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In the opening days of the 2007 Ontario election campaign, Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory has launched a two-pronged attack against Liberal Dalton McGuinty that highlights broken promises and an unprecedented tax increase.

With voters listing health care and education as by far their top issues, Mr. McGuinty is trying to blunt his rival's thrust by describing the $2.6-billion surtax as a premium that was needed to protect public health care.

But the Conservatives say the Liberals boosted overall spending by $22-billion during their four years in office, as revenues from a growing economy turned a $5.6-billion deficit into a $2.5-billion surplus.

Their conclusion: The Liberals could have easily covered the $8.5-billion increase in health-care spending without a tax increase that hits poorer Ontarians hardest.

The challenge for Mr. Tory is to convince voters that he can cut taxes without gutting health care and education as Mr. McGuinty alleges he intends to do. The Conservative Leader also needs to remind voters that what the Liberals call "a health premium" is really a surtax that goes into general revenues, with only a notional allocation to health care.

Pollster Greg Lyle of Innovative Research Group said voters would be more concerned about the broken tax promise if they believed it went to wasteful spending, rather than to health care.

The Conservatives "should tie it to the millions of dollars that went out the door to special interest groups, or the $40,000 raise the Premier received," Mr. Lyle said.

"Those are the things people get angry about."

Mr. Tory sought to highlight Mr. McGuinty's broken promise on the anniversary of the day when the Liberal Leader put it in writing with a much-publicized pledge to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation during the 2003 campaign. He repeated the "no new taxes" promise in April of 2004, two weeks before the first Liberal budget introduced a $2.6-billion health tax.

"Dalton McGuinty not only broke his promise not to raise taxes, he shattered it beyond any recognition," Mr. Tory said at an event where he was joined by officials from the taxpayers federation.

"It was the largest new tax burden ever imposed on Ontarians. It was a regressive tax that actually hurt low- and middle-income Ontario families most of all."

According to Conservatives, an Ontarian with $60,000 in taxable income pays 1 per cent of that income in the health tax, while someone earning $200,000 pays only 0.45 per cent.

But Mr. McGuinty recently suggested that, despite a pledge to review the health tax in 2009, he had no plans to eliminate it.

He said yesterday that the Liberals faced a stark choice when they came to office in 2003 and discovered that the previous Progressive Conservative government had left a $5.6-billion deficit. He said his government could either slash spending on health care and other social programs or raise taxes.

"The decision I made, and it wasn't an easy one, was to ask Ontarians to invest more in their health-care system," he said.

He did suggest that the government is now in better financial shape and would not need to raise taxes.

Asked by reporters whether he would sign another pledge, he responded: "No, I won't."

"I've been in politics for 17 years. The toughest decision I ever had to make in my life was to ask Ontarians to invest more for their health-care system."

Mr. McGuinty often says that every cent of a tax cut would come directly out of the health-care budget. But in fact, the tax revenue goes into the province's general revenue coffers, so cuts could be made elsewhere, if necessary.