Well, surprise, surprise a real conservative won the PC leadership in Ontario on Sat. March 10. A political pundit observed on the TV coverage of the event, it is no longer an Ontario PC Party, for all practical purposes it is now a Ford conservative party.
The problem that the Ontario PC Party has had in at least the last two elections, is that their leader came across as liberal light.
Their progressive policies just did not differentiate them that much from the Liberals.
With Doug Ford as the leader of the party, you can be sure that he will clearly differentiate his party from the other parties for the electorate in the June election.
Much of the media with the exception of The Sun will try to tie Doug to the baggage of his deceased brother Rob. It won’t work because Doug Ford does not and never has had addiction problems and he comes across as exceptionally reasonable.
Tom Parkin, a Sun columnist, thinks the election of Ford will give the NDP the inside track to win the next provincial election.
In his view, Ontarians deserve something better than a horrific choice between Wynne and Ford.
He thinks that Andrea Horwath would have a considerable impact across Canada. She would be able to influence Trudeau on issues like health funding, childcare and taxes.
I guess he thinks we don’t have high enough taxes in Canada yet. On the other hand Doug Ford thinks he can convince NDP blue collar workers to support him.
The liberals and the left still do not seem to understand that Ontario is financially in crises. It is a direct result of Dalton McGinnty’s Green Energy Act.
This Act has caused electricity prices to increase exponentially. The result has been the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs, due to electricity being a major input cost for many manufacturing processes.
It has also resulted in the loss of government revenue. That and the liberal penchant for spending billions of dollars on unaffordable social programs has put Ontario with the highest per capita debt of any sub-sovereign jurisdiction in the world.
You can be sure that a Doug Ford government will put a stop to government spending on socialist feel-good programs.
As soon as Kathleen Wynne found out that Ford had become the new Conservative leader she was accusing him of implementing severe cutbacks on the public sector workers.
If they are paid anything like the public sector workers in Alberta, there needs to be a substantial cut back, both in the number of those workers and their pay.
There is no doubt that the razor thin election of Ford over Christine Elliot was a bitter pill for her as it was her third loss in a leadership contest.
At first her and her team were challenging the results, they were convinced that there were voting irregularities, but after reviewing the results for a day she agreed that the system worked the way it was supposed to.
It was a point system that gave equal weight to each constituency, similar to the system that is used by the Federal Conservatives.
She congratulated him on the win and has now decided to work with Ford to defeat the Liberals in the June 7th election.
Ford and Elliot have always been friends and those two working as a team will be an incredible political force.
While the Liberals, NDP and much of the media will try to portray the Conservatives as a party divided, I think they will soon learn that the majority of people in Ontario are sick and tired of their deficit spending government.
Canada needs an Ontario that is again the financial backbone of the country, it can’t happen too soon.
A federal Liberal government and an Ontario provincial Liberal government has been a terrible combination for Canada.
by Herman Schwenk
