Fair, fully-costed, and forward-thinking plan presents choices for voters
TORONTO, May 9, 2022 /CNW/ - Steven Del Duca has released the Ontario Liberal Party plan for Ontario, A Place to Grow. It will improve public education, clear the surgery backlog, and revolutionize elder care. At its core, A Place to Grow is about tackling Ontario's affordability crisis and helping families get ahead – including by introducing $1 transit fares, lowering the cost of food, and making buying and renting a home more affordable.
"Governing is about making the difficult choices—and too often, the Ford Conservatives have made the wrong ones," said Del Duca. "Ontario can be a place to grow if we make the right choices. After four years of cuts, chaos, and confusion, we need to rebuild what's always made us strong: publicly funded schools, hospitals, and public services that support working families. We know so many in Ontario are hurting right now. We're ready to undo the damage the Ford Conservatives have inflicted over the past four years and begin healing"
Our Liberal plan will make Ontario:
● A Place to Grow Your Family
○ Eliminate HST on more meals, funded by fair taxes
○ Replace the minimum wage with a regional living wage, starting at $16/hour
○ Build 1.5 million new homes and deliver rent control
● A Place to Grow Older
○ Revolutionize senior care in Ontario by guaranteeing home care
○ End for-profit long-term care
○ Boost pensions by up to $1,000 for seniors who need it
● A Place to Grow Healthy
○ Clear the surgical backlog and set maximum wait times
○ Ensure access to a doctor or nurse practitioner within 24 hours
○ Make more mental health help available
● A Place to Grow Economic Dignity
○ Give every worker access to benefits and 10 paid sick days
○ Build to a four-day work week
○ Eliminate corporate taxes for two years for small businesses hit hard by the pandemic
● A Place to Grow Up
○ Build and repair schools with $10 billion funded by scrapping Highway 413
○ Hire 10,000 teachers for smaller class sizes
○ Fully fund an optional Grade 13 to give students a chance to catch up
● A Place to Grow Sustainably
○ Cut transit fares to $1 a ride everywhere in Ontario
○ Cut Ontario's carbon pollution in half by 2030
○ Protect and expand the Greenbelt and create new provincial parks
● A Place to Grow Together
○ Raise disability and social assistance benefits
○ Advance Indigenous reconciliation
○ Ban handguns
Ontario Liberals have a plan that works for everyone and a team ready to deliver. On June 2, the choice is yours.
"The team that's ready to implement this plan includes community leaders from all walks of life," continued Del Duca. "They're educators, nurses, and doctors that have experienced the Ford Conservatives' cuts and privatization creep first-hand. They're mayors and town councillors that know what it means to lead. They're entrepreneurs and small business leaders fed up with Doug Ford's big-box bias."
Read the full Ontario Liberal Party platform here.
About "A Place to Grow": Our Liberal Plan for Ontario
This fully-costed, fair and forward-looking plan will make life better for the next generation. The full fiscal plan is consistent with the 2022 Ontario Budget's deficit reduction projections over the same period, but the Liberal plan makes very different choices.
The Ontario Liberal plan makes the right choices to put Ontario on a path to present a balanced budget in 2026-27.
The Ontario Liberal plan incorporates the revenue forecasts from the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, which were reinforced by the Auditor General in their pre-election report. To ensure these assumptions are prudent, an Ontario Liberal government will undertake an in-depth fiscal review within 100 days of taking office.
The Ontario Liberal plan reallocates portions of the contingency funds, which the Auditor General described as "overly cautious and higher than usual." We choose to put these funds to work now to help Ontarians recover from COVID-19. Despite this choice, the Liberal Plan still maintains $3.4 billion in contingency or reserve funds in 2022-23 growing to $4.8 billion in 2025-26.
The Ontario Liberal plan uses defined fiscal anchors to reduce the debt burden and put Ontario's finances on a sustainable path, consistent with the Budget 2022-23's fiscal plan, including a commitment to keep the net debt-to-GDP ratio below 42.0% and the net debt-to-revenue below 250%.
SOURCE Ontario Liberal Party
Andrea Ernesaks, [email protected]; Will Wuehr, [email protected]
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