Ontario Votes: NDP election platform no 'game-changer'
The long-awaited Ontario NDP election campaign platform announced Thursday will appeal to many supporters and people shopping their vote, but is it a game changer for the party?
CBC's provincial affairs specialist Robert Fisher says it's not. He told Metro Morning on Friday the document outlined by leader Andrea Horwath is "pretty light in some areas on policy."
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"This is not a game-changer for the NDP, but it is a platform," he says, adding Horwath says it's not fair that media pundits are calling the game plan "Liberal light."
"She says no, but if you go through it, there are a number of things that are in the Liberal budget," Fisher says.
Still, he says the platform has given Horwath "a new kind of confidence that was not there until yesterday" and she has consolidated a "dance of the seven veils, with a "little announcement here, one there," so the platform announcement is a turning point for her.
Fisher says Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak still appears to have the momentum in the campaign and provided the turning point with his plan to cut 100,000 public-sector jobs.
Click here for the full discussion on Metro Morning.
During a campaign stop in Toronto on Friday morning, Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne said the NDP put forward a "list of kind of disconnected ideas, [and] many of them come from our platform, from our plan.
"It's interesting that the NDP has put out a platform that relies so much on our plan, and so it's a bit confusing that they didn't support the plan that we put forward," she said.
The Liberal budget that sparked the vote for June 12 was rejected by both the NDP and Progressive Conservatives.