NDP leader and Thornhill candidate offer new solutions to Ontario’s problems
Horwath, Hackelberg answer reporter's questions

January 31, 2014
Thornhill Liberal
By Tim Kelly

Andrea Horwath is the leader of the NDP party in Ontario, with 20 of the 105 MPPs ­— and two seats, Niagara Falls and Thornhill — up for grabs Feb. 13.

The Hamilton Centre MPP wields outsize power as she has decided whether or not to pull the plug on the minority Liberal government when it has delivered its budgets, which have been unanimously opposed by the Opposition Progressive Conservatives.

Ms Horwath spoke to York Region Media this week, along with Thornhill NDP candidate Cindy Hackelberg, answering a number of questions about where they stand on the issues.

Q: In Thornhill, a major issue is transit: how we’re going to fund it? how the Big Move is going to be dealt with? whether we’ll have tax increases? The Opposition is saying we can do this in another way through finding efficiencies. What plan would you bring forth if you were elected government?

A: New Democrats are 100 per cent in favour of the Big Move. We always have been and, as a matter of fact, we were quite disappointed when the Liberals took $4 billion out of Transit City, because we know that that just moves back the timeline for the extension of a subway to Richmond Hill and Thornhill. So we know the Liberals have already made decisions that have slowed down progress on dealing with the vision for subway services to this part of the GTA.

We also know families are struggling when it comes to the amount of time they spend on the transit systems that exist to try to get where they’re going.

I’ve ridden the transit systems on purpose to get a sense from people for what their day is like. I’ve met people who were literally spending six hours a day on public transit in the GTA because it’s taking kids to child care in one direction and then to work in another direction, both at the beginning of the day and at the end. One young father with three young children, it was unbelievable the amount of time he was spending on transit!

So we know there needs to be significant investment in transit and we support that 100 per cent. What we don’t want to see, though, is more taxes and tolls on the very families struggling to make ends meet now and who need to utilize that transit system to make life better.

What we will not do is what the Liberals are planning on doing and if you look at their budget projections for the next couple of years — they want to continue to reduce corporate taxes. We’re not saying increase corporate taxes, we got the government to stop reducing corporate taxes already and we think corporate taxes are good as they are. We don’t think further reductions are necessary. We also don’t believe we need to open up new corporate tax loopholes. Right now the government’s plan is to open a new tax loophole next year that basically allows companies to write off the HST they’re paying on entertainment of their clients at ball games or all kinds of big dinners, lavish events.

Those companies are entertaining their clients at those venues and they’re paying the HST, there is no reason to open up a new tax loophole to give a refund on the HST to those companies. We can use that money to fund our transit system.

Q: How much money is that? Do you know?

A: Between maintaining corporate tax rates and not continuing to reduce them to 10 per cent and maintaining the HST and not opening up the corporate tax loophole and the third thing the Liberals want to do is get rid of that high income tax; the NDP in the first minority budget, forced the government to put a small increment on people earning a significant amount of money, they also have in their plan to get rid of that high income tax when the budget balances – all of those things together, equal $3.1 billion of revenue annually that will be lost with those three measures.

Q: You have basically been the most powerful politician in Ontario for the last couple of years, I would say. Will you play the same role again and forestall another election for six months or even a year by doing exactly what you’ve done with Kathleen Wynne or [Dalton] McGuinty the last couple of budgets, again this time around, just like you could with this $3.1 billion?

A: We were able to get the 15 per cent reduction in auto insurance commitment, we were able to get the youth jobs plan, which was extremely important, the financial accountability office...

Q: Are you going to do this again? You could, right?

A: That’s exactly the process we’re in right now. My MPPs right now are out on a number of different government committees. There’s a developmental services committee, there’s pre-budget hearings that are happening right now and we are gathering from people of Ontario a sense of where things are at. Do they feel the commitments that the government made in the last budget are actually turning into reality? Are they seeing the results? Are they seeing positive results from those commitments: a change in the homecare system, reductions in their auto insurance rates, young people getting those jobs?

