Ontario PC Party Headlines

Friday, April 19, 2013

Editorial: What taxes does Ontario Premier Wynne want?

QMI Agency - Premier Kathleen Wynne seems to have forgotten something in her rush to impose new taxes and tolls on Ontarians to pay for the Liberals' $50-billion, 25-year Big Move transit scheme.
What she's forgotten is the voters.
Voters who must have the final say on this issue, the majority of whom, polls show, aren't in favour of what Wynne's proposing.
But there's a simple solution.
Wynne needs to end her tiresome dance of the seven veils before friendly crowds of elites, hinting at which taxes and tolls she's thinking of imposing, and start coming clean with the public.
Especially so, since she has no electoral mandate to implement any new taxes or tolls, given that she was chosen as premier by Liberal partisans, not democratically confirmed in a general election.
The honest thing for Wynne to do would be to tell the public now what taxes and tolls she's prepared to implement to fund the Big Move and then to run on them in the next election.
So far, the only people the public is hearing from on that issue are special interest groups like the Toronto Region Board of Trade and unelected bureaucrats at City Hall.
In June, unelected bureaucrats at Metrolinx, the province's regional transportation agency, will chime in, again, on which new taxes and tolls they favour.
Clearly, this is all part of a co-ordinated plan by like-minded elites to wear down the public into thinking they have no choice but to meekly accept higher taxes and tolls to pay for transit.
It's time to end this charade.
On Wednesday, Wynne suggested at a friendly forum held by CivicAction, that she might move ahead with imposing new road tolls and taxes to pay for the Big Move, without the support of the affected municipal governments.
The fact she would say this just two days after the Ontario Auditor General said her government misled the public on the real costs of its political decision to cancel the Mississauga gas plant two weeks before the last provincial election, doesn't surprise us.
After all, arrogance is nothing new for Liberals.
But it's all the more reason for Wynne to come clean with the public now about what she's planning.