The Oshawa Express - Ontario budget good for Oshawa residents
   
Ontario budget good for Oshawa residents


Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s first budget of the McGuinty government’s second
mandate may have seemed bland in its substance, but it prompted strikingly little in the way overt criticism.

Indeed, one can only surmise from the lack of opposition to its content that the provincial budget is a responsibly fiscal approach to trying times for Ontario.

And the budget’s emphasis on retraining bodes well for Oshawa on two fronts: first, it will assist hundreds of workers who have lost their jobs in the manufacturing and automotive sectors by offering training opportunities in other skilled trades.

And second, it will mean additional funding for Durham College and the University of Ontario’s Institute of Technology in providing the programs to retrain these workers.

The funds for transit and infrastructure will also assist our area in creating jobs and result in better services for residents. But quite possibly the most impressive fall-out of the provincial budget is how it might have finally led Prime Minister Stephen Harper to silen ce one of Ontario’s staunchest critics: Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

Ottawa is now extending an olive branch to Ontario after several weeks of downright petty and vindictive blather from Flaherty, who also happens to be the MP for Whitby-Oshawa.

Flaherty’s barbs about Ontario’s economic policies were especially unsettling when you consider how volatile the economy has been in recent months.

His irresponsible comments, however, ring hollow when you consider that part of Ontario’s current fiscal woes stem from a multi-billion dollar deficit left behind by the previous Tory government – a government in which Flaherty himself was the finance minister.

So, Harper’s move to bury the hatchet is a welcome change from the spiteful verbiage we’ve heard from a man who is supposedly a national cheerleader for the entire Canadian economy.

And that includes Ontario, too.

 
 

 

  
     
       
     

 
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