Wednesday, September 26, 2018

'LIED TO ALL OF US': Liberals to be held to account for $15B deficit, Ford says

 


Doug Ford's late Brother Robert Ford, long before Trump, informed the political world that it was all right to be politically incorrect and to be a complete asshole so long as you are publicly working for the voters.

This has opened the door wide open for successful businessmen to enter the political fray and gain  immediate acceptance without having to turn them selves into total fakes.

Of course the liberal regime was essentially the lawyer's party and that became a simple formula for financial misfeasance. 

I grew up with the Big Blue Machine in Ontario whose fiscal prudence and carefulness was legendary and ingrained and had lasted forty years.  I left and that all passed and i watched this train wreak from afar.

Now they will see justice at the same time it is happening in the USA. 

Next year we will see a federal election and i expect to see many strong and mouthy business types take up the fight.




'LIED TO ALL OF US': Liberals to be held to account for $15B deficit, Ford says

Antonella Artuso

 https://torontosun.com/news/provincial/ford-forming-special-committee-to-probe-ontarios-fiscal-situation

The Ontario Liberals’ accountability for the “cover up” of a $15-billion deficit didn’t end on election day, Premier Doug Ford says.

Ford announced his government will create a select committee to investigate “Liberal waste and scandal” with the power to call witnesses, compel documents and gather evidence.

The Liberals, under former premier Kathleen Wynne, left the province with a $15-billion deficit, instead of the $6.7-billion deficit they claimed, Ford said.

“But worst of all was the cover up — this was quite possibly the worst political cover up in Ontario’s history,” Ford told a special PC caucus meeting Monday. “Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals lied to all of us and we all know that if you lie on your taxes, if you lie on your mortgage, if you lie on your car loan, there are consequences. You don’t just get to walk away.

“The people held the Liberals accountable on election day but their accountability did not end on election day,” he said.

The committee will demand answers about where the money went — “a lot of the Liberals got rich, really, really rich” off the backs of Ontario taxpayers, he said.

The government has already picked out its members on the committee, Ford said.

“I tell you, what a team we picked, too. Boy, I’d be worried to go in front of them,” he said, to laughs from his fellow PC MPPs. “They’re a tough group.”

Supporters at the premier’s weekend FordFest could be heard shouting: “Lock her up, lock her up.”
His language was inflammatory and Ford’s claims that Liberal insiders got rich was unsubstantiated and “completely false,” Wynne countered.

“I am completely clear and sure that we revealed everything about what we were doing in the financial realm,” she said.

Wynne added she was disappointed that Ford didn’t shut down the crowd’s chant, an echo of what happened to candidate Hillary Clinton when she ran against President Donald Trump.

“It’s just vile and it is unbecoming of a premier in the province in my opinion.,” she said.

Six Tory MPPs and three NDP MPPs will sit on the committee, and Wynne argued there should be at least one Liberal MPP on the committee.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said Ford would be one of the few people in Ontario who didn’t know that the Liberals were “playing games” with the deficit, and accused him of plotting cuts to compensate for his own planned tax cuts.

Ford’s allegations flow from a report of a Financial Commission of Inquiry, initiated by the Tories, that found the previous government left behind a $15-billion deficit.

Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk has reported that the Ontario Liberals were understating the deficit, primarily by counting teacher pension funds as an asset and by pushing the cost of their Fair Hydro Plans off the government books.

The Liberal government had its own expert panel that argued its accounting was correct.

The Ford government has accepted Lysyk’s numbers, and the premier said the select committee will get to the bottom of the “dirty accounting tricks.”

Wynne said she’s the first to admit there has been an accounting dispute over how to record the deficit.

But she argued the state of the books was clear before the election, because her government, under former premier Dalton McGuinty, brought in the requirement of a pre-election report after Conservative predecessors left behind a hidden $5.6-billion deficit.

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