I am going to do exactly what I did the last two years in terms of taking my cues from Ontarians, so right now we’re in that informal process of getting the feedback from Ontarians. In the next week or two, probably after the byelections, you’ll see more formal outreach we’re going to do. Last time we did townhall meetings, we did Internet interactive response types of questionnaires, those kinds of things — and I’m going to take my cues from them.

So it will be up to the people of Ontario, depending on the feedback we get, that will inform my decision as to how we handle the next budget cycle.

Q: I talked to the premier and opposition leader on minimum-wage reform and they both had different answers. The premier was definite about minimum-wage legislation coming, Mr. Hudak just avoided the question. What’s your response to that?

A: We’re disappointed that the Liberals actually decided instead of going ahead with a phased-in minimum-wage increases they were supposed to be implementing, that they suddenly just froze the minimum wage. We’d be well over $11 an hour at this point. I think we’d be at $11.50 or, I don’t know specifically.

They had a plan to phase in a gradual increase in the minimum wage, which business knew about, which everybody knew about, had they actually fulfilled that promise, certainly we wouldn’t be at $14 an hour, we’d be higher than we are right now and I think the pressure wouldn’t be as great as it is right now.

I think the tragedy is that there are people who actually are cobbling together two and three jobs at minimum wage to try and make ends meet, but people shouldn’t be working 40 to 44 hours a week and not still be able to put a roof over their heads and feed their families. It’s not a good thing.

Having said that, we know an immediate increase ... could create some issues, particularly with small business, so we’re being very careful how do we find the way to get those wages where they need to be to provide people with a decent standard of living while at the same time recognize that the impact can’t be such that we deep-six some of the businesses that create the backbone of the economy these days, which are small business. A balanced approach needs to happen, but there also needs to be an acknowledgement that you can’t just arbitrarily ... freeze minimum wage for years on end and expect people’s quality of life not to decrease, not to reduce.

Q: What are three top priorities for Thornhill?

A. Cindy Hackelberg: The first one is health care, without a doubt. There are people from all walks of life in Thornhill. The issue I hear the most about, first off, is the need for better health care from our doctors and nurses and also homecare.

There are a number of people who are waiting for homecare and the waiting times are much, much too long. It’s hard for those who need it and it’s very hard for those who are concerned about their loved ones, so this is something I think is requiring a lot of improvement throughout the province and here in Thornhill.

The second issue is job creation. Although many people have the sense that Thornhill is a very wealthy riding and that is true — there are a number of people who are very well off — it’s also very true there are a number of people who are struggling and I see it on the doorstep.

I see people who are working very hard, they’re working two jobs or even three jobs as Andrea [Horwath] mentioned earlier and that’s a big problem. We need to make people able to get the jobs that they need and the youth, in particular, too. We’ve worked very hard to try to create youth jobs and more investment needs to be done in that way. We need to make sure it’s more equitable and more people are able to find employment.

The third issue for me would be transit. I am a commuter, I’m probably the only candidate who is a commuter, I don’t know if the others are, but I haven’t heard anything to that effect.

I travel to Toronto every day for my job. And, I go with the GO Train. Even though Thornhill is only 20 km from Toronto, for me to go to and from work takes two-and-a-half hours and the transit options are not very frequent, either. If I look at the Lakeshore lines, they go every 10 minutes in rush hour. If I don’t get the 5:30 p.m. train on the way home, it’s another 75 minutes to Thornhill (Union to Langstaff in Thornhill). That’s hard, there are thousands, 2,000 people every day, taking the Richmond Hill line, that’s hard when there aren’t transit options in the city to make it easier in Thornhill.

Q: What are the top three priorities provincewide?

A: Well, they’re not that dissimilar from what Cindy [Hackelberg] has mentioned for Thornhill. Jobs is a huge issue. It seems every single week there’s another announcement of a closure of a plant, whether that’s 40 people losing their jobs or 700 people losing their jobs, we continue to see job loss and no real plan from the Liberals and the Conservatives want to just cut more corporate taxes and the Liberals have a plan to do the same. Those are not working, those are solutions that have proven not to work.

