Ontario Votes 2014: Liberal platform officially unveiled
Plan released Sunday details spending on transit, more hospice care
Ontario's Liberals have officially delivered their campaign platform, which echoes the budget they had tabled earlier this month.
No new spending was announced, but party leader Kathleen Wynne, speaking in Thunder Bay, got specific about where previously announced money is going.
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There were pledges to spend money from a promised $29-billion transit fund on such things as expanding the Kitchener Waterloo LRT to Cambridge. And, there would be more GO Transit options to connect Brantford and the Niagara Region to the Greater Toronto Area under the Liberal plan.
For northern Ontario, $1 billion would be available immediately for the Ring of Fire mining development that was contingent in the budget on equal support from the federal government.
A planned development corporation for the Ring of Fire would be up and running within 60 days of the Liberals being re-elected.
There is also a grab-bag of promises to appeal to all kinds of voters, including a pledge to cap hospital parking fees for frequent visitors. In addition, Wynne is promising 20 more hospices for end-of-life care.
Her government will also create a regulated way for entrepreneurs to use crowd funding to grow their business.
Wynne says if she's elected premier her government will also re-introduce the exact same budget they tabled back on May 1, the one that sparked the June 12 election.
NDP candidate John Vanthof, issued a statement on behalf of his party Sunday, in response to the release of the Liberals' platform.
"This is a list of promises waiting to be broken by Liberals on the run from their record," said Vanthof. "After 10 years of scandal, the Liberals deserve time in the penalty box."
The NDP had signalled they would not support the budget the Liberals had brought forward, which put the province on a path to an election.
As the Liberals already knew they would not be able to obtain support from the Progressive Conservatives, Wynne went to the governor-general and had the government dissolved, rather than waiting to see her party’s budget formally rejected.
The Liberal platform comes a day after Charles Sousa, Wynne's former finance minister, blasted the Progressive Conservative Party's Million Jobs Plan, arguing the Tories' numbers are way off.
PC Leader Tim Hudak's plan is "misleading Ontarians" with skewed numbers, Sousa told reporters in Toronto.
Sousa said Hudak's plan would add only 34,000 jobs over eight years, not the nearly one million the PC has promised. That would mean the numbers are off by 95 per cent, he said. But the PCs say it is the Liberals who are misinterpreting their numbers.