by Adam Gault
Flanked by Windsor-Essex PC MPP hopefuls, Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford made a stop at Colasanti’s in Kingsville on Wednesday, May 23, shortly after addressing members of the agricultural sector in Lakeshore earlier that morning.
Ford is the first provincial party leader to visit Essex County since the announcement of the June 7 election, and in his address to supporters, he stuck to his message of lowering hydro rates and taxes, and the impact those changes would have on small business.
“We’re going to reduce taxes on small businesses, medium businesses, but mostly small businesses,” Ford said. “Eighty-five percent of the people in this province are employed by small businesses, they’ve been getting gouged by this government. We’ll reduce their taxes by 8.75 percent. That will go back into hiring people, back into getting equipment, and making them a little more prosperous, just giving them a hand up.”
Citing Ontario’s “unacceptable” position as the world’s most indebted sub-sovereign borrower, Ford said his government would begin to “chop away” at that debt, of which Ford said could go towards much needed local infrastructure projects, such as the widening of Highway # 3.
“I’m here today to commit that we will make sure that we twin that road, and make sure that there’s never an accident on there again,” Ford said.
Just earlier that morning, two multi-accidents took place on Highway # 3, just outside of Kingsville, closing the stretch of the highway between Kingsville and Essex for the remainder of the day.
“I can assure you, what we say we’re going to do, we will do,” Ford explained. “We won’t delay it for years and years, and we’re going to make sure we get the shovels in the ground, and make sure that we start paving that road for an additional lane immediately.”
Ford also made an additional guarantee to rural areas across the province, saying his government would commit additional funding to improve telecommunications and various other infrastructures in underserved areas in Ontario.
“We’re committing over 100 million dollars for natural gas, broadband, and cellular communications,” Ford said. “That’s 38 thousand people in 70 communities that are disconnected. We’ll make sure they’re connected.”
Ford then went on the offensive against the NDP, a party that has been making strides in the polls against the PCs in recent weeks, bringing to attention the remarks NDP Mississauga Centre candidate Laura Kaminker made in a 2014 blog post against wearing poppies on Remembrance Day, where she said they were a “ritual of war glorification.”
“The NDP candidate that comes out and starts trashing our soldiers, trashing our veterans, trashing families of soldiers saying poppies should be landfill,” Ford said. “This is the radical group from the NDP, downtown Toronto radical NDP. That’s how they’re going to govern. They’re not competent to govern when they attack our soldiers.”
Ontario’s general election is on June 7.