The job promises previewed in today’s Throne Speech are vague and fail to hide dangerous changes in how patients access health care, how funding is allocated to hospitals and a plan for “cash-grab” asset sales that won’t create a single job but will cripple the province by permanently reducing its revenue base, the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario, the province’s largest trade union, said today.
“Dalton McGuinty has so little confidence in his own job creation promises and in Ontario’s businesses and workers’ ability to grow the economy that he’s planning to sell the farm to pay the mortgage,” CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn said today.
Selling off chunks of Ontario’s biggest revenue sources, Hydro One, Ontario Power Generation, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario and the Ontario Lottery Corporation, “is an admission of defeat by a Premier hoping to use marketing gimmicks to dress up a fire sale of what generations before us worked so hard to build,” said the CUPE Ontario leader.
Hahn is also extremely alarmed that new legislation to bring competition to hospital funding will be a disaster predicting that Ontarians will reject it because it will pit communities against each other and make access uneven and harder for Ontario families.
“Finally,” the CUPE President said, “it is sadly ironic that our Premier chose International Women’s Day to deliver a Throne Speech that leaves women and children behind by continuing to underfund the very non-profits described in the Speech as ‘unsung heroes,’ child care, children’s aid and child welfare agencies.”
Fred Hahn is President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario with over 220,000 members.
For more information, please contact:
Chris Watson CUPE Communications 416-553-9410