Member of Provincial Parliament
Mississauga-Streetsville Provincial Liberal Association
Riding Association Web Site
So who's a foreigner, Hudak? Spell it out!
By Tim Hudak's warped, sneering, hypocritical, angry rhetoric, I ought to feel hard-done-by. After all, just about everybody on my street, except me, seems to meet the Hudak Conservative definition of being a "foreigner." The difference is that instead, I feel angry because my neighbours, and those like me, born in Canada, are being treated like idiots by Hudak. Just how stupid, how gullible, do Conservatives think Ontarians are in the Hudak deliberate misrepresentation of who and what "foreign workers" are?
Hey Hudak! I was born in Quebec! Even though I have lived most of my life in Ontario, does that make me a "foreigner?" And if so, then precisely who is a "real" Ontarian?
Ontario’s 107 MPPs were born on four continents, in 16 different countries. What about the 14 MPPs born in Europe? Are they more or less "foreign" than the nine Ontario MPPs born in Asia? Watch Bob Delaney Member's Statement.
What's all this about? The Hudak Tories are trying to stir the racial pot with a false and misleading allegation about the Liberal platform that its proposal to assist 1,200 Ontarians by offering a tax credit to their employers represents some sort of reverse discrimination. Read the editorial in the Toronto Star taking the Tories to the woodshed on the type of behaviour your mom would have slapped you for if you did it. In fact, former Ontario PC Leader John Tory, said Hudak is "pandering to the worst emotion of envy, jealousy and insecurity about so-called foreigners" while calling the Ontario Liberal plan "one of the best investments we [could] make... this is the right kind of thing to do." Now let's tell the truth, something Tories tend to run in fear from anyway. Just remember the hidden 2003 $5.6 billion deficit.
- Does the proposed tax credit discriminate against "Ontarians," and in favour of "foreigners?"
- Nope. You have to be an Ontario resident for your employer to be eligible for the tax credit if the organization chooses to train you for the type of work you came to Ontario to do. The tax credit is aimed at assisting 1,200 workers who obtained their qualifications and work experience outside Canada, and are now resident in Ontario. In other words, this proposal is about you, or your family, or your neighbours, or friends, or co-workers, people who already live here and pay Ontario taxes. Hudak's bald-faced attempt to manipulate your emotions should be transparent by this time, but read on.
- Is the Province focusing on helping people who come from other countries when Ontarians who were born here are left to their own devices?
- No. Hudak's politics of division treat you like an idiot again. Tell the whole truth, Hudak! Tell Ontarians that the Conservatives voted against Ontario's Second Career Program. Second Career has helped more than 47,000 Ontarians, regardless of where they were born or came from, to acquire the skills they need to retrain, learn and equip themselves for a new career. Second Career provides up to $28,000 for tuition, books, manuals, workbooks and other supplies. It even pays a living allowance while you learn and retrain. It has been a runaway success, and the Hudak Tories opposed it. Ordinary Ontarians all loved it, because they got new and better jobs as a result. Three quarters of the Second Career graduates found new jobs within a year.
- Didn't Hudak himself suggest something very similar very recently?
- He sure did. In May of 2010, Hudak introduced a Private Member's Bill, called the Newcomers Employment Opportunities Act in the Ontario Legislature, proposing a 10 percent wage subsidy for any business hiring a skilled newcomer in Ontario – and there was no cap to Hudak's program! Of course, when Hudak is against someone from another country, he seems to call them a "foreigner," and when he wants to suck up to them, he calls them a "newcomer."
- Back when I/my parents came to Canada/Ontario, there was no such program, so why should people get help today?
- Because the faster people convert their portfolio of qualifications and expertise to whatever applies in Ontario, the faster they will contribute to building this Province and our communities. Ontarians don't think the generation that came from the "old country," regardless of which country, and when you/they came, should have to "sit out" a whole generation. If you live here and pay taxes here (and everybody who benefits from the proposal must), then we want you working at your best as soon as possible. Just because we did not do things as well as we might have years ago, why should we do less than our very best today?
So who are you trying to manipulate here Hudak?
The policy-bankrupt Ontario Conservatives have decided to strike out at everything from outside Ontario. Let's look at a list:
- The Ontario PCs are against businesses from other countries coming to invest here in Ontario. They have a policy commitment to chase away the $7 billion that Korea-based Samsung plans to invest (their money, not ours) in renewable energy out of Ontario. Let's put that money in a different context. Toyota's much-coveted new auto plant in Woodstock is a $1 billion investment by that "foreign" company;
- The Ontario PCs oppose prize students from other countries coming to Canada to study. Them seem strangely silent on whether it is a good idea for top Canadian students to broaden their scope by studying abroad;
- We in Lisgar, Meadowvale and Streetsville want to hear what the PCs say to those thousands of workers at Toyota, and Honda, and Samsung about whether there is anything "foreign" about the paycheque they’re bringing home from those "foreign" companies who employ Ontarians and pay Ontario taxes.
Hudak is playing these mind games because his PC platform is uncosted, untested nonsense. Hudak faces a $14 billion deficit in his ludicrous platform that Conservatives in western Mississauga scoff at. He can't give it to an independent auditor, because then the game would be up, and the Conservatives would be headed to a distant third finish in this election (which may be true anyway). Hudak says he won't cut education and health care, which is the opposite of what his mentor, Mike Harris, did. Nobody believes that. However, if Hudak does persist with that nonsense, here is a list of the type of cuts the Conservatives would have to make to find that $14 billion. It means completely abolishing, in their entirety, all the following Ontario ministries, and everything they do: Attorney General (all the courts and civil and criminal justice systems): $1.6 billion; Community Safety and Correctional Services (the OPP and the prison systems): $8.6 billion; the Ministry of the Environment (they'll do that anyway): $375 million; the Ministry of Labour (worker protection): $179 million; Municipal Affairs & Housing (affordable housing? forget it!): $664 million; Transportation and Highways (hello gridlock): $2 billion; and the Ministry of Energy (blackouts again): $469 million.
Hudak's politics of anger and division will not strengthen our economy and create more jobs. Ontario Liberals have a plan that balanced the budget when times were good, and will balance the budget as we recover. In fact, Ontario's policies have more people working in this Province now than were working at the height of the last economic boom. It is the first-ever "made-in-Ontario " recovery in the Province's history. And Hudak wants to throw that away in a fit of anger. Ontarians are not that stupid.