Hudak talks jobs, transit, taxes in Thornhill visit
Opposition leader campaigns with byelection candidate Martow

Thornhill Liberal
January 23, 2014
By Tim Kelly

Official Opposition leader Tim Hudak of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario was in Thornhill Tuesday on the campaign trail touring Raywal, a furniture making plant in Markham. He sat down for a chat with the yorkregion.com along with local PC candidate Gila Martow, who is aiming to be the MPP when the votes are counted on Thursday, Feb. 13.

Q: We’ll start with your Million Jobs Plan. Apparently the unemployment number is, at most, around 600,000, so how then did we get to a million jobs? Are there some underemployed as well, some who are off the books, who have given up looking for work? Is that where the difference in the 400,000 comes in?

Tim Hudak: Our plan is to create a million jobs and these are good jobs, steady jobs with benefits and pension, not part-time, minimum-wage jobs, like the only ones you can get out there these days. You can’t do that at once, that’s a million jobs over eight years. Who is that going to help out? For sure, the unemployed, there’s over 600,000 of those, there’s about another hundred thousand who have given up looking for work altogether, there’s a lot of folks too, in Thornhill, who are working at a part-time job, who are saying, ‘I’m proud I’ve got a paycheque, I can do a lot better and should Ontario do a lot better,’ then we’re going to have young people coming through school, we’re going to have young people coming to our great province, they’re all going to need jobs. If we don’t create a million jobs, we’re going to have further decline and we won’t be able to afford the things we need like subways and new hospitals.

Q: I know that part of the plan includes reduced taxes but don’t we have one of the most competitive business tax rates already in North America?

Tim Hudak: I know the other two parties keep saying that, but I’ll tell you what. If I was going out to buy a TV, I wouldn’t go to the place that has average prices, I’d go to the place that has the best quality and the best price and business is the same way. I’m just fed up with businesses that are overlooking Ontario. They’re going to Alberta or Saskatchewan or Michigan or Indiana. Our plan is to actually get the business tax rate down to among the lowest in Canada to encourage investment.

Q: It’s not there yet? I thought it was, based on comparisons with the other tax rates.

Tim Hudak: It’s not, so my Million Jobs Act would make it the lowest in Canada, even with Alberta, New Brunswick and British Columbia. The second aspect is, it’s not the only tax you pay. There are business taxes, the Liberals brought in the HST. I just cannot believe the Liberals are talking about a 10 cents-a-litre gas tax on top of that. You keep getting nailed by the tax man over and over again, you pack up shop and you leave Ontario and families can’t afford it.

Q: If we’re going to increase the level of transit that we have, how are we going to pay for it, how are we going to find the $2 billion per year, $50 billion over 25 years?

Tim Hudak: I think taxpayers are doing more than their fair share. Taxes have already gone up, hydro bills are going through the roof, they’re talking about this 10 cents-a-litre gas tax, I think it’s time the government did their fair share. I think if we truly want to get people out of their cars and into transit, you build subways. You don’t rip up streets to put down rail, like the Liberals want to do. I think that will make gridlock worse and people won’t even ride it, so subways, and that means north on the Yonge route into Richmond Hill, into Thornhill and secondly doing the Scarborough route as well and the downtown relief line to take relief off that Yonge line. That’s what I see as our main subway proposals. So, how do I pay for it?

I do not support taxes, because I think that if you take money out of people’s pockets, it’s going to hurt our economy and impact negatively the province and job creation. Here’s what I think we should do: Create an Ontario Transportation Trust, sort of like a locked-in fund so we know it’s going into transportation so taxpayers can look and know here’s where the money is going into a subway project like north into Richmond Hill and Yonge. What do I put in that fund? First, I think we’ve got a lot of excess land and buildings when it comes to government. Why do we have government buildings in some of the most expensive real estate anywhere in North America in downtown Toronto? Sell that stuff off, move them to a better location, shrink government, put the savings into the transportation trust. As well, encourage pensions to invest in our transit systems and to invest in our Crown assets and the revenue can go into the Ontario Transportation Trust.

