there longing for representation.

Ontario, like many jurisdictions around the world, is falling into the trap of expanding public sector employment because it appears to soak up a lot of otherwise unemployed people. The trouble is, the public sector, by and large, does not create wealth - only the private sector can do that. This results in an ever increasing burden on the private sector to support the growing public sector with their taxes. If you want a good example of this, look at Greece.

Greece may be bailed out by the EU (read Germany), but who will bail out Ontario? The rest of Canada? I think not. Unless we put austerity measures in place now, Ontario is going to hit a brick wall, fiscally speaking, in a few years.

We need another Mike Harris to hack the public sector down to a reasonable size again.

McGuinty has demonstrated he is the definitive exanple of a political crackpot. De-industrilizing the south with hostile taxing, pissing away millions to Koreans for shoddy windmill schemes in the midst of a resession, Native violence in Caledonia still unresolved. Toronto looks like a clapped out Pittsburg,infrastructure going to seed, industrial towns going to seed, enforcement redirected from crime to farmers selling whole milk and unpasturized honey. What a frigging swamp Onterrible has become.

We need vision and leadership to get back on track and stop wasting away. I won’t hold my breath for Hudak to provide that vision, but just an alternative.

What you say is not extreme at all Cathy. None of this is by accident. It is the road we are on. This is the politics and ideology of the left. All the things McGuinty has done are following that ideology. There is no accident or miscalculation. All of what’s been done to our society over the last 50 years is by design. And “Progressive” Conservatives are pretty much on board with it. Like their liberal friends. This is why we need real true blue conservatives that will stay on course and not get over powered or swayed by liberal/progressives. At some time in the not so distant future we’ll reach the point of no return. We all know we’re almost there. Once you lose freedom just wait and see how hard it is to get it back. Sticking to the status quo we will lose it. The status quo has got us where we are now. At our local EDA AGM it was obvious they are oblivious to what’s actually going on. It was very disappointing. For me it’s way to early for optimism. Many of us know the sting and disappointment of the let down we face and experience time after time. Sadly Ontarians by a majority cannot discern between the words and the actions and the ultimate consequences of liberalism. Either that or they really just don’t care as long as they feel they’re getting theirs. It’s shameful.

McGuinty Ontario government hypocrisy on innovation in both transportation and technology is truly breathtaking.

Since May 2004 the McGuinty government has been stonewalling investigation of a new made-in-Ontario technology concept for preventing traffic congestion on expressways.

Expressway Traffic Optimization (ETO) uses pavement-embedded signal lights to guide individual drivers in real time to use headways (speed and spacing) that ensure sustained safe efficient traffic flow.

www.gettorontomoving.ca/ITS-ETO.html

Instead of embracing this simple, practical and cost-effective idea, McGuinty and his anti-car ideological allies in the Ontario “transportation establishment” are blindly pushing ahead with a ruinously expensive plan for a huge mega-sized “transit empire” of more taxpayer-subsidized union jobs.

The ETO technology could banish expressway traffic congestion from the entire Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), for a tiny fraction of the $55 BN Metrolinx “Big Move 2020″ plan, a plan that includes Mayor David Miller’s disastrous “Transit City” plan for a network of new streetcar lines in Toronto, on exclusive rights-of-way created by removing precious road space from motorists.

Ontario is missing out on a major opportunity to develop ETO here at home, and then to export the technology all around the world, earning $BNs in high-tech revenues.

McGuinty and company actively stonewall ETO because they cynically view expressway congestion as an “incentive” for motorists to switch to public transit.

Four successive Liberal Ministers of Transportation have preferred to be passive puppets on strings pulled by powerful bureaucrats. These wimpy Liberal Ministers of Transportation are too cynical and timid actually to use the reins of cabinet power, to defend the interests of the vast majority of commuting voters, who choose to travel by private car.

Premier McGuinty needs to build $0.5M into the next Ontario budget, to fund an ETO multi-disciplinary feasibility investigation, including the constructive pro-active participation of both Metrolinx and the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO).

