Yesterday’s Ontario Liberal Budget that is … and Tim Hudak is most welcome to plagiarize it.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in response to the Government’s Budget, more in sorrow than anger.
In sorrow, since we have all witnessed over the 10 years of Liberal Government Rule the decline of this once great Province from being the Engine of Canada, to one of Have-Not Status.
And yesterday’s Budget only serves to entrench it further.
I am also most saddened by the Government’s deliberate actions to divide Ontarians into two distinct groups: the first are all those who rely upon government for their financial support; the second group, a declining one, is composed of those who work in the private sector and whose earnings fund all things governmental.
Simply stated, without the Private Sector, there would be no Public Sector but that simple fact has escaped those on the front benches opposite.
Over the course of this last decade, those of the private sector have seen more and more of their hard-earned money going to pay provincial taxes of all kinds and all the while, have watched in horror as the Liberal Governments under Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne waste their tax dollars on multi-billion dollar scandals and the placating of rich Public Sector Unions which have become out-of-touch with the common working man and woman which they once rightly stood for.
Many of these good folks have been forced by their own Government to choose between keeping their homes warm or buying groceries.
Industry too has suffered greatly with the draconian increases in the cost of power and are fleeing the Province, often to jurisdictions which our own Government is subsidizing with cheap, below market rate power.
We in Ontario have a debt / deficit problem which would make indebted States such as California blush.
It cannot go on.
So I make my appeal today to those who find themselves in group one – the public sector. The current level of government spending is not sustainable. If it is not stopped now, Ontario’s economy will soon fall to the point where we all will suffer great harm – the Public as well as the Private Sector.
We in Ontario, with all of our resources both human and natural should be number one in Canada and indeed throughout the world. The fact that we are not is a tragedy and one of the making of the most wasteful Governments in Ontario’s history.
As I see it…
‘K.D. Galagher’
