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LONDON, Ont. — Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is calling on residents of the province to become the squeaky wheels of Confederation and rally behind him in his fight for a fairer deal from Ottawa.
Ontarians can learn a lesson from residents of other provinces, who have not shied away from speaking out when their interests are threatened, Mr. McGuinty said. He suggested that federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty never would have gotten away with describing any other province as the last place in Canada where businesses would want to invest.
“If, for example, [he] were to have openly discouraged investment in their province as he did in ours, they would close ranks and defend their interests so quickly it would make your heads spin,” he said in a speech Tuesday to the London Chamber of Commerce. “My friends, it's time to stand up for our province.”
The rallying call to all Ontarians to shed their complacency is a new tactic in a campaign that began three years ago for Mr. McGuinty and comes as oil prices threaten to transform the province into one of the poor cousins of Confederation.
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, seen in this May file photo, promised to ramp up his campaign for fairer funding from Ottawa. (AP Photo/Akira Suemori)
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Earlier this year, Mr. McGuinty gave up any hope of finding allies among the other provincial premiers in his push for a radical overhaul of the country's national wealth-sharing programs.
On Tuesday he said he could not wage his battle with Prime Minister Stephen Harper on his own.
“It's one thing for me to take it to Parliament Hill and make the case as one Ontarian,” he told reporters after his speech. “It's another thing for 13 million Ontarians to make the case together.”
Mr. McGuinty declined to be specific when asked by reporters which province Ontarians should emulate in asserting their claim for fairness. Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams led a high-profile battle with former Prime Minister Paul Martin back in 2004 that included ordering Canadian flags removed from provincial buildings. Shortly after, Mr. Williams cut a deal with Mr. Harper that allowed both Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to exclude resource revenues from the calculations for their payments under the national equalization program.
Mr. McGuinty said he wants Ontarians to start loudly complaining about the fact that they are propping up the rest of the country even as the fortunes of their own province deteriorate. While this state of affairs has existed for decades, he said the unfairness is more pronounced today because of rising oil prices.
He is calling on the Harper government to reform the equalization program to take into account Ontario's waning prosperity relative to the growing wealth of Alberta, Saskatchewan and other resource-rich provinces. He argues that taxpayers in his province pick up more than their fair share of the tab under the existing arrangements.
Taxpayers in Canada's most populous province contributed $21-billion more to federal coffers than what they received from Ottawa in 2005 – the latest year for which figures are available. Mr. McGuinty said this is equal to about 3 per cent of the province's total gross domestic product.
Unless the Harper government reforms the system, Ontario will continue making these payments even as it is poised to join the ranks of the have-not provinces as early as 2010, making it a recipient of equalization payments for the first time.
The equalization program is designed to give money to Canada's poorer provinces so they can provide social services comparable to the richer ones. The federal government was set to distribute $13.6-billion in equalization payments in fiscal 2009 to provinces other than Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. However, Newfoundland recently joined the ranks of the “have” provinces because of its rising offshore oil revenues.
Mr. McGuinty said Ontarians should be allowed to hang on to more of their wealth rather than distributing it to other regions.
“We could go further and faster if the federal government took the brakes off our economy,” he said in his speech.
