If Tim Hudak is elected, Ontario will see unprecedented job cuts, healthcare cuts, education cuts and the decimation of workers’ rights.
For those who value decent jobs, good health care, strong communities and a bright, stable future for our children, the primary objective in this election must be to keep Tim Hudak from becoming premier.
That means supporting the candidate with the best chance of defeating the local Conservative candidate.
While so-called strategic voting has always been controversial, the threat that Hudak poses has encouraged many more to support the idea in this election, including some who have criticized it in the past.
That's because this time, the stakes are just too high to do anything else.
Hudak can't be trusted with the premiership, and not just because of his terrible promises to fire 100,000 public servants -- mostly teachers and health care workers -- increase class sizes and cut health care to our elderly and most vulnerable.
Hudak likes to paint government services as wasteful luxuries and a burden on taxpayers. But he’s wrong. Public sector workers keep our drinking water safe. They teach our children and monitor nuclear facilities. They maintain the roads we use to get to work and to school, and to get home again at the end of the day. They care for us when we’re sick.
It’s no wonder respected economists are left scratching their heads over Hudak’s plans. They just don’t make sense. The false idea that cutting jobs and services in the public sector somehow creates investment and jobs in the private sector has been disproven time and again.
For even more reasons to keep Hudak out of power, we can look to his heavily promoted promise to create one million jobs over eight years. At Unifor, we've taken a look at the plan, and found some astonishing things – and more reasons not to trust Hudak.
Simply put, the plan is based on deeply flawed economic assumptions that include a devotion to dismantling labour rights, the so-called “right to work” laws Hudak publicly dropped from his platform just three months ago.
The Hudak Conservatives hired US economist Benjamin Zycher, well-known for his love of right to work laws, to estimate any boost to economic activity and job gains from its million jobs plan. To assess the part of the plan dealing with regulation changes, he relied on a Fraser Institute report measuring the supposed economic freedom of US states and Canadian provinces.
Part of that index includes labour laws. Through perverse logic, fewer labour laws are assumed to mean more freedom, leading to higher economic output, more jobs and a stronger economy. Of course that’s wrong. The fact is, right to work states have seen fewer jobs, less money spent on health care and education and more bankruptcies.
Besides, Hudak said in February that he would not pursue right to work legislation if he becomes premier.
But now his million jobs claims rely in part on right to work laws coming to Ontario. That means either Hudak is still committed to the idea, or the analysis is even more deeply flawed. Either way, we can’t trust the numbers.
The Conservative’s own analysis claims that Hudak’s regulatory changes would mean a one-time boost of 10,600 jobs. But once the Conservative campaign team got its hands on the research, the claim was inflated to 84,800 jobs, or 10,600 in each of the next eight years.
That’s a far cry from the one-time boost their own analysis predicted.
So this is what we end up with: job creation numbers based on suspect assumptions, stemming from a policy that Hudak claims he will not pursue, and then multiplied by eight by the Conservative campaign team.
It’s just one more reason why Hudak can't be trusted.
The threat in this election from the potential of Hudak becoming premier is greater than we’ve seen before, including from his mentor Mike Harris. Hudak says he is being very upfront about his drastic plans, but once again we see mistruths and a hidden agenda. He hopes that he can win with a clear mandate to dismantle the best parts of this province in the name of massive corporate tax cuts.
Let’s make sure he doesn’t get the chance.
Jerry Dias is National President of Unifor, Canada’s largest union in the private sector. To see Unifor’s research into Tim Hudak’s job plan, go to: http://www.unifor.org/sites/default/files/brief-statements/zycher_and_million_jobs_final.pdf