FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 5, 2002
Flaherty’s priorities “out of whack,” Casselman says
TORONTO – Ontario Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s budget priorities are “seriously out of whack,” says Leah Casselman, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
“Jim Flaherty is like the guy who spends all day in the bar buying drinks for his buddies but won’t put food on the table for his kids,” said Casselman.
Casselman said Flaherty’s spending priorities are focused on “wasteful and inefficient” policies like privatization, corporate tax cuts, and tax breaks for parents with children in private schools.
“From what he’s been saying, things like food safety, road safety, workplace safety and community safety are all on the list of Jim Flaherty’s ‘non-priority’ expenditures,” said Casselman. “Jim Flaherty is promoting the ongoing destruction of public services when we need to rebuild public services now more than ever.
It’s time somebody called him on it.”
Casselman scoffed at Flaherty’s Feb. 27 statement that Ontario’s economic growth rate would be 1.3 per cent for 2002.
Casselman noted that the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board is predicting U.S. growth of 2.5 – 3 per cent for the year ahead. Bank of Canada governor David Dodge is predicting Canadian growth of 1-2 per cent in the first half of 2002 and 3-4 per cent in the second.
Casselman said that in 1996, then Finance Minister Ernie Eves referred to numbers lower than that as “steady, solid growth.”
“Flaherty’s prediction is a deliberate lowballing designed to provide a rationale for his real agenda: cuts and privatization to transfer public dollars into private hands.”
Click here for a full transcript of Leah Casselman’s March 5 remarks to the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, check the OPSEU web site at www.opseu.org.
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