I think the problem is that for years we have had an over regulated system.Somehow we need to rejuvenate a desire for creativity that has been stifled by bureaucracy and an anti capitalist attitude,where the unions paint a picture of the capitalist being a greedy cold hearted s.o.b.
With all this wasteful spending we may as well flush another million done the drain by offering a million dollars to any Canadian that can produce a perpetual motion machine or apparatus.
We know that physics claim it is impossible. However so will be employment if we do not go ten degrees starboard. Or am I at a pool party and about to go off the deep end!

I would have to guess Steve that the ETO technology does not have any Liberal connections or a history of donations and support to the Party. And if it doesn’t grow government and cost billions why would they be interested? Liberals love huge government projects that expand their reach into our lives and pockets. That’s how they represent voters. And people seem to like it. That feeds into Terry’s point. The last thing they are interested in is market solutions or a smaller bureaucracy. I don’t know why people actually have any expectation of it. We are at the deep end and ready to fall in but it’s no pool party. Will the people of Ontario wake up? And if they do will the OPCP deliver or disappoint?

I think much of what the NCC has been saying about McGuinty, the Liberals, and the HST in particular is unfair and misleading. Let’s not forget, for example, that the Harris/Eves era ended with a multibillion dollar deficit, and that was in a time when the economy was much better than it is now.

No political party is perfect, and the Ontario Liberals have sure made some poor policy decisions, but don’t omit facts that that don’t serve your arguement. What’s more, comparisons of Ontario to totalitarian states, or saying that people of a particular political persuasion only think that way because they are “intellectually lazy,” are examples of assertions that serve only to further lower the level of discourse that Mr. Coleman, a leader on the national stage (someone who should know better!), and others have been lamenting.

You are right Jordan. No political party is perfect. But there is little doubt about where leftist ideology and policy lead. It leads to high unemployment,a sour business climate and bigger government. And you point out that our so called Conservative Parties let us down as well. We all know and understand that with great frustration. I don’t think that leftists are intellectually lazy. They either tend to be Utopians or people that enjoy the safety and security of the nanny state entitlements paid for by their neighbours rather than freedom and personal responsibility. And we all know socialism is a failed system. So why do we continue to pursue it? Ask the Liberals and NDP.

Terry says:
“I think the problem is that for years we have had an over regulated system.”

Bingo!!

We need less of Ken Galbraith’s Kenesian central planning and more Von Mises end user market forces determining economic and outcomes.

Ontario’s statute micro regulation is far from a new direction and can be traced back to the 50s Frost governments. It imitates Soviet productivity and civil control systems. It also indicates a shift from free market demand economy to quasi-Marxist command economy.

I believe the progressivist statists in Queens park under Frost-Robarts and their collectivist statist counter parts in Pearson’s PMO called it “mixed economy” - of course Fredrick Hayek saw what it was and called it “the road to serfdom”.

It appears Hayek had the cause of Ontario’s steady post 60s deterioration nailed. Only a political cabal of narrow minded dogmatic left leaning statists could take the vast wealth potential of Ontario and piss it all down the drain with myopic economic and social engineering experimenting.

If you want to know what Ontario’s wealth engines would look like without the Federal transfer payment welfare we now relying on, look at Detroit. Changing parties has not ridden Ontario of the disaster prone social and economic experimenters at its helm and in its bureaucracy.

Its time to look for a solution beyond left-right partisan sameness. We need to start thinking about electing populist independents and stuffing the house with them so they end up on policy and administrative committees. Government in its entirety must be re-gravitated towards fully accountable public service and away from satist elitism and bureaucratic tyranny.

The Liberals in this province never had a vision. As a result they produce stupid laws. look at the number of speeders that have been charged with racing. Look at what happens when some one has a girlfriend under 19 that has the nerve to smoke . . . outside of the car. Her boyfriend gets charged!
Look at HST no discussion and the dishonest statement that it is revenue neutral. To whom? The great majority of Ontario buyers will pay a huge amount of taxes. Gasoline taxes will affect everyone who has a car. Insurance taxes will affect everyone that owns a car a house is alive with life insurance.