And I just believe that as the economy grows and I’m confident we get this economy growing with this million jobs plan, instead of putting some of the revenue aside for new government programs, you put it into the transportation infrastructure, other places have done that, it’s high time we did that in the province of Ontario.

Q: Gila, you’ve said, if you had your way, you’d get rid of the rapidway going through Bathurst and Centre streets. You’ve been a longtime opponent of that plan. When I spoke to the Premier Monday, she said that’s not doable, that’s dedicated and it’s going to happen. How can that be changed, how can you make that change happen?

Gila Martow: Any plan can be adjusted and they’ve already adjusted part of the route on the Hwy. 7 Rapidway through Unionville and Markham. We’re not asking to change the Hwy. 7 Rapidway per se, we’re asking for another adjustment and another rethink and what I’m hearing at the door and what I heard when I walked around in the mall yesterday with Steve Clark, MPP from Leeds-Grenville, and what we hear from people is that they have an opinion about what transit that they want to see in place through their tax dollars. Not one person so far has said to me that what they need to get to work or to do their errands or to get their kids to hockey is bus lanes coming down Bathurst and Centre. In fact, it’s not what they need. That is a $100-million investment with no return from what I can see and no signs of significantly increasing the ridership.

Q: If you’re elected the majority government, maybe this year, if you are, will you commit to getting the Yonge Street subway extension up to Richmond Hill?

Tim Hudak: Oh yeah, I already did.

Q: That’s a promise we can take to the bank?

Tim Hudak: Absolutely. Politicians always say. But it’s necessary to do. I just believe for the Greater Toronto Area to be world class and to get people out of their car you’ve got to invest in subways and the most sensible we’re talking about is building that Yonge line north into Richmond Hill to help out families here and I also have a plan to pay for it not by increasing gas taxes 10 cents-a-litre like the Liberals want to do or putting more taxes on businesses like the NDP want to do.

Q: Since this riding has the highest percentage of Jewish voters in all of Canada, and the PM is right now in Israel talking about what great friends we are with Israel and the Jewish state and getting heckled by Arab-Israeli members, is it fair to say our one-sided policy towards Israel is a little bit too one-sided? Is that a fair criticism for our Prime Minister?

Gila Martow: Isn’t that nice that there are Arab-Israeli members in the Israeli Parliament? I think our Prime Minister is a strong proponent of democracy and I think that if anybody – you’re using the word one-sided, I would not say one-sided – I think he’s supportive of anybody in the Middle East who’s supportive of human rights and democracy.

Tim Hudak: I think he’s just doing the right thing and I’m proud as a Canadian to have a government that’s standing up for the right thing. That’s defending Israel’s right to exist, the one true democracy in the Middle East. I wish we had more democracies in the Middle East. My family came from instability in Eastern Europe to come here to Ontario. What made us attracted then was that we were a democracy. We believed in human rights and freedom of religion and when we see that elsewhere in the world, don’t we have a duty to celebrate that, recognize that?

Q: What are your top three priorities for Thornhill and the province?

Tim Hudak: Jobs, second one, more jobs, third one, have you guessed, even more jobs. It all starts with a good steady job. If you have a good steady job, it means you can move out of mom and dad’s house, you can buy your own home and create more jobs here in Thornhill.

Q: But you won’t commit to a minimum wage increase even though it’s been stuck at $10.25 an hour since 2010 and hundreds of thousands of people are stuck on the minimum wage and having a tough time?

Tim Hudak: Let me answer that and Gila is a small business person herself, we need people like Gila there herself who know what’s it like to run a business and keep a payroll and what it takes to hire people and quite frankly how often the government is in your pocket and in your way when you’re a small-business person.

We talked about my million jobs plan, I want to see good middle-class jobs, my focus is not on creating more minimum wage jobs.

You’re right, the problem today is you’re twice as likely to do work in a minimum-wage job as you were 10 years ago. We’ve got enough minimum-wage jobs, I want to create high-quality jobs so young people won’t have to go out to Alberta or B.C., they can stay here in Thornhill, close to family and buy their own home. That’s what I’m all about.