Tim Hudak and the Common Nonsense Revolution
From Ken Gray, Ottawa Citizen:
Provincial governments are about to be battered by the cost for helping an aging population. We are approaching a senior health and longterm-care crisis that will tax our ability to pay for those services and others, such as education and infrastructure, as aging demographics hammer our costs while reducing revenue. Tax cuts should not be on the provincial agenda for the foreseeable future. We have big bills and escalating costs to cover. Debt should not be an option.
Hudak missed this reality with his Changebook platform for the upcoming October election. The PC leader would save middleclass couples about $1,400 a year through income splitting and cut income tax five per cent on the first $75,000. That’s revenue that shouldn’t be discarded. It makes it difficult to understand how Hudak will cover the cost of doubling the caregiver tax credit or spending $35 billion on infrastructure, two planks in his spend-and-spend platform.
[…]
The Tories would kill the $7-billion Samsung deal that is seed money for creating a whole new manufacturing sector in a province that will be hard-pressed to keep auto jobs as the Canadian dollar rises. And how many hundreds of millions of dollars will it cost to extract the province from that agreement? In addition, municipalities will be given the power to plan industrial wind farms, so forget about that green energy alternative in the face of NIMBY.
Hudak would also eliminate the McGuinty Local Health Integration Networks that save money by, for example, getting long-term-care residents out of expensive emergency-care hospitals. The Changebook says foreign scholarship programs would be axed so that pesky trained doctors and scientists won’t come to the province, let alone stay. Still, Hudak will put $6 billion more into health care but where will the money be raised for that in the face of tax cuts? Debt, no doubt. Laughably, Hudak promises more freedom to choose home-care providers, presuming in the coming health crisis any will be available at all.