We have low corporate taxes already in this province. What we need to do is find ways to partner with businesses so that they actually start utilizing this relationship with government in a way that makes this economy better.

Q: They say there’s a lot of dead money sitting around that they don’t seem to re-invest in their businesses?

A: Exactly. This is the problem, this is exactly the problem, those tax cuts sit in corporate coffers, they sit in liquid money and they don’t do anything.

What we’re saying, we want to partner with business, with the private sector, but we want something for it. So, we’ll give you the tax cut, if you’re investing in Ontario. You invest, we’ll give you a refundable tax credit. You create jobs in Ontario, we will give a jobs tax credit.

It’s interesting to note, that the Heinz factory that’s moving those jobs from Leamington over to the United States in Ohio, they’re actually getting jobs tax credits in Ohio for those couple of hundred jobs that are going to be created in Ohio, so these are not NDP ideas, these are ideas that are working in other jurisdictions.

Manitoba has a refundable tax credit program. They are actually double the rate of productivity investment of Ontario and of all of Canada, in fact, and they decided proactively a couple of years ago they were going to stop reducing corporate taxes and start actually getting something back for the relation of tax credits through the tax reduction system.

We have been saying for years now, let’s stop doing what’s not working, let’s look around the world, not with an ideological perspective, but with a practical perspective, and see what it is that other jurisdictions are doing to successfully get some of that dead money moving into the economy again and get some people hiring folks again and so jobs is a big one.

If there’s another big one, Cindy mentioned the health care system. The government likes to say how much money they spend on health care, but when that spending doesn’t translate into services that people can rely on then we know that there’s something going on and that’s what we’re very concerned about.

Do I need to mention again E-heath and Ornge air ambulance? My fear is that there are a lot of other problems out there like that that we haven’t been able to uncover yet and we work on that all the time and we try to get our auditor-general to work on that all the time.

There are ways of doing things differently and better that we need to implement here in this province. One of the things that’s extremely important is we need to see the homecare system fixed. We demanded a certain amount of investment in the homecare system in the last budget. The government doubled up.

They said, yes, we’re going to do twice as much, but if you’re throwing twice as much money at the problem, you’re not actually solving the problem. You have to look at what’s wrong with the system and there’s lots of problems with our homecare system.

Our homecare system used to be largely not-for-profit. The Liberals have switched that around. Where it used to be about 80 per cent not-for-profit, now it’s about 80 per cent for profit and so, there’s no wonder that the costs are going up. The services are not being stretched as far, but they’re not meeting the needs of the public, but that’s just one piece.

We still see many communities, this isn’t one of them, but many communities still don’t have a family doctor, we have people who are losing hospitals and emergency wards and obstetrics and gynecology from their hospitals, it’s quite problematic. So healthcare’s a big one and it always is.

If there’s another issue, it’s the fundamental affordability of everyday life and I go back to the issue of the increasing pressure of hydro rates to families, but that’s the only thing. We know that there’s pressure on municipalities, so they’re increasing property taxes.

We know constantly that people are saying their auto insurance bill is their second highest bill after their mortgage or their rent. We force people to get insurance if they are going to get a licence to drive in Ontario. We have to make sure that product is affordable, meets their needs in terms of coverage and all of that.

There are a number of other ideas that we have to make life more affordable for people and to give them a sense that they’re not going backwards and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to all kinds of different places.

This past week I’ve been here, I’ve been to Sudbury, I’ve been to Niagara Falls. Everywhere, people are saying, we feel like, it’s not just that we’re standing still and we’re not getting ahead, we feel like we’re falling behind. We feel we can’t make ends meet like we used to, we feel we’re cutting and scrimping and saving and trying to cut every corner just to maintain a quality of life that we’re watching erode before our eyes.

That reduces hope for people. People are not feeling hopeful about the future, of themselves and their families, about the future of the province. And when you lose hope, things don’t turn around very easily.

We want to make sure the people of this province know that there is hope, there is a way to turn this province around. Choosing the same old ideas and the same old solutions that haven’t worked so far are not going to get us to where we have